Memory

In the empty lot behind the row of new office buildings, a singular structure sits, grey and green, moss-crowned, rust-shedding, an emptying hull of something that once was. People might have lived here, or passed through here, or worked here. Now it is cracked concrete and crumbling brick, flaking iron and the last chips of paint curling from the rotting wood. In another time, it might have been called grand, magnificent.

It still is, though. Magnificent, that is, though perhaps not in the same way. It is not only the image of rebirth (the ivy covering the walls, the oak growing out the roof, the grasses forcing their way through the concrete, the swallows nesting in the rafters) that makes it so. There is something else at work here.

In some places, the structure is skeletal. Stripped away are the trappings a former life, of a once-upon-a-time, of something that now lurks on the fringes of memory. Time passes, things change. Some things are forgotten, other linger on, and yet others merely oddslot morph into caricatures of whatever they once were. Perhaps the past was meant to moulder away into dust. Perhaps the past was meant to be remembered with processions of horns and viols and scarlet-decked frivolity. Perhaps.

But even then, in remembrance, something is inevitably lost. You can restore your brick-front facades and repaint your crown moldings and rebuild your sagging roof. In choosing what to remember, you choose what to forget. And then you remember, but you remember incorrectly, incompletely, which is, in a way, worse than not remembering at all.

Better, perhaps, to let things fade away into memory, beyond memory. Yes. Better to leave them unsullied by oversimplifications and misinterpretations and false justifications. It’s all quite romantic, really. Lost knowledge! Entire kingdoms, buried and then unearthed! An idealized past is at once untouchable but tangible, foreign but familiar.

Time alters all, slowly, but surely.