Steve Matuchek refers to:
"Nature, always seeking for balance, blurring tracks to oblivion, evaporating volatiles, annulling memorials and memories." (7, p. 70)
Artificial continuities, like memorials, are imposed on natural continuities, e.g., left to itself, a block of stone will endure for a very long time, eventually to be eroded away by the elements, but will not preserve information like names or dates. However, nature annuls memorials. Older continuities reassert themselves. On St. George's Quay in Lancaster (see image), dates, first of founding, then of rebuilding, were carved above the entrance of a derelict factory, now demolished, although remembered for a while. One way to cope with the transience of conscious continuity is to identify with cosmic continuities:
"'...they're part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they've gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They'll never vanish. They're just part of everything... part of everything alive again.'"
-Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (London, 2001), 23, p. 335.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And I know of exactly similar "artificial continuities" in my own hometown. That is, some of the older buildings here, including quite ordinary structures, have a block of stone built into them with the year of construction carved on them.
Ad astra! Sean
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