"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone"

The beauty and truth of a working waterfront right across the street caught our eye in the early morning light.  Salt pile in the foreground, "double-leaf, rolling-lift through-truss" McArdle Bridge [it has its own website . . . totally awesome!] middle ground and Mystic River Bridge background. Fun fact of the day about our own Mystic River Bridge -- sometimes referred to as the Tobin Bridge -- something Tuck told us post hurricane Katrina: its engineering sisterhood with a New Orleans bridge that has its own CAM.

About that renaming of the Mystic River Bridge after Maurice J. Tobin, a former Boston mayor and Massachusetts governor: How pompous and silly and all too human. It's just like the double naming of the iconic new Bunker Hill Bridge, AKA the Zakim Bridge, after someone who apparently led an exemplary life, but no one we or Pauline Kael had ever heard of, Leonard P. Zakim. How embarrassing. Surely an outstanding citizen, but. It reminds us of Shelley's "Ozymandias":

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.'

Meanwhile, salt trucks are salting in across the street at Eastern Salt in preparation for "the coming monsoon season." Another fun fact of the day is that Eastern Salt also runs the salt piles in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. That's where we had cocktails with Chris the other day.

Comments

[goomp]

Ever since my school days when I first read Shelley's poem in 1938, it has been my favorite as an illustration of the futility of human hubris and vanity.