What lasts is what is written. We look to literature to find the essence of an age.
What is important-what lasts-in another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.
One attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without fretting over how to say, "Have a nice day."
There is a negative proof of the value of Latin: No one seems to boast of not knowing it.
