Explore "The Absence of the Past" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It is perhaps not possible to put into human language that emotion / which rises when a man stands upon some plot of European soil and can / say with certitude to himself: "Such and such great, or wonderful, or / beautiful things happened here."
Touch that emotion ever so lightly and it tumbles into the commonplace, / and the deadest of commonplace. Neglect it ever so little and the / Present (which is never really there, for even as you walk across / Trafalgar Square it is yesterday and tomorrow that are in your mind), / the Present, I say, or rather the immediate flow of things, occupies / you altogether. But there is a mood, and it is a mood common in men who / have read and who have travelled, in which one is overwhelmed by the / sanctity of a place on which men have done this or that a long, long / time ago.