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Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), 1866-1946

"Secret Places of the Heart"

DID these people have goats?"
"I don't know," said the doctor. "So little is known."
"Very like children they must have been. The same unending days. They
must have thought that the world went on for ever-just as they knew
it--like my damned Committee does.... With their fuel wasting away and
the climate changing imperceptibly, century by century.... Kings and
important men followed one another here for centuries and centuries....
They had lost their past and had no idea of any future.. .. They had
forgotten how they came into the land... When I was a child I believed
that my father's garden had been there for ever....
"This is very like trying to remember some game one played when one was
a child. It is like coming on something that one built up with bricks
and stones in some forgotten part of the garden...."
"The life we lived here," said the doctor, "has left its traces in
traditions, in mental predispositions, in still unanalyzed fundamental
ideas."
"Archaeology is very like remembering," said Sir Richmond. "Presently we
shall remember a lot more about all this. We shall remember what it was
like to live in this place, and the long journey hither, age by age out
of the south. We shall remember the sacrifices we made and the crazy
reasons why we made them.


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