The Past It is mesmerising in the British Museum, to stare into the blind, contemplating eyes of the Athenian's, see the flutter of orange cloth on the vases, blown by an ancient breeze that brushes your face with imagined grace illustrated in a Sophoclean haze. You can see the artist's intensity in the paint strokes that glisten under the light, the mortal chisel, the wild beasts and man as one. To look at a world, persevered in clay and marble, a world where the gods walked the earth and told man's story. Lives shaped by the poetry on the pots and the voices that are lost deep in the soil. Wild and savage beasts that tore heroes apart and made the reputation of others. The safe clasp of a land where the gods rule supreme with a human darkness, a world in which man's innate soul is lose to wander unbound by the rules of modernity. The nature of which is immortalised in the brush lines of a frenzied bacchanalia, connecting across the centuries to the unconscious animal within. The green-tinged armour and helmets hung vacantly on the walls, revealing none of their gory battles. I stared at the void in the helmet where the eyes would be, imagining the expression of the man. Scared? Feared? Alone? Dying? Wondering at the soul that possessed that space, that pocket of time and who spoke with a foreign tongue, conveying ideas unfamiliar to my contemporary ears, condemned to a fate I would never known. Then I went into the street and it was noisy and crowded with the smells of food infused with petrol and voices. Bright lights scared the gods, scattering them to the shadows. My feet smacked the street as I watched brick walls and the lives within through the festive windows. And the city feels insubstantial and alien not like the primal familiarity in the pots, armour, vases and statues that live within the Museum. I feel sad and out-of-place in this colder world of supermarkets and glass that reflects back your image with unrelenting indifference. Crammed in with too many other minds, all into a world that suddenly feels superficially small and so large in the mass of realities that shout and clammer. To stumble for even a moment is to get swept away into the vast unknown.