A Time to Change
Hey Carly!
I have always been fascinated with stories that have a post-apocalyptic setting. They feel oddly refreshing, serene, and natural. Perhaps because I find most current societies to be dystopian, but I also believe that post-apocalyptic worlds would have remarkable stories to tell. After all, beauty is only fully appreciated when it has come and gone like the falling leaves of autumn.
Looking at ruined and dilapidated structures, we can catch a glimpse of history. Ghosts of the past and stories of struggle layered upon bronze patinas, whiffs of decay, faint traces of melancholy, and an overarching sense of desolation. Buildings that were once saturated with life, dreams, and hope now serve as empty spaces for wildlife to occupy and nature to reclaim. Yet, I cannot help but feel attached to these things. A sense of joyous wonder and awe. Some would describe this feeling as kenopsia. To me, it’s a feeling of connectedness to humanity as a whole, both as a witness and as a subject to the grand march of time. A form of nostalgia and sadness to a past I never lived but I am inherently part of.
Two things that tie back to this feeling of which I have always been enthralled are the Japanese aesthetic concepts of wabi-sabi and yūgen . Wabi-sabi (侘寂) focuses on the acceptance of the transience and imperfections of life. Yūgen (幽玄) is a concept that can have varied translations, but we can think of it as a deep, profound, and often indescribable emotional response toward the beauty or awe of the universe and with how we experience it. A feeling that triggers deep emotional awareness of how all things are impermanent, imperfect, and destined to be lost to the design of time.
This feeling is as dreadful as it is comforting. An awareness of how all things will eventually come and go. How the homes that have been built will eventually come to ruin. How the devices that we have will eventually act as spare parts for looters and scavengers. How paintings and photographs will become windows to the past. All the things we have done will be retold as reminders or stories for future generations to ponder. Yet it provides a sense of hope that things can change.
Far into the future, people will discover our stories as we leave traces of our identity through the objects and people we have interacted with and hopefully find meaning in our struggles. But for now, we can still change what that story could be. I am hopeful that with time, suffering will have dwindled in the future and people will look with the same sense of awe, wonder, and connectedness with the things that we have built and left behind, even if it may end in ruins. Only time can tell.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered. —T.S. Eliot