Reaching Out To History

  “Each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly: the cat, the woman, the job, the front tire, the bed, the walls, the room; all our necessities including love, rest and foundations of sand — and any given cause, no matter how unrelated: the death of a boy in Hong Kong, a blizzard in Omaha; can serve as your undoing. All your chinaware crashing to the floor, your girl will enter and you’ll be standing, drunk, in the center of it all, and she’ll ask: my God, what’s the matter? and you’ll answer: I don’t know, I don’t know…”

  This was written on a wall by someone I’ve somehow met but will probably never know. It’s fascinating how soon you figure out there’s no meaning to anything we ever do. Nothing stays, no one stays, but nowhere ever leaves. Every action is trivial, each choice leads to the same ill-fated destiny. Death is inevitable, and everything else perishes. History moves forward, but at what cost?

  Stories die with the voices that told them, feelings are buried with the hearts that kept them, people are gone in the blink of eye and they take with them everything that’s worth anything. The shadows of their spirits barely stay behind in paper and cloth and earth. Things. Books. Used things. Clothes. Old things. Stone.

  Architecture is the only thing that stays. Every style has a meaning, it carries the weight of the artist behind it. The tales unraveled in stone, confined in castles and under archways - those are the ones that leave a scar in history. And although, surely, ancient tales are remembered and retold for ages; we don't need to reach that far into the past to grasp this sense of kinship. History is happening all around us, all the time, as we speak, as you read about it, and as I write this memoir to you.

  Old things hold a certain kind of poetry to them. Getting lost in ruins of fallen royalties, feeling the magmatic yet magnetic heat of a volcano that killed thousands, a thousand years ago. But it still is incredibly moving to get ahold of a reality that's not that far behind us. We trip over lost souls more than we think - bumping into shadows is constantly misunderstood for getting shivers down your spine. Ghosts of past loves meet in dusty hallways and souls touch in rusty doorknobs. I’ve met people through pillars and tables and balconies. I’ve danced with kings and queens and went to school with generations.

  It’s funny that what someone from somewhere at anytime could write on a wall would resonate with me, at this time, at the same place. Almost as if they were here. Almost as if they could feel what I fell. Almost as if they knew. I happened to happen into the ends and dark corners of a floor way too high in a library way too small, and that happened to lead me to some other person who happened to stumble into the same circumstances, under other circumstances, in the same place, at a different time.

  There's a famous theory, utterly romantic - therefore I believe in it completely - about soulmates connected beyond time and place, by an unbreakable bond in the shape of an invisible red string. It's important to keep in mind, though, that a soulmate goes a long way ahead of simply lovers by fate. The only rule on matching souls is love; that's what the string means (it's red for a reason). Oh, and it's unbreakable. My take on it, however - if I would - would be that people might be connected by reasons divergent to that feeling.

  Literature, music, poetry, art, cinema - sometimes you could happen to meet ghosts of the past at the most unlikely of places. And they might not speak, or make themselves seen; it's not paranormal. They come alive in words carved in wood, handprints over dust, windowsills built from scratch. They haunt history stealthily, subtly, only just noticeable through the surface. Still, they scratch deep into forever. 

  There’s history in every brick and stone that lived to tell the tale. Architecture is the red string that connects time and place. Loose hair over the floor and the long lost warmth of another body prove what paintings and pictures cannot. Yet, the light coming through the old magnificent windows once hit them just the same as it does to me, as I stand and stare and wonder 'what's the matter?'. It surpasses time. It’s proof that they were more than stories, they were people. They were real and they were right here. They always will be.

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  Excerpt on the architecture of Sterling Library, at Yale University:

"[...] in almost every available wood, stone, and plaster surface, is carved a design that will remind the viewer of the dignity and significance of learning in general and of libraries in particular. A visitor passing through the archway separating the nave from the exhibition corridor will walk beneath four quotations on the value of written knowledge. Above the circulation desk, field bosses on the ceiling represent various writing implements, from quill pen to typewriter keyboard; and a painting of Alma Mater on the back wall is surrounded by allegorical figures representing her academic schools. In the exhibition corridor, stone corbels picture scenes that include a fifteenth century scholar, a reader with a book and jug, and a student receiving his diploma."

Gothic Style Windrow from Sterling Library

           *hand-drawn sketch was not loading, will upload it again later :)