The folllowing is excerpted from As if nothing could fall: Essays on monuments , forthcoming from Dublin-based PVA Books. Not being a monuments person has determined the kind of writer I am. Two things are anathema to me: subjectivity, with its family members, psychology and self-expression; and historiography, whose household includes monuments, key events, and great personalities. Anything that’s immutable seems to me extraneous to what I understand as reality. I’m not sure if this is a Buddhist position. It could be that Buddha was among the first people to articulate a prejudice against the unchanging. Not for him either God or the self (atman). He saw them as fictions. In this sense, monuments too are fictional. There’s also my laziness. Faced with the prospect of seeing a monument, I have dropped out due to lack of stamina. In 1979, my mother and I sat at the base of the hill on which the Parthenon stands while my father pluckily went up.…