To build a folly is essentially to do something a second time, something at an inopportune moment. That something is always the memory of something forgotten, about which we can paradoxically say "There it is again."
Follies were misunderstood, purposeless constructions. They were often only small, extravagant gestures in a garden, easily whisking off the imagination to distant lands, a sort of time capsule built to awaken the memory and induce surprise in passers-by. They marked locations, organized secondary paths in a park, or simply predicted the arrival of better times—a demarcation, a sacred spot, a mysterious trail, a hill whose tragic rocky nature begged for a tower, a party, or the arrival of summer.
“It is demonstrably true that things cannot be other than as they are. For, everything having been made for a purpose, everything is necessarily for the best purpose.” — Professor Pangloss
Irwin's thinking was informed by the writings of Alfred Schutz, a follower of Husserl, ...[who] had noted that typification was at the basis of the assumption of the reversibility of perspectives, which was a condition for the possibility of intersubjective experience and the notion of a shared, commonly experienced world. It is also the first step in overcoming the specificity of the individual in favor of knowledge about groups. What is gained by this procedure is an understanding of demographics, but the cost of this understanding is a lack of emphasis on differences between individuals and their unique subjective experiences.