Monuments Upon the Tumultuous Earth
https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/monuments-upon-the-tumultuous-earth/?utm_source=Emergence+Magazine&utm_campaign=b24ad0ec3f-Boyce%E2%80%9420230326&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73186f6259-b24ad0ec3f-357088886
For thousands of years, Indigenous societies were building hundred-foot pyramids, fifty-acre plazas, and intricate clusters of hillocks along the wild waterway of the Mississippi River.
Beholding the 2,200-mile levee system that now curbs the river’s torrent, Boyce Upholt wonders: what do our monuments say about who we are—and the crises we face?
"A river, though, and especially a river so big, is never orderly, at least not when left to its own devices. The Mississippi’s unruliness grows as each new tributary joins the flow. Many are big enough to lend their names to whole states: the Minnesota and then the Wisconsin, the Iowa and the Illinois. By the time the Missouri arrives, halfway down the continent, the nation’s big river has grown to the extent that—again, speaking here of natural conditions—it can writhe across a floodplain six miles wide. When the Ohio joins at the bottom tip of Illinois, this river becomes a monstrosity. A continental torrent. I’ve heard stories of through-paddlers who, after traveling more than a thousand miles from the headwaters, give up when they reach this confluence, overwhelmed by the size of the water."
Please read the article at the link above.
Today's quote:
After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life...” and “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” Joseph Brodsky
