Decaying Legacy

There is a certain beauty in decay, decline rust. A certain wonderment in all the peeling paint, broken glass, off-hinged doors. This world breeds a certain curiosity. The little clues that remain, a broken chair, a rusted cart, any assorted rubbish feeds the mind’s wonder. The absence of life and its allusions makes the mind drift wildly into deeper wonderment. This is where stories are born. Who made their abode in these dusty chambers? What dramas occurred in this very room? What were the faces, what were the circumstances? How has the drama changed throughout the life of this structure? What has its walls seen? Perhaps the stories the mind invents are superior to reality. In the mind, however, the creative supersedes reality. Why know exactly what happened? Often it serves the mind better to imagine.

How decay takes on a life of its own. It creates its own culture. Nature makes its brush strokes with decay. It paints a picture upon urban walls. You will be forgotten, it says. You will become me once again.

Men remember other men by what they leave behind. Every man leaves a legacy; whether or not that legacy is righteous or evil, they nonetheless leave something behind. However, the lifetime of legacy is a short one. As history works, it forgets what it was working on. Legacies crumble like the buildings of the men who created them. Civilizations fail. Nature bulldozes it over, clears the lot for the next buyer. Or conqueror. Legacies crumble. Histories powder into dust. Civilizations into disarray.

And one day, they excavate. The past is rediscovered and reinvented. Civilization takes a few crumbled broken pieces and tries to create a story.

And once again enters the mind. It alone can find the answers. Whether they be true or false, the mind creates the story.

And that is myth. The mind is an incredible thing to waste. Did Romans wonder as I?