Hearts Into It

 On doing, today, a jigsaw online puzzle, the picture of a magnificent Benedictine Palace, I marvelled  at those who built these elaborate structures that are so admired by tourists, photographed and revered for hundreds of years. Many of these gigantic buildings took centuries to build and were laboured by the hands of humble people who dedicated their entire lives to their work. The architects of  those times, bowed to the appreciations and praises showered on them. Their names were etched into metal and stone markers that honor what they created. But who remembers the arms of people who mixed the plasters and grouts and lifted the stones and bricks into place? They are anonymously part of the construction just as are the statues and gargoyles that embellish the walls, the ones these ordinary people  struggled to set  in place. Many of these workers might never have lived long enough to see the end result of their labours. I think of today when modern workers, the ordinary people now, who work with machines and equipment and materials that are not handwork but that of tapping keys and buttons, to be in production, part  machine and part human in making objects large and small, that give us easier and quicker and cheaper commerce. Technology goes down the same pathway and hopefully makes us appreciate the past as well, or do, ever, we think of it? Are today's workers as patient and dedicated? I think it would be hard to find. We see little handwork with tools that take us further and further away from it.  But the same instincts and aspirations are there, still, in very special people who want to turn their ideas into reality. Can they produce beauty that will survive the centuries as of old?  Will their stuctures be pragmatic but also pulchritudinous? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but if the beholder hasn't seen it, will it disappear? Our "new world style" the cheaper, faster minimalist sort, might, therefore, be in question?