Have you heard about the outlines of ancient human structures and settlements which have been revealed by the British version of this summer's record-breaking heat? The Times has some nice pictures in an article about it, oddly placed in the "Opinion" section. The author, a researcher and historical novelist, wraps up his account of variously florid responses to these ghostly presences:
The apparition of these traces has caused the same questions to be asked
over and over: What do these strange signs mean? Are they signs of hope
or omens of doom? Are they ruins or runes? When we’re gone, how will
the land remember us? If these ghosts in the grass have the answers to
our questions, they are not telling us. They sit in mute witness as we
try to understand, waiting to disappear again with the coming of the
rain.
The author's working toward a PhD in "ruin and memory studies" so I should probably defer to him. But it seems sloppy to lump together the idea these cropmarks mean something, that they are signs of hope or doom, that they might have answers to our questions, that they sit in witness. Each of these seems worth parsing, and considering as an expression of efforts by people in our own time to make sense of time and our place in it. I'm there, too.