Friday, March 26, 2004
Time sense
In England the land seems to carry the memory of hundreds of generations of quiet farmers caring for the land since the dawn of time, an unbroken succession of pastoral lives.
In Rome the city seems to breathe humanity out of every pore. The land doesn't remember its inhabitants so much as preserve them unwillingly, like friezes on the temple columns hacked out by forgotten sculptors. The land carries the burdens of empires gone, successions of ruler-popes and generals and gladiators, generations of cynicism and power struggles and decadence soaked into the marble of the baths and ruins. People madly desperate to immortalize themselves. (For some reason I keep thinking of New York, and London, and Washington DC, and today's Neros and Caligulas who foul their kingdoms with their glorious wars...)
Two thousand years ago things were much the same. I wonder whether this is it, this is the legacy we were meant to leave - wars and monuments, and cathedrals.
(Totally unrelated - the Pantheon, once a Roman temple, is now a Catholic church. And there was sung mass at 5pm yesterday. The experience was unsettling, as though the old gods still hung around every mass for a bit of secondhand worship.)
In Rome the city seems to breathe humanity out of every pore. The land doesn't remember its inhabitants so much as preserve them unwillingly, like friezes on the temple columns hacked out by forgotten sculptors. The land carries the burdens of empires gone, successions of ruler-popes and generals and gladiators, generations of cynicism and power struggles and decadence soaked into the marble of the baths and ruins. People madly desperate to immortalize themselves. (For some reason I keep thinking of New York, and London, and Washington DC, and today's Neros and Caligulas who foul their kingdoms with their glorious wars...)
Two thousand years ago things were much the same. I wonder whether this is it, this is the legacy we were meant to leave - wars and monuments, and cathedrals.
(Totally unrelated - the Pantheon, once a Roman temple, is now a Catholic church. And there was sung mass at 5pm yesterday. The experience was unsettling, as though the old gods still hung around every mass for a bit of secondhand worship.)
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