from the futility of immortalization

Surrounding the mausoleum of French artist Edgar Degas, the movement of tree roots and soil cause the crumbling of graves and tombstones. Two hundred years ago, when Paris’s inner city cemeteries were closed due to health concerns, the Montmartre Cemetery was opened on the site of a former gypsum quarry, along with Père Lachaise and Montparnasse cemeteries. Throughout France, rubble represents the visible face of impermanence. Everything built to endure—stone, name, memory—must yield, eventually, to time. Even in France, where the past is so carefully preserved, rubble reminds us that immortalization is provisional, subject to the same forgetting it works so desperately to resist.

Grant Gold in Montmartre, Paris