The news last week reported that archaeologists working at the Ground Zero site in New York have found a ship buried in the eighteenth century as part of the extension of the land in lower Manhattan. (Click here for the story as reported with the most historical background.)
It's not yet clear how much of the ship is intact or what its actual date and significance is, and though the details will probably be interesting I don't much care about them. What captured my imagination in the story is the layering of history of which the story reminds us. Cycles of birth and death, creation and destruction: that's always the way of things. A house witnesses births and deaths, celebrations and griefs. Land is excavated and built up, demolished and build up again. What once were roads become parks and what once were parks become roads. And a city landscape destroyed by one century's plane is found to be built on the remains of another century's ship, in a place another century's people were trying to make better use of.
There's nothing in this discovery that makes Ground Zero less stark or sad. (As a former worker there, I have to admit that I've never been able to visit the site since 9/11.) Yet it does remind us that change, of whatever kind, is part of the nature of things. We are all part of time's complicated layering, for all that we feel unique in both our accomplishments and our pain; and what we think is buried often rises again, in some other form, at some other time.
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