"Why are you taking us to the cemetery, Professor?"
I recalled D.H. Lawrence saying: "I like to try new things so I can reject them."
"So you can see how the Victorians pictured their place in history," I said.
Ravens were sitting atop Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s tomb.
"They buried him with a little bell, in case he should wake up and need rescuing," I said.
"Karl Marx didn’t get a little bell, and you’ll notice there are no birds on his tomb." I said.
"George Eliot doesn’t have any birds either, and look, her tomb is sinking. That’s because they buried her with all her books." I said.
"How do you know her tomb is sinking if you can’t see?" asks a girl.
"Because I read the books," I said.
You could hear a day laborer spading up wet earth beside a fallen stone.
S.K.
"1, 2, 3 ..."
Posted by: andrea | October 20, 2007 at 06:01 PM