Friday, November 5, 2021

Stonehenge and fame

Females! They do everything together. Talk about teamwork.

What an amazing picture. A bush book club. A kaffeeklatsch with snacks. Pass the brie, girls. 

I was briefly famous today. In the letters to the Editor in the Star, one writer began, "Letter writer Beth Kaplan was wondering who's buying all those expensive condos downtown..." and proceeded to answer. (Developers.) So at least one nice person read my letter! And then later, on Instagram, to my amazement, I saw this: 

In the immortal words of! Fun. Alas, such fame, though welcome, is fleeting and does not pay the bills. 

Last night I watched a doc about Stonehenge. How they discovered the quarry in the Welsh Preseli Hills where the bluestones came from, and then, laboriously, how they tried to figure out the method of dragging them - perhaps on sledges - and that they were erected closer to Wales first and then four hundred years later moved to Salisbury Plane. All research done with various complex pieces of scientific equipment. Riveting. From 2300 BC! 

I've been there twice, once at fourteen with my parents, and in 2012 with a British friend. In 1964 we could walk around the stones and actually touch them; now you're kept back by barriers. They're just as awe-inspiring, though. Memorials to the dead, they think, to the ancestors. Stones, like the ancestors, are eternal. 

Documentaries forever. 

The tourist.

It was a stunning day and is going to be so all weekend - warm and bright. The leaves are gorgeous, a cavalcade of red, orange, yellow. This is right outside my house:
The city looks good, for once. Even if the developers are buying all the condos.

4 comments:

  1. I remember visiting Stonehenge in the mid-1970s, a powerful experience in all sorts of ways. I think we will never understand its whole mysterious story. Also went to Avebury, nearby, and more understated. When I lived in Ireland, I walked everywhere and never really noticed the single stones here and there. But when I returned years later with an ordnance survey map, I realized standing stones were all over the landscape,some of them in the middle of farmers' fields where sheep rubbed on them.

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    1. Yes, Avebury is powerful too; you can still touch the mysterious stones. I wonder what of comparable mystery our descendants will gaze at millennia from now and wonder about?

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  2. The few old trees our species leaves standing?

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