I remember a cartoon from a long-ago MAD Magazine (back when it was still at least marginally funny) which depicted a young woman trying on an expensive dress. When reproached about its cost, she said, “But it’s something that my daughter, and her daughter, can wear on their wedding days.” And when it’s suggested she use her own grandmother’s wedding dress instead, she snaps: “Oh, who wants to wear that old thing?”
Things pass, and the tragedy is that often what was beautiful, or majestic, or seemed destined for immortality, doesn’t end up that way. And few better examples can be found than among magnificent ruins such as these.
…and these deathless words spring to mind:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley
