This post by the film scholar David Bordwell has me thinking about how I might apply lessons from the project of caring for old movies to the more general work of cultural invitation and repair. Imagine then a threefold labor: 

• Conservation 
• Preservation 
• Restoration 

Imagine something that you value — a trove of photographs, a house or farm, a notebook of poems, your local church; your family even. First, you have to make sure that what you value is not lost altogether. Then, having preserved it from destruction, you work to prevent its deterioration — you protect it from corrosive or destructive forces. And finally, you strive to restore it to its best possible condition. (I recently bought the Criterion Blu-Ray of Citizen Kane, and as I was watching it I wondered if this movie has ever looked so good. It’s staggeringly beautiful.) 

All this work paves the way for further development and extension of good things later on. This threefold labor, then, is not simply backward-looking, is not focused solely on the excellence of our inheritance. Maintaining our inheritance is what enables us to extend it, to add to what we pass down to the next generations. Because generations of scholars preserved the work of Homer, Vergil could write the Aeneid; because later generations of scholars preserved the work of Vergil, Milton could write Paradise Lost. And on it goes — or it should.