Time, again.

'Ruins are rather touching. Before the residues of noble things our pensive, sensitive inward selves involuntarily bow. The remnants of what was once distinguished, refined,and brilliant infuse us with compassion, but simultaneously also with respect.'

---Robert Walser.

'Far from looking on their works with despair, we join sightseeing tours and queue to gawp at their artefacts at the British Museum: because right now it's we who are winning, we are alive and they are not. We gloat. We preserve ruins because they tell us that we are not yet, for all our idiocies, ruins ourselves.'

---Jack Robinson.

Leisure, amusement, commerce, sporting recreation, industry, faith and religion, family and tradition, all broken and felled by time. There is something about seeing the remnants of human civilisation like this. These pictures could have been stills from a film, so familiar are they. Like something from Planet of the Apes or a post-apocalyptic future that we imagine and, strangely, want to imagine. 

There's this line...after the draining away of meaning from the cosmos and before Christ man found himself utterly alone. Here, perhaps, there's something else: the world, life and nature return to being what they were before human beings made their mark.We delight in seeing these traces of ourselves, conjuring up images of a family crowded around the television set, munching savouries during the advertisements, knowing full well that none of it will last, knowing full well that the coming silence was already pre-figured in the wide empty spaces between man and man, man and woman. Already our hearts were abandoned.

We loved to look at old photographs, name names, try and recall something funny an old and now deceased uncle once said. Our fingers rest on a face and we remember. A line,a quip, a gesture is all that remains. Or we recall a dead colleague or one who has simply decided he's had enough and had to move to another city or country. We wonder about those lives that go on, those lives that because they go on elsewhere and are far removed from us are really like a death to us. We ask ourselves, not very seriously: where have all those people gone? What are they now? Will anyone say the same about us?

This is not just about the future; it is about the past. We want to look back, picture the refuge we constructed for ourselves against the storm, remember how it used to be. 

We lived on the surface of this planet. We lived on the surface. And now it reclaims us and all we ever built. Maybe it was because we built against it in the first place that we're undone now? That was the huge gamble: linearity...stepping outside the cycles of life.