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I experienced a similar sense of the despondency when reading about the construction of the Pentagon Memorial dedicated to the 184 victims killed at the Pentagon and on American Airlines Flight 77 on 9/11. Its builders confidently predicted that it would last over a century. Think about that: a memorial that will last only a little longer than the life span of a healthy person. What is the point of a memorial that will mostly be viewed by contemporaries who already have firm recollections of the tragic event it memorializes? Compare this to the many bronze and granite memorials in our nation's capital built in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that will, like their Roman and Greek predecessors, probably endure millennia. Such are the values of this world we have created, one in which we have come to accept the short life expectancy of not only our infrastructure but of our memorials as well.
-- Robert Courland - Concrete Planet: The Strange and Fascinating Story of the World's Most Common Man-Made Material
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