Here is another shot from the same cemetary/monastary, though on a different day. As I looked around the brilliantly decorated cemetary, with its white washed tombs blinding all visitors, I started noticing the stains of time, the marks of mortality.
I knew it reminded me of a poem from college. At first, I thought it was a Keats poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, but once I read it, I realized that was not what I was thinking of. It was Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias which tells of the dust to which our great boasts will turn. We think so much of what we are and what we accomplish here on earth, but ultimately we all return to the dust from which we were created, whether we believe such to be true or not.
What we see in this photo is just a damp, decaying version of the statue in the desert.
