Some Brief Reflections on Stonehenge

You don't go to England to feel young again.  Quite the inverse, in fact.

I don't mean this as a knock on England, simply an adjustment of what sort of travel experience you're hoping for.  I went to Madrid and Paris last year, you see, and young again is precisely what I felt--the incredible food, the stunning architecture, the beautiful people, all made me feel refreshed, revived, rejuvenated, and all other manner of re-. 

London will not make you feel that way--at least, not at first, and not in the way you expect. Everywhere you turn reminds you not only of England's antiquity, but the world's: Westminster Abbey is cluttered with the musty-tombs of men who once commanded kingdoms, but today can't command the attention of indifferent tourists on their way to see Chaucer; the British Museum is filled with the remains of empires once-awful-long-forgotten--Assyria, Egypt, Persia, etc--all inconceivably powerful in their time but now so long gone as to feel unreal, and all collected by an Empire upon whom the sun was also supposed to never set but since has; all while Big Ben keeps time as unhurriedly and morosely as the Thames. Among all these artifacts, one begins to feel part of the whole endless, weary drama of human folly, tragedy, and vanity.

One is confronted with this antiquity head-on at Stonehenge, outside Salisbury.  Here is a Neolithic structure that predates the Normans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Celts, the Romans, even the Druids.  Whoever built it put themselves to great and impractical expense, effort, and sacrifice to construct it.  It feels sacred, in fact, for those very reasons.  

Of course it was a Temple, is all I'm saying.

And as utterly (and inevitably) touristy and roped-off and ticket-boothed as that World Heritage Site is now, and as bitingly cold was the wind and poorly-prepared my clothes on the day I visited it, I still insisted that we walk around it twice, and I wish I'd walked around it a third.  It filled me, quite simply.  I felt very keenly then how old this place is, how old Britain is, how old is the world, humanity, existence, how very and utterly brief our time on this earth is. 

But somehow that made the place feel all the more recent and new.  "All is as only one day to God, and time is measured only unto man," for if there are no other markers for judging time, then time really does disappear.  I felt co-present with this piece of deep-antiquity, and that's what finally made me feel young again.  Not the same way Paris did, not by a long shot...but the effect was the same--I felt refreshed, revived, rejuvenated.

England came alive for me more after that encounter.  On out last night in London, we revisited Big Ben by the Thames again, and this time that morose and unhurried time-keeping filled me, like I was afraid it wouldn't but finally did.