I went to England this summer and came back with this phrase, courtesy of Lucy the Tour Guide: “Stonehenge was as far from the Roman Empire as the Romans are from us today.” The thought stuck with me, along with the words “shrouded in mystery.” (You hear “shrouded in mystery” an awful lot when you visit Stonehenge.) Anyway, it gave me a visual timeline and a new way of looking at the puzzle.
These days, of course, the things we do and the things we build aren’t exactly shrouded. We use the internet to document what we’re doing every moment of the day. So all of these thoughts swirled around to bring you the following writing prompt:
Pretend that you are a being in the far-off future — say 2,000 years from now. Now write a poem, story, or even just a list, of what you have noticed or discovered about people today. If it helps, you can pretend that the Library of Congress’ Twitter Archive has been destroyed and that not everything has context. What’s the most mysterious thing you’ll find? How might you try to explain it?
I took a lot of pictures of Stonehenge but I think this is my favorite. Photo/Madelyn Rosenberg