Is my Hagia Sophia picture-portfolio's value about to spike? Dunno... Got a ton of haunting pix from inside the Hagia Sophia's de-plastered walls. The ancient Christian paintings are moving. However Koran's not supportive of images of most kinds within the walls of mosques. Sooooo....
Are we witnessing the collapse of the frame of a fragile world? As Hitler demonstrated, crisis presents opportunities, and I suspect there's a vacuum of consensus concerning historic preservation, certainly that seems to be the case here in the US.
"Is there a future for the past?" Sorry I cannot recall who wrote that, it's just stuck in my mind, like one of those tunes that won't stop playing. Y'know? Istanbul's a nagging example of the adage that every great success is built upon unstable and painful rubble, huh?
Beneath every Rome lies a Carthage, Athens, and Dixie.
P.S. Just as it's piquing me to wonder if there is a future for the past? Um, whuddabout the vice versa? Hmmm... Or izzat the same thing? Or... I'm off to quietly have a head explosion. Aaargh!
1 comment:
When you ask "Is there a future for the past?", are you asking if there will be a tomorrow or are you asking something a little more metaphysical, a little more abstract? If it's the former then I would simply answer, yes, there is a future for the past in the sense that there will be a tomorrow. After all, even though one day there won't be, the odds are in my favour when making such a prediction. If it's the latter, then despite the so called "evidence" (fossils, ruins, photos), the past is merely conceptual, a fabrication of the mind which is possibly why memories are so unreliable. The future is exactly the same, a fabrication of the mind, except that instead of calling it memory, we call it imagination. Which leaves the present, that cliched "Now", which is little more than a conduit for thoughts to morph from imagination to memories, transformed by filters as it goes through in Planck time from future to past.
Or perhaps you are merely wondering if today's cities will someday become the Carthages of yesteryear. Future civilizations, excavating the remnants of 20th and 21st century cities wondering… well, whatever they would be thinking in two or three thousand years. If that's the case, I can only wonder if they'll still have photographs then, and if they will look as good as yours.
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