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Many people like to walk through graveyards.
There’s a strange fascination in looking at gravestones.
Those upright memorials tell the briefest story about the person beneath.
In long-established cemeteries, we might see the record of someone who last walked two or three hundred years ago.
And perhaps that’s where the fascination lies.
We know these were real people just like us, but they are no longer here.
Some stones tell they were soldiers, mothers, doctors, wives or children.
Some were long-lived, many not.
When those people were alive, they knew they were living in the most advanced time the world had known to date.
Citizens of Rome and, before them, Athens thought the same.
This feeling of lives gone before was summed up in 1750 by Thomas Gray in his poem “Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard.”
Here’s an extract;
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-trees shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,
The swallow twitt’ring from the straw-built shed,
The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn ,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire’s return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
It’s a beautiful poem and one that makes you think.
Take from it what you will.
Very best,
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