Our ideal of the present is a picnic beside the picturesque ruins of the past. Our lives operate in disconnected halves: work and leisure. We don’t know the meaning of either. Still, we wonder at the remains of the seriousness we have escaped.
Regular squares of stone in the grass are all that mark out that long gone refectory. They imply a grid, like a puzzle to be filled in.

What are ruins for?

It’s as if the remnants of someone’s diary were pinned to a school noticeboard and called ‘educational’. We have so much distance that we assume the pre-eminence of our merest curiosity. Just by being, we have defeated the past. Ours are the spoils.

But there are questions in the other direction, too. What, of us, will protrude from the ground when the present has passed on to others? Perhaps not as much as a ruin. When our lives have ceased to be the living answer, what question will they leave? Will anyone read it?

This doorway to a roofless space—we step through. The masonry’s cryptic clues begin to make sense. The answer is written upside down. The broken embrace of the past brings a taste of our future.