Evelyn Waugh's brilliant 1947 piece
"Half In Love With Easeful Death" imagines what scholars would make of the tombs and religious implications of Forest Lawn Glendale upon encountering it amongst the ruins of Southern California one thousand years in the future. It is a highly entertaining and insightful read.
Read it read it read it.
"Nature will re-assert herself
and the seasons gently obliterate the vast, deserted suburb. Its history will
pass from memory to legend until, centuries later, as we have supposed, the
archaeologists prick their ears at the cryptic references in the texts of the
twentieth century to a cult which once flourished on this forgotten strand; of
the idol Oscar - sexless image of infertility - of the great Star Goddesses who
were once noisily worshipped there in a Holy Wood.
...their steps will
inevitably tend northward to what was once Glendale, and there they will
encounter, on a gentle slope among embosoming hills, mellowed but still
firm-rooted as the rocks, something to confound all the accepted
generalizations, a necropolis of the age of the Pharaohs, created in the middle
of the impious twentieth century, the vast structure of Forest Lawn Memorial
Park."
