`Traces of the Past are Unstable'

I had business in the university library archives on Thursday and talked to two men photographing maps and sketches of the campus dated 1910, two years before the school opened. The land was flat and marshy, a malarial swamp. On one of the maps, a creek is drawn in blue pencil and marks the western edge of what became the campus. There’s no creek there today, not even a ditch, and an archivist suggested it may run underground.

In 1689, Matsuo Bashō, age 45, left Edo on a 156-day journey, mostly on foot, to the north of Japan. The poet wrote his prose masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about the journey, and in it he writes:

“Of places made famous in the poetry since long ago, many are still handed down to us in verse. But mountains crumble, rivers change course, roadways are altered, stones are buried in the earth, trees grow old and are replaced by saplings: time goes by and the world shifts, and the traces of the past are unstable.”

David, my youngest son, turned five on Thursday.