The other day, I visited an old fortress complex that 250 years ago had become a site for bloodbaths. History works in a twisted way. The marks of the canonballs still haunts us with the imagined memory of people whose names only appear in the archeological records.
The walls, the pillars, the cemetery are all abandoned since long. Time tranformed them to ruins of a place which, once upon a time, used to reverberate with lives. All that is left now are bricks; dull, old, non-functional piles of ceramic parallelopipeds. Ruins of homes and hospitals and hopes.
Or, should we call them the remnants of a human establishments which proves that we were still there! Yes, all ruins are remnants. Our memories of some long colourful days are gone leaving behind those remnants. Of course you can call them ruins and feel sad. I prefer to gratefully look at them – the remnants of a few happy days when Sun really shone. May the birds visit them and trees find solace there. May I learn to embrace the ruins as remnants with gentle care.
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