There are places on earth where you can feel the presence of the past. It’s almost tangible like you are standing in the middle of a vast crowd, feeling the people move around you, but you can see no one. I like to think of it as “feeling ghosts”. Not the white translucent spirits that float around horror movies, but a kind of lasting impression of the life that has been there before. It’s a distinct feeling, a haunting, powerful, transcendent feeling.
The first time I ever felt this presence of the ancients was in Greece. Greece is full of ghosts. Especially in Olympia. Oozing out of the marble columns and headless statues. The press of thousands of feet have compacted the earth and the touch of thousands of hands have polished the stone. You can feel the electric anticipation of the onlookers even 3000 years in the future. The heart thumping, head pounding excitement filling everything. It’s like the events of ancient Olympics are still happening, superimposed on top of the ruins filled with tourists. You feel like a voyeur into the past, only ever catching shadowy glimpses of the years before. It’s an amazing feeling to sit in the middle of some ancient place and imagine the past, there, walking right beside you.
Ever since that trip, I have been craving the same richness of experience every place I go. Sometimes I can find it in the remote places, cabins in the woods and famous old abandoned sites but most of the time I can’t. The tragedy of living in the United States is that all its deep old history has either been bulldozed over by the force of westernization or it never left a permanent mark to start with. At least it seems that way in my corner of the country. We don't have castle ruins from the crusades or settlements from antiquity. Our legends are 300 years old at most. Our ghosts come from tragedy, civil war battlefields and the like. You can feel the history there but it feels twisted and dark. You feel the presence of death, not life. The place becomes a memorial, not a monument.
When I learned I was studying abroad in London I immediately thought back to Olympia, and Mycenae, and Delphi and the way the ruins held a sense of the lives that used to exist there. I was ecstatic. England has such a rich history, from the Vikings to the Roman occupation to the legend of King Arthur, William the Conqueror, to the War of the Roses, Henry the 8th and the Tudors and so on. There must be ghosts everywhere! And not only England but the rest of Europe as well! Medieval castles, ancient burial grounds and pilgrimage trails, temples and cathedrals and old streets. There would be no lack of rich inspiring experiences. No lack of ghosts.
I was right to some extent, on a weekend trip to Tintern, Wales, we visited the ruins of an old abbey which the poet Wordsworth famously wrote about. Walking through the massive columns and looking out at the mountains where stained glass windows used to be, I felt awash in the past. It had very little to do with the poetry the building had inspired but with the way my imagination could project the lives of the monks into the empty ruins.
I felt the presence of past life even more strongly in the chapel of St Mary in the same town. Even though nature had completely reclaimed the church and old graveyard, I could still feel life there. I could imagine parishioners kneeling on the red and black tiled floor , now carpeted in moss. I could imagine the music filling the cavernous roof, now replaced by vines and the sky. I could feel a connection to the ordinary people who would have come to this space every Sunday until it burned down and was abandoned.
I came home from Wales inspired. Feeling lucking and amazed that there was such a sense of the past in these overgrown places. I was in awe of the power humanity has to leave lasting marks on our world that can be felt so deeply by its posterity.
But then my class went to the Tower of London, a place that should have been full to the brim with ghosts. Not only did thousands of living souls walk those halls but many died there as well. But I felt nothing. The stones were cold and clean and dead. All the live scrubbed out of the well-preserved walls. Even though the fort was in much better condition and slightly less crowded then the training fields of Olympia I could not imagine the lives of the people there. Maybe I knew the stories too well? Maybe I had expected too much? Maybe I was just in a strange mood that day? All I know was that the earth felt empty. There were no ghosts there.
Why does a rotting carcass or crumbling overgrown ruin hold more life than a museum display or perfectly preserved temple? Why do we feel closer places that have been utterly destroyed then places that exactly echo their original splendor? I don’t know. But maybe we should appreciate the lost places, the abandoned places, the pieces of the past where we can still feel close to those who came before us. Their ghosts inspire us, connect us to older ages, allow us to feel like part of a vast network of humanity.
