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I think I get what you are saying and certainly not trying to compare you to this horrible villain... but whenever I hear that sentiment I am usually reminded
by scarecrowbob 4y ago
I think I get what you are saying and certainly not trying to compare you to this horrible villain...
but whenever I hear that sentiment I am usually reminded of this quote from Judge Holden in Blood Meridian:
"What is true of one man, said the judge, is true of many. The people who once lived here are called the Anasazi. The old ones. They quit these parts, routed by drought or disease or by wandering bands of marauders, quit these parts ages since and of them there is no memory. They are rumors and ghosts in this land and they are much revered. The tools, the art, the building — these things stand in judgement on the latter races. Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with. The old ones are gone like phantoms and the savages wander these canyons to the sound of an ancient laughter. In their crude huts they crouch in darkness and listen to the fear seeping out of the rock. All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us."
For what it's worth, I live in the four corners area of the US and regularly see stone buildings that are hundreds of years old out in the desert, and the structure I live in is made of wood.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoWood lasts essentially forever in the southwest. We have dendrochronological records going back thousands of years from the Colorado plateau because there's so little decay. There just wasn't much of it to build with out there by the classic period, so they relied more on abundant stone rather than trying to drag more timbers than strictly necessary the tens of kilometers from where they grew to where pueblos were built. You probably know this as well, but for those that don't, the Anasazi are typically called "Ancestral puebloans" in modern literature because it's been well established that they didn't actually go anywhere, they're pretty direct ancestors of the modern puebloan nations (among others).
- scarecrowbob 4y agoYeah, those are both good points; I brought out the quote as that's what the op's thought reminded me of, but the terminology is more appropriate to McCarthy's villain than the material world. That said, I am a little up the hill where it's wetter (and will hopefully remain so). If we stopped upkeep on the place I live, I am not confident that obvious traces of it would outlast the cliff dwellings at, say, Mesa Verde.