Time and Change
Cram, William Everett
494 THE COMMONWEAL September 29, 1926 of deeming, but by reason imaginative," as Boethius ...
...rotted away, and where the coffin nails had been were only Today is the age of steel...
...We read that When my grandfather, with his broad axe, hewed the timthe first settlers gave iron hatchets and arrow-points to the ber which constructs the framework of the house in which Indians in exchange for furs, but who has ever found one of I now write, life was very much as it had been during many those implements...
...They did not find In such a case, there would seem to be but one course left for any on that occasion, but discovered, instead, a human skull, us to follow-a gradual return to hand-labor...
...it was a white man's skull...
...The poet, the artist, and the mystic declare, would the geologist find a few thousand years hence, where with Goethe, that "everything transitory is parable...
...A that news is circulated through the medium of newspapers few seasons longer in the ground, and it would be only a and magazines in our present civilization...
...the individual partly uncovered...
...of their records on parchment, brick, stone, and bronzeThe flint hatchet, fashioned by a red-skinned workman hoping, perchance, to leave something that might be read by centuries ago, lies on my desk as I write...
...abling us to dispense with what we are compelled to do without, Both had been buried in coffins of old growth pine, almost and offering something better in its place...
...The scientist admits that "the in the matter, either one way or the other, and hence it must remain a subject for conjecture...
...It is exhausted, and that when it finally gives out, or becomes so now several rods in diameter, basin shaped, and with its outer diminished as to fail to meet the full demand, not only will the edge higher than the surrounding turf...
...But the short-sighted and undiscerning are sand, quickly wears away to nothingness, while as to books scarcely aware that, whether they will or no, they live and written and printed papers and manuscripts, they are as in a world of reflections...
...quite commonplace and uninteresting...
...I first saw this sand circle us that the supply of mineral oil in the ground is well-nigh forty years ago, when it was only a few yards across...
...wireless, with invisible currents of power, caught and transIron and steel are more perishable than wood, and yet we formed to suit our pleasure, into light and heat, just as we confidently assume to name the ages of man, the stone age, now use them to transmit the spoken word...
...perishable as autumn leaves in the forest...
...Perhaps this suggests our condi- with these stone buildings, there were also towering steel tioned vision of deeper verities...
...principal motive power of today be taken from us, but lack Every year I visit it in search of arrow-heads, and very sel- of oil for lubricating purposes will shut down mills and facdom fail to find them...
...Two years ago, my brother and my tories, the generation of electricity, and transportation generally...
...Why, then, should we assume that and a little later, a steel wrench I had lost from the mow- just because certain people in the past saw fit to inscribe a few ing machine only a few years before...
...Massive foundations of stone, and Alice's first discovery in the looking-glass room was little else...
...We have no positive evidence from different angles...
...Glass exposed to the friction of wind-driven darkly...
...gold coins and jewels here and there, and perhaps that what could be seen from the old room remained some inscriptions stamped on copper or bronze or platinum...
...All the surpris- Very little I think, that could be deciphered to tell of the life ing things, the familiar objects in new aspects, were of the past...
...seems to me-the possibility that, alternating with these there Surely it becomes increasingly possible to conceive may have been periods of civilization like our own, when iron of science and art no longer as rival seers, proclaim- and steel and other metals dominated all other materials in ing different gospels, but as gazing into one mirror, supplying the needs of men...
...On the other hand, those who have studied the progress of In reburying it where it was found, I discovered the rest invention claim that whenever anything we deem a necessity of the skeleton, and a few yards away another skeleton-lying fails along one line, inventive genius rises to the occasion, enparallel with the first, with the feet to the rising sun...
...but if along former standpoint...
...Our whole modern civilization has A mile to the west of my home there is a "sand circle"- sprung up since then, and how much longer it will continue a spot where the winds, deflected by the evergreen woods on is wholly a matter of conjecture...
...On the one hand, there are three sides, blow the sand round and round and ever outward- many who claim to be possessed of indisputable facts, telling like the waters of a whirlpool...
...reddish discoloration of the surrounding soil...
...The stone work stands there now...
...Tomorrow may be the age of red rust stains in the coarse-grained wood...
...our big cities now stand...
...It seems a reasonable supposition that in the centuries that elapse between civilizations, abandoned towns and cities would TIME AND CHANGE be appropriated by tribes of wild men-decendants, perhaps, By WILLIAM EVERETT CRAM of the original builders-leaving in their turn, traces of simpler life, which students of research in after years, might naturally 0 NE morning my plough turned up a broken tomahawk, ascribe to the real owners...
...centuries before his time...
...Out of his profound structures, and leagues on leagues of intersecting wires and steel rails along which freight trains rumbled, we should be experience, Saint Paul wrote: "Now we see in a mirror none the wiser...
...The presses, by means of which what they found to say was passed steel wrench I might easily have mistaken for the half-decayed from one to another of their time much in the same manner root of a tree, encrusted and eaten away as it was, by rust...
...It is of the type of a later comers-that these same people, or others of an earlier swamper's axe, double-edged, with a hole through the middle generation, did not also have their paper mills and printing for the handle to fit into, clear-cut as when first made...
...Great cities flourished in Central and South found in the part which had been invisible from that America...
...eye sees that which it brings with it the power of see- If our civilization should come to an end next year, what ing...
...They supposed it to be that of an Indian, production of the chief necessities of life to supply the local but when examined a few days later, it seemed evident that daily needs of men...
...son walked that way looking for relics...
...494 THE COMMONWEAL September 29, 1926 of deeming, but by reason imaginative," as Boethius bronze age, and the age of iron and steel, overlooking-it expressed it...
Vol. 4 • September 1926 • No. 21
