“Ozymandias”
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Standing in the massive, intentionally awe inspiring Monument to the Fallen, I found myself remembering the poem “Ozymandias.” Gazing up from Franco’s grave marker I noticed cracks in the ceiling and water damage seeping through all the way to the floor. There were several vulnerable places in the cavernous chamber carved into the mountain that already show the folly of such construction, or destruction of the natural order. The incredible vanity of forcing his vanquished foes to build this obscene monument to nominally commemorate the 10s of thousands of dead victims of his viciously prolonged civil war defies comprehension for the level of vanity commemorated there. As we entered the mountain, we learned that Franco admittedly meant to eliminate all those who thought differently from him, burying them in unmarked mass graves in the mountain behind the chapels carved into his cavern. He had the Pope himself consecrate the entire project and ultimately took the place of honor behind the central altar as his grave. Like Ozymandais in that imagined “antique land” in the poem, Franco set out to say to the universe, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” Already less than one generation’s lifetime later, the mountain is reclaiming the space. It was not difficult to imagine someday this monument to Man’s ego and brutality disappearing back into the mountain Franco defiled to create it, leaving only trace ruins to remind a careful observer of the real power before which we would all be wise to quake.
We have spent a week struggling to understand how we would have a society remember cruelties and guilt inducing acts of the past that chill us with the purposeful “presence of the absence” of a whole culture expelled from the places it helped to build. Perhaps tourists of the distant future will stand before the ruins of the entrance to what once was a huge cavern carved into a mountain and speculate about why they are here. They may conclude, hopefully, that the whole place and the story it tells reminds us of the folly of waging genocidal war on those with whom we disagree.