Posthumous essay from Benedict “Imagined Communities” Anderson, celebrated scholar of nationalism. Basically an intellectual autobiography, ends up with an endorsement of comparison as pedagogy - across cultures, across times, wielding the foreign to see the hidden particularities of the familiar.

I mean, endorsed, and when he puts it like that it really sounds like an old-school take on the promise of liberal arts. And when he puts it in proximity to his biography, makes you wonder if that doesn’t depend on men with the kind of Indiana Jones man-of-the-world life he had.