Italian Epilogue: Pompei Scavi

As kind of a postscript to the Italy trip, I thought maybe I'd describe my inner thoughts as I wandered the streets of ancient Pompei, give my ruminations some illumination, you might say...Isn't that some nice writing?: "give my ruminations some illumination"...Just say that out loud...I'll try and think up some other rhymes as we go along. Anyway, gazing upon the 2,000 year old wagon ruts in the cobblestone streets of Pompei Scavi (which means "The Pompei Excavations" in Italian) it occurred to me to wonder what our cities will look like 2,000 years hence, will our buildings survive? Probably not the buildings of Salt Lake, they're all very cheaply made, except for maybe the City Library, and the Temple of course, and the Giant Parking Garage under the gateway...but the all the rest would be rubble, ruins, a few bare walls, and would be greatly improved by the conversion, and people might look at them and let their imaginations run wild, so wild they might think something pretty or somewhat bearable stood there, once.

As we hurried through Pompei Scavi, fleeing the huge German tour groups with their bull-horn-voiced guides, I thought somewhat wistfully of Salt Lake's future prospects as a historical disaster site; we have no volcano, but the lake could rise, perhaps precipitously, and preserve our city in salt water (does that work?) and tourists would one day wander our streets as we wandered Pompei - well, maybe they'd snorkel our ancient streets, or use scuba gear, and think we were very quaint and magically tragic (bam! brilliant writing again - it reads like music!) and mysterious and ill-fated and get goose-bumps when they gazed up on our aged and corroded basement junk that we never threw away because we knew how interesting the piles of it would look in 2,000 years.

Somewhere along in these ruminations I had the fantastic notion that in this entry there would be some kind of a verbal zoom out, out to a view of the Earth from outer space, and my voice, deep and powerful like the guides of Pompei Scavi; describing the possibility of humanity's future demise, complete erosion and dissolution of even our greatest monuments, nothing but a layer of polluted carbon in the strata of the earth's history, but zooming out and out again dramatically, to humanity's final, most indestructible, most vast and stupendous and truly embarrassing monument, the TV transmissions we've been emitting for 50 years or so, and with that to end the entry on a powerfully ironic note...

- but I can't do that because they've already used that idea in a couple movies, Galaxy Quest, and this 90s movie about little kids in a homemade spaceship who meet TV-quoting aliens. These movies, of course, are also now being transmitted out into space, to whatever alien intelligences are really out there. We can only hope they understand!