Human Evolution Seen From the Inside

I finished Verlyn Flieger's book Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World. I'm now several chapters into Owen Barfield's History in English Words. Barfield's style is sometimes very difficult to read - it was first published in 1926, by an educated and literary Brit. But it rewards gentle, undivided attention with flickers of a world that is distant, but so clear, and alien, yet so human. The amazing thing about this view, especially as contrasted with the view we might get from looking at pottery or bones or ruins, is that it is not only so human, but it is so very present - as present as our own thinking and perceiving, because in fact it is our own thinking and perceiving.

The contrast with the objects of study of archeology and even anthropology is especially relevant since, as Barfield states, "in the case of these remote Eastern [Indo-European] ancestors - or predecessors - of ours, philology is almost the only window through which we can look out on them...Historical records, archeology, ethnology, folk-lore, art, literature all come to our help in considering, say, the ancient Egyptian civilization; but it is not so with the [Indo-Europeans]."

To put it another way, he helps the reader, not "to know what the past was", but "to feel how the past is."