Quote

I just finished "London: the Novel" by Edward Rutherford and at the end of this comprehensive history of a dynamic city, the following quote presented itself. Because I found it so moving I thought I would share it here, in the hopes that you may understand and gain something from its historic significance.

"Imagine, a summer. At the end of it the leaves fall. They lie on the ground. They almost dissolve, you might say, but not quite. The next year the same thing happens again. And again. Thinned out, compressed, those leaves and all the other vegetation build up in layers, year after year. It's the natural process. It's organic.

Something similar happens with man, and especially in a city. Each year, each age, leaves something. It gets compressed, of course, it disappears under the surface, but just a little of all that human life remains. A Roman tile, a coin, a clay pipe from Shakespeare's time. All left in place. When we dig down, we find it and we may put it on show. But don't think of it just as an object. Because that coin, that pipe belonged to a someone: a person who lived, and loved, and looked out at the river and the sky each day just you and me.

So when we dig down into the earth under our feet, and find all that is left of that man or woman, I try to remember that what I am seeing and handling is a huge and endless compression of lives. And sometimes in our work here, I feel as if we've somehow entered into that layer of compressed time, prised open that life, a single day even, with its morning, and evening, and its blue sky and its horizon.

We've opened just one of the millions and millions of windows, hidden in the ground."