Roskilde

Yesterday, I made a fun and exciting pilgrimage to Roskilde, home of a respectable rock festival, some old viking ships, and a church with lots of dead Danish royalty inside. As fascinated as I was by the sight of really old wood that’s just been dredged up from the bottom of the ocean, what really struck me about the afternoon were the tombstones set into the floor of the cathedral. They had all been ornately carved, and obviously marked the graves of some very important people who were probably quite excited at the thought of being commemorated for all time with a stone in the Roskilde Cathedral. And they were all in varying stages of illegibility, the carvings mostly worn away by the feet of generation upon generation of worshippers and cheeky tourists who can’t tell the difference between kings named Christian and kings named Frederick.

Which is why I want the writing on my memorial stone, if I get one, to be worn away by lichens and winds and trees and other things that aren’t so busy deciding if that arch there is Gothic or Romanesque that they don’t even notice that they’re eroding my last pretensions of immortality. And there should also be lots of run-on sentences like that last one. Yeah.