A friend posted a photo of a very ordinary-looking typical American urban plaza. (It’s not this photo; I am using a public domain image that isn’t a expressive.)
He wrote that it’s the grassy knoll (can that ever be just a phrase anymore? already you know what I’m going to say) adjacent to the Dallas Texas School Book Depository, and how it seems just such an innocuous place when wandering by.
I do wonder how many places of great significance are now lost to time? How many places now are unmemorialized yet under there the greatest chief ever is buried, or this is the place where the woman who is the biological ancestor of all currently living humans made a stand against a rival who would have taken her life in youth.
But even for places like in Dallas where we know we hold time special, as the location of a world-changing event, it can seem disconcertingly incongruous what they were vs how they seem.
As with semantic satiation/saturation, when you actually focus on places that are historically significant, the overwhelming feeling is that they are ordinary and mundane.
It’s like this to look at the dead body of a person you once knew, too.
You realize the meaning is all elsewhere, and the things themselves are just things like any other.
In a way it’s like jamais vu, but weirdly, it’s the ordinariness that hasn’t been seen before, not what’s special.