καιρός remembered

Living monuments

Americans are used to everything being big: skyscrapers; paper cups for cola or weak coffee in ‘large’, ‘larger’ and ‘largest’ sizes; and trees of a size unrivalled anywhere in the world.

As we walk amongst the giant sequoias, we suddenly feel very small and insignificant. But it is not just their enormous size that fills us with awe; it is also the trees’ incredible age: the largest sequoias can be over 2,000 years old!

They were already there “when David danced before the Ark; when Theseus ruled Athens; when Aeneas fled from the burning ruins of Troy”, as someone with a keen sense of history remarked in the mid-19th century, when these giant trees were first discovered by white Americans. Or, as John Muir, one of the first American conservationists, remarked with regret upon seeing a felled sequoia: “this tree was in its prime, swaying in the Sierra winds when Christ walked the earth.” With the Sequoia gigantea – these living monuments whose roots stretch back to antiquity – America now also had the connection to a distant historical past that it had so ardently desired.

Quotations taken from Simon Schama, “Landscape and Memory” (1995)

Photo of the week: Giant sequoias in Mariposa Grove, California, USA, 1998