REFLECTIONS ~

Today we are sharing words from an article read this past week in the Washington Post,

shared without permission, but with full credit.

Unfortunately, one can provide links to Post articles, but unless you are a subscriber, links will not open.

I found this story moving, important and so lovely to read, I've only chosen

some words, a few paragraphs to highlight.

Much, so much, has been out there, across all media, and rightfully so, about the

Reflecting Pool.

I believe because, more than any other of the president's vanity projects this is a

metaphor for all he has done, continues to do, and may do going forward if not stopped.

Philip Kennicott joined the Washington Post in 1999.
He is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer covering stories on 
art and architecture, classical music and culture.

______________________________

The delight of a reflecting pool is the illusion that there are two buildings framed in the picture, the real one built on terra firma, and the watery one that may seem on several glances to be just as substantial.  The doubling can be scattered with the faintest trace of wind.  And in that there is a poetic conceit of transience, a reminder that everything we build and make and do is fleeting.

The urge to put your hand in the water is almost overwhelming.  If a reflection in water hints at the ephemeral nature of all man-made things, it also gives the visitor a curious power, the ability to dispel the image with a stone or the flick of a finger.  Nature has offered us a double, but we can make the double disappear ...

Now, the pool is the story.

There are good reasons not to swim or wade in the pool - and both actions are forbidden by law - but arresting people for putting their hand in the water is grotesque.  And it repeats a now familiar and maddening pattern of events during Trump's second presidency, alienating Americans from cherished institutions and beloved places.  Touching water is innocent, but now it is a Trumpian crime ... 

People had come to see Lincoln, to stand where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, where Marian Anderson's voice soared above hate and division on a spring day in 1939.  The view from the memorial's inner chamber is one of the finest man-made vistas in the world, full of promise and possibility and just enough of the sublime to make you think that perhaps humanity can rise above tawdry things like greed and cruelty and chaos.

When the air is calm, particularly just after sunrise, and the pool offers its most pristine surface, the pool suggests another kind of power, and one too often dismissed or ignored.  It is easy to disturb the surface of the water, which suggests one kind of agency.  But we also have the power to leave it alone, to let it reflect back at us this fragile sense of perfect beauty.

In that, there is perhaps an even more telling metaphor.  So much depends, in life and in government, on the collective agreement to preserve and protect, to leave beautiful things alone if they are self-sufficient in their beauty.  Collectively, we can stand back and let everyone enjoy it.

It only takes one person immune to the magic to disturb the image.  And Donald Trump knew a pool guy.

Thank you, Mr. Kennicott