February 27, 2009
Ubi sunt
(Via Urban Angle’s Flickr photostream)
Ubi sunt (literally “where are…”) is a phrase taken from the Latin Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?, meaning “Where are those who were before us?” …
A general feeling of ubi sunt radiates from the text of Beowulf. The Anglo-Saxons, at the point in their cultural evolution in which Beowulf was written, experienced an inescapable feeling of doom, symptomatic of ubi sunt yearning. By conquering the Romanized Britons, they were faced with massive stone works and elaborate Celtic designs that seemed to come from a lost era of glory (called the “work of giants” in Seafarer).
(Via Wikipedia)
I spent the afternoon walking the halls of the New York Public Library. I find it overwhelmingly beautiful, but also heartbreaking. Like some great stuffed beast in a museum, no more of its kind will be born into this world.
I could say the same for much of New York; indeed, the city itself. Who were these men who could conjur up such visions and realize them in stone and steel? In the library, the Chrysler Building, Grand Central–I see the human spirit writ large. Glass boxes now tower above them, yet seem lost in their shadow.
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I love this.
I understand and agree with your dismay. I think it’s the same thing we see, ‘writ small,’ in local school districts. When I was a kid in Dallas in the ’60s, I went to an elementary school in a very working class neighborhood, but we had a cafeteria, an auditorium and a gymnasium–three separate spaces, not one conjoined and ugly joint-space which the custodians constantly had to rearrange. The gym and a nearby ‘health’ room had polished wooden floors, like high school gyms. We had an art room and art teacher. And you know what else we had? We had a community (and believe me, Dallas in the ’60s was far-right conservative) that may have grumbled about taxes, but paid them, so that we could have adequately furnished and equipped schools, instead of metal warehouses for children. The ‘vision’ thing is a huge problem in the US, and part of that problem is the resentment of so many people that things have to be paid for. What’s so unfunny about this is so many so-called Christians are at the forefront of this anti-tax, greed-is-good movement, blatantly ignoring their own teachings that ‘from him to whom much has been given, much will be demanded.’