Time & Perspective Quote by John A. Logan

Memory is doing the heavy lifting here, but not the soft-focus kind. Logan’s sentence is a command dressed as a warning label: if the nation lets its monuments decay, that rot will read like moral decay. The targets are bluntly named - “avarice” and “neglect” - which turns crumbling stone into an indictment of character. He isn’t worried about weather; he’s worried about what forgetting looks like in public.

As a soldier speaking in the long shadow of the Civil War, Logan frames commemoration as a civic duty with consequences. “Vandalism” isn’t just hooliganism; it’s profiteering, political indifference, the impulse to move on because moving on is cheaper. “Ravages of time” is the clever rhetorical twist: time will inevitably erode, so if erosion is visible, it means people chose not to resist it. Forgetting becomes an act, not an accident.

The phrase “free and undivided Republic” carries the period’s deepest anxiety. “Free” is aspirational and contested; “undivided” is the hard-won outcome of war. Logan welds both into a single object that must be protected, implying that unity and liberty are inseparable and, more pointedly, that they were purchased in blood. The subtext is political as much as elegiac: preserve the sites, preserve the story; preserve the story, preserve the nation. Public memory is portrayed as infrastructure - let it crumble, and the future will infer you didn’t deserve what you inherited.