I had not thought much about obelisks until I recently read a lengthy and detailed book about them.  Who would have supposed there was so much to these singular spires of stone?  Although I remember reading, in graduate school, Hammurabi's Laws as they had been inscribed in Akkadian on the Stele (obelisk) of Hammurabi, I didn't think much about the stele itself.

    As I pondered obelisks more, however, I recalled the famous ziggurats of ancient Sumer, along with the biblical Tower of Babel (which most scholars believe was a type of ziggurat).  One purpose of these structures was to set humans closer to the gods whom they believed resided in the capacious skies above them.  A modern counterpart might be the many cathedrals built in medieval Europe.

   Either way, be it as monument or temple, obelisks seem to have exercised a curious hold on the human imagination.  In their own peculiar way, obelisks express humanity's astonishing proclivity to remember even as it looks ahead.  To celebrate what has been, what is now, and what might come.  Creatures of memory that we are, we love to commemorate.  Yet being creatures of vision as well, we can't suppress an innate desire to prognosticate.

    Commemorate, prognosticate:  can either of these happen in an impersonal world?