At the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford last week, I touched a piece of the oldest slice of England.
It was a slab of rock dating back 2.9 billion years.
“Do you think we can find anything older than this?” my son Asher asked.


We hunted around. There were dinosaur skeletons, chunks of fool’s gold larger than watermelon, and the remnants of the extinct dodo that inspired the bird in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” all set beneath a glass and iron ceiling built in 1887.
The walls fairly creaked with history.
On our explorations around town, we climbed the tower inside St. Michael at the North Gate church to inspect the prison door behind which were held the Oxford martyrs, three Anglican bishops burned at the stake under orders by Queen Mary during the Counter-Reformation.
“This tower was built in 1000 A.D.,” I told Asher. “Can you imagine? It’s more than a thousand years old, the oldest structure in Oxford.”
Asher waved an indifferent hand. “Everything here is the oldest.”
He was right. We ducked into a standard-looking department store, Boswell’s, because it displayed Legos in the window. The store was filled with dishware and bed linens. About five customers milled the aisles.
Another chain about to fall to the ploys of Amazon, I thought. I was sorry for them, but not sorry enough to buy anything, even though Asher spent two hours building a police station at the open Lego table.
I asked the cashier if they were doing OK, business-wise.
“Yeah, we do pretty well,” she said.
I had my doubts. “And how long have you been in business?”
“About 220 years,” she said. “We’re the oldest department store in the world.”
Oh. Right. Perhaps they’ve got it figured out, then.
You get lax with ancient things when you’re surrounded by so many. When we were visiting friends in France in mid-July, we went splashing in a nearby creek. It was down a country road, next to a farm, over this little arched bridge made of stone.
As we were leaving, my friend Zeyna cocked her head back at the bridge. “I think the Romans built that.”
I wheeled around. “That? The Romans. They built that bridge?”
She laughed. “There’s stuff like that all over France.”
It had no marker. No cordoned-off rope warning people not to touch this ancient artifact built during the greatest empire the world has ever known. If it were in America, it would have an entire museum built around it, complete with a gift shop.
But if Europe did this with every artifact, every great structure, there would be no space for living. These civilizations have been repurposing antiquities since the prehistoric age.
Pieces of Stonehenge were carried off to build nearby churches and walls. Rome’s Colosseum was stripped of its marble to adorn nearby hospitals and palaces.
The land and its structures have been built over, buried under, retooled and refashioned. These are countries that have been burned, blitzed, plagued and hewn together in wood, cement and stone.
To try to shore it all up is an enormous challenge. Europe must grapple with preserving its past while trying to move forward into the modern age. Everywhere I turn I see evidence of post-Imperial strain. The Elizabeth Tower (commonly referred to as Big Ben) in London is shrouded right now in scaffolding, except for the friendly face of the clock, peeking out from the construction as if from behind a curtain. British parliament will be moved out of the Palace of Westminster for years while the structure undergoes a $4.8 billion refurbishment.
Americans flock to Europe because we want to see gothic spires, not the steel and glass skyscrapers, or even worse, the uninspired cement blocks that rose up after World War II. I am personally affronted everywhere I see new development. How dare they reshape the neighborhood, the view, by building more large apartment complexes! I want it all to resemble the Cotswolds, with thatched-roof cottages and soaring churches.
They say that change is the only constant, and perhaps that is true. But history matters too. When we preserve monuments and prison doors to martyrs, when we touch ancient stones, we remember that we are part of a great human chain, that empires rise and fall, that this life right now is fleeting, fleshy, precious.
We have the ancient world at our fingertips, but we are so, so young.