A broader perspective can never hurt. And you can't get more different than by going back. I'm currently reading Sei Shounagon's The Pillow Book. The author

A broader perspective can never hurt. And you can't get more different than by going back. I'm currently reading Sei Shounagon's The Pillow Book. The author was a woman in the Heian court in Kyoto about 1000 AD, attendant to the Empress. By tradition it is a collection of her dairy entries, letters, poetry drafts and other personal papers, not intended for distribution, at least in the form we received them. It's unclear if the whole work is even a single author's. I went in expecting not to understand parts of it. And that has been true. But I also didn't expect to laugh quite so much! At one point, she has a list of grievances over the aggravations of daily living and bad etiquette. The more irrelevant and trifling, the more hyperbolic she is. At one point I fell right right into it and I was in the scene. I have lived those very moments. And I feel her same bizarre gulf between the urge to be polite outside, and the frustration with the people being impolite on the inside. I am pretty sure I have felt some shadow of what she felt in Kyoto some thousand years ago. It is both jarring and pleasing to have that momentary connection to someone who is about as alien to me, as anyone who has left a written work could possibly be.