Laudator Temporis Acti

Renaud Camus, Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings, tr. Louis Betty and Ethan Rundell (Blowing Rock: Vauban Books, 2023), p. 76:

What characterizes a good library and makes it easier for one to take its measure is as much the books that are not there, that are not worthy of it and that not only would not add anything to it but would spoil it, as the books that are there. In the same way a good museum and, a fortiori, a good art gallery, which has less space at its disposal, establishes its quality as much by the works that one does not see there, that it is out of the question that one should see there, as by those that hang on its walls. It is sad to say and dull to recall that each of us has at his disposal, as I have said before, a narrowly circumscribed time on earth, and all our efforts and all our care will do nothing to render this time infinitely extendable. And I do not regret having elsewhere proposed, as one of the possible definitions of culture, "the clear awareness of the preciousness of time." The cultivated man never has too much time; in fact, he never has enough time to read, see, hear, know, learn, understand, and love.