The El Silar Complex in Bolivia Looks Just as the Splendid Achievements of Past Civilisations Do in the Perspective of Our Own Day

Have you ever driven past a ruined Sovkhoz or an abandoned factory? Many of the everyday phenomena of the developed past, seen through the sad prism of the degraded institutions of the present, may indeed look like meaningless geological formations. Weathering, the movement of rock strata, a many-minded gentleman will say, gazing at the collapsed silage pits and water-collecting conduits that only a few decades ago fed living farms.

And after such a transformation of something great, significant and grand into its opposite, before our eyes and within the memory of two or three generations, a thing that resembles what it pretends to be only in outward outline, is it possible to look at the majestic stone skeletons of million-year-old canyons, mountain fastnesses and colossal boulders of past geological eras without imagining in them molten cities and palaces turned into pillars of salt?

Just as a tomato bought at the grocer's resembles a real tomato only in the shape of the fruit, the shade of its colour and, at best, its smell, but in nothing else, neither in taste, nor in wholesomeness, nor in the joy of eating it, does it resemble what the real fruit was before the intervention of capital, mismanagement, malice aforethought (call this fateful force what you will), so the stunted and pitiful reality of this day resembles what the beautiful and complex humanity of long ago once was