Three Views of the Same Subject
Aug. 26th, 2013 08:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraThree views of the same subject.
Main Street, Poughkeepsie, circa 1906:
Main Street, Poughkeepsie, circa approximately 1956:
Main Street, Poughkeepsie, today:
This last one isn't such a great photo because it doesn't really show the decay, and you can't really snap shots of lost looking people shuffling slowly down a street, occasionally erupting into screaming matches with the imaginary people who live in their phones.
This is the interesting thing about modern life. Doesn't matter how down or out you are. You have a high tech telephone.
Still it's quite a triptych.
###
I've written before about a trip I took when I was in my late teens to Sarajevo, a prosperous city in what was then Yugoslavia. When was it? Oh, probably 1970 or 1971. Before the Olympics.
I didn't realize it at the time, but that casual trip to Sarajevo was to become one of the defining points of my life.
Twenty years later during the Bosnian War of Independence when this completely modern, sparkling, attractive city was turned into a war zone, when everything was destroyed, I felt completely unhinged.
If it could happen in Sarajevo, it really could happen anywhere. When I was there, the place looked like a prosperous American city.
Sarajevo became kind of a metaphor in my own mind. Mao Tse Tung sez change must come, sings Alabama 3 in one of my very favorite songs off "Exile on Coldharbor Lane." Change must come from the barrel of a gun.
I suspect, though, change more often comes from the fallout of natural disasters. From the shifting of major transportation routes. From whatever cracks in the social facade that make people abandon one place and move on to the next, a decision that people naively believe is personal but, of course, is never personal.
The older I get, the more I realize there is no such thing as a personal decision.
A fair summary of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: The only constant is change.
Change seems to happen gradually, incrementally, while your back is turned. But it will happen, and it will happen within your lifetime. Sarajevo is the exception, of course. Most change takes place along the fringes – which is as good a reason as any to avoid those fringes, I suppose.
Except some of us are drawn to the fringes.
Main Street, Poughkeepsie, circa 1906:
Main Street, Poughkeepsie, circa approximately 1956:
Main Street, Poughkeepsie, today:
This last one isn't such a great photo because it doesn't really show the decay, and you can't really snap shots of lost looking people shuffling slowly down a street, occasionally erupting into screaming matches with the imaginary people who live in their phones.
This is the interesting thing about modern life. Doesn't matter how down or out you are. You have a high tech telephone.
Still it's quite a triptych.
I've written before about a trip I took when I was in my late teens to Sarajevo, a prosperous city in what was then Yugoslavia. When was it? Oh, probably 1970 or 1971. Before the Olympics.
I didn't realize it at the time, but that casual trip to Sarajevo was to become one of the defining points of my life.
Twenty years later during the Bosnian War of Independence when this completely modern, sparkling, attractive city was turned into a war zone, when everything was destroyed, I felt completely unhinged.
If it could happen in Sarajevo, it really could happen anywhere. When I was there, the place looked like a prosperous American city.
Sarajevo became kind of a metaphor in my own mind. Mao Tse Tung sez change must come, sings Alabama 3 in one of my very favorite songs off "Exile on Coldharbor Lane." Change must come from the barrel of a gun.
I suspect, though, change more often comes from the fallout of natural disasters. From the shifting of major transportation routes. From whatever cracks in the social facade that make people abandon one place and move on to the next, a decision that people naively believe is personal but, of course, is never personal.
The older I get, the more I realize there is no such thing as a personal decision.
A fair summary of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: The only constant is change.
Change seems to happen gradually, incrementally, while your back is turned. But it will happen, and it will happen within your lifetime. Sarajevo is the exception, of course. Most change takes place along the fringes – which is as good a reason as any to avoid those fringes, I suppose.
Except some of us are drawn to the fringes.
