This morning I came upon the wrapping up of a major collision at a city intersection. Firetrucks, ambulances, police cars, tow trucks, backed up traffic, the works. I found my way around it and went home. An hour later I drove to the same intersection. It was as though the accident had never happened. The street was clean, traffic was moving, the sun was shining. Nothing to memorialize what I know occurred. Except perhaps a brief and transitory news blurb.
What struck me about this one especially was that the area beside the intersection is a nicely landscaped little area, a walking spot for employees of the research park built there in the past few years. There’s a little depression with stone benches around it. Not long ago someone queried the local paper asking if, as this person recalled, there had once been a little shed or building on that spot. A local historian replied, “maybe,” adding there was no way to know now, things change.
Things change, and their precedents get lost.
My daughter was telling me about the Etruscan civilization, how we know so little about it, that it was succeeded by the Romans who busily supplanted it and its structures with their own. Hard to know what it was like to be Etruscan, and it’s almost all conjecture and educated guess. I once stood atop one of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, a pair of giant statues in Afghanistan, carved from sandstone cliffs, which were themselves honeycombed with caves for ascetics and hermits. Those folks were long gone, and only bats and birds wandered there. Now the Buddhas themselves are gone, blasted to bits by the Taliban for being heretical. They exist only in photos and textbooks now, and before long the sites themselves will be forgotten, if not the memories.
I could go on and on. My point is that things that seem so solid and fixed now will soon enough slip into the sands and mists of time, as will we. I remember that tombstone inscription, one variation of which I came across as a teenager: “Look at life as you pass by/As you are now so once was I/As I am now soon you will be/Prepare for death and follow me.”
Cheery, huh? I wonder how cheery the folks in that accident are feeling right now. I hope they are okay, and ready to resume the journey.
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