In the first part of Don Quixote, one of his misadventures involves mistaking wineskins for giants and slashing them with his sword. These wineskins, in what is often called “the first modern novel,” have a farflung ancestry: an ancient Roman novel by Apuleius, The Golden Ass. In that book, the protagonist comes home drunk and slashes three assailants, which turn out to be inflated goatskins. He finds out through an elaborate hoax carried out by the townspeople the next morning, a mock trial during which he thinks he has indeed committed murder. When he is confronted with his “victims,” everyone erupts in guffaws—the hoax has been part of a yearly festival “in honor of the god Risus,” the god of laughter. (Something of this hoax in Apuleius finds its way into the series of warmhearted, collaborative hoaxes that surround Don Quixote in Part II, courtesy of a sympathetic Duke and Duchess.)

Lest anyone is skeptical about Cervantes’s familiarity with the ancient novel, consider that his last novel, The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, was a “remake” of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica. This ancient novel—one of several available, in modern English translations, in B. R. Reardon’s Collected Ancient Greek Novels—also inspired Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Antiquity’s prose fiction was quite widely read during the seminal centuries of the Renaissance. The first English translations of Apuleius and Heliodorus date to 1566 (Adlington) and 1587 (Underdowne), respectively. These works are secret skeleton keys to much of Renaissance literature—the originals for all the shipwrecks, bandits, changelings with secretly noble blood, and reunited lovers of many a now-unread prose tale and Shakespeare’s own “late romances.”

Cervantes also played with the tradition of chivalric romances, just as Shakespeare echoed (on at least one occasion, in Hamlet, mockingly) the Latin plays of Seneca. These authors reveal a paradoxical pattern in literature so consistent as to approach the status of a law: We go forward by looking back. The new literary experience is founded in literary memory. Originality is imitative, and writing is most of the moment when it remembers the past.

And the more of the past, the better. At this distance, we can see that “Modernism” in English poetry broke the stranglehold of a few select eras on the literary imagination. Arthurian legends, Greece and Rome, and a Shakespeareanized version of Italy reliably fascinated the 19th century English poets. Pound exploring Chinese and Provencal, Eliot sampling fragments of Sanskrit and a Wagner libretto—these were ways of introducing new and far-flung memories into English-language poetry. Already well-known works gained renewal by being known more thoroughly: Joyce’s creativity changed the familiar Odyssey into something rich and strange, not by altering the plot or characters, but by patterning Ulysses on it intricately, twenty-four books, twenty-four hours.

The Sanskrit word for a tradition is parampara, literally, “from one to the other.” And we can trace such transmissions through time, from the Boccaccio poem Teseida to Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” to Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, co-authored with John Fletcher. What happens when the chain of transmission is broken? What happens when the audience itself no longer recognizes the references and allusions, when the reader no longer remembers along with the writer?

This situation troubles many teachers and lovers of literature today, as well as many writers whose work engages deeply with the past. As many professors of writing have begun to note, students at the college level, even those dedicating themselves to the study of literature, often have little working knowledge of the Bible or Shakespeare, much less the Greek and Roman tradition. The source code of tradition is vanishing from the literary culture, even as readers themselves dwindle in number. The overall mood seems to be one of alarm. Is it justified?

In my opinion, not at all. Those wineskins in Don Quixote have made Spaniards laugh for centuries now. They didn’t need to know about the Apuleius connection. Most contemporary readers of Cervantes’s most famous work have not read the actual chivalric romances that he was half satirizing, half paying homage to, like Orlando Furioso or Amadis of Gaul. They don’t have to. The Winter’s Tale delighted the elites and groundlings alike, and most theatergoers, then or later, never read or even heard of Heliodorus.

In fact, it was precisely the unfamiliarity of Sanskrit utterance that thrilled the early readers of The Waste Land. It hinted at an immensity; though thousands of years old, it was new to them. And that understanding is what’s often missing from lamentations of cultural amnesia. That periods of forgetting, like the forest fire that fertilizes the forest, are actually healthy and necessary for literary civilization. It’s no different from the fad for chilvaric romances dwindling for a few centuries…and then surging again in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. The pagan heritage of Greece and Rome itself went underground for several centuries—then caught the fancy of countless writers and painters, a burgeoning whose legacy we have not shaken yet, as movies about gladiators fill movie theaters, and series about Roman political intrigues stream into homes across the Western world.

Even better, digital means of preservation and the printing press have ensured that old books, though forgotten, will not be lost. There are no legions of monks scraping vellum and overwriting Propertius with some theological treatise; book burnings are quite futile in the age of the downloadable PDF. The lovers of the long literary past, full of reverence and memory, can regard their obscure favorites as secret sources of strength, denied rival poets who stick to their social media feeds for inspiration. There are countless plot ideas, verse techniques, images and rhymes out there to be mimicked or even lifted outright—but always adapted in a way that appeals to the audience of the day. Cervantes and Shakespeare, living in eras with far lower literacy rates compared to ours, understood this well. They alluded to past literary works and patterned their stories after past stories with the full awareness that only a small fraction of those experiencing their works would “get” the allusions. But they made sure that their works would delight their contemporaries regardless of whether they had read the same books.

That dual allegiance in a writer, to the past and to the present, secures a future for a work of literary art. It benefits a writer to remember. The reader’s experience can benefit from the thrill of remembering the same thing—or it can benefit from the thrill of a first encounter. It’s up to the writer to make sure both subsets of readers have something to enjoy. When you meet someone who has never heard of Homer, that is not a cause for despair. That’s an opportunity. You’ve got to hear this crazy story, you can say. So this warrior, Achilles, was furious. Let me tell you why….

Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children. Recent and forthcoming books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025), and Things my Grandmother Said: Poems (Knopf, 2026). More information at www.amitmajmudar.com.