We’re a culture in search of a past. We travel around the world to visit iconic sites of ancient history. . . Stonehenge or Petra or Giza or northern China. Without fail, visitors are two or three or ten deep, craning their necks for a closer look. When we walk away, we may be awed or saddened or impatient that our companions linger longer than we like, but rarely are we indifferent. What is it that we feel? It may be comfort, to know that a civilization achieved such lofty heights and left a legacy behind that endured for centuries. Or melancholy that those same distant people failed at some point to maintain the regular course of events and over time, declined, first perhaps to obscurity but finally, to oblivion.
And yet, if we’re looking, there are roadside monuments to forgotten times all around us. Sometimes they appear in our everyday lives, along the beach, under a tree, on the crest of a hill. Not ancient by any means, but cryptic relics of times we no longer remember, of functions we cannot guess, of lives as ordinary as our own.
They seem silent sentries from an unknown past. But for those who are listening, they speak their own story.
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“silent sentries” lovely.
Lovely, Rita! Ozymandias was one of the poems my eighth graders could choose to recite.
Wonderful! It and Xanadu by Coleridge have been favorites for a long time…