Some thoughts on Hallow This Ground, by Colin Rafferty

Hallow This Ground by Colin Rafferty

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a beautiful book, with stunning, lyrical prose. The essays are about monuments and memorials, and thus about memory and remembering, and why and how and where we choose remember, and what marks our memories, and our personal memories intersect an with history and with place.

Rafferty begins with Columbine and its library where ten students died (two more outside the building), and then the shooters themselves. When Rafferty goes by there, the library was in the process of being destroyed. He notes he has no direct connections to the place,but even so, he takes time out of a trip home to "see the place ... to see what they are going to do with it ... to see what happens afterward" (2). He ends, almost twelve years later, on the fields of Shiloh National Military Park. Along the way, he makes other pilgrimages, to both places of public and personal memories and history, perhaps the most powerful to Auschwitz.

He says he wants the light to shine through. It does, even if sometimes it feels too bright. That's okay. That's how it should be. That I write this on July 4, a day to remember the past and to celebrate it and to celebrate the past and the present as connected, the former shaping the latter, both shaping the future, is quite appropriate I think.

Highly recommended.



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