a nameless yeast
[detail]
When a thing ages enough, no matter how tough or vulgar or brash or even tacky it was when it was new, we can’t help ascribing vulnerability to it. We see that the flush of its youth has faded, that it has creases where once it was smooth, that it has lost some of the power and functionality it was intended to have, and something about it seems poignant now to us — irresistibly so. It’s the same with a silver-headed person, a rusty bicycle, the peeling facade of a venerable old theater… if they are old enough and weathered enough, all these things provoke a kind of tender nostalgia in us, whether or not we ever saw them in their prime. In them we see the passage of time writ small; signals of our own senescence. I think we love them more for it.
I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but for me paper seems to take on this quality with greater ease than any other material. The gradual disappearance of ink on old letters strikes at my heart, and the dusty rustle of old book pages thin with age; even the stiffly yellowed crusts of today’s newspapers underfoot, in the light of a waning evening, can put me in mind of how quickly what was once fresh turns into a relic.
And then, of course, there are old photographs. These are perhaps the most evocative trigger of all, because we understand that their very creation is always an attempt to stop time — freeze its unrelenting passage forward — hold on to a present that barely exists before it is, already, the past. It doesn’t matter that this particular old photograph is also an old advertisement, hanging on the wall of a beauty salon. It doesn’t make any difference that I know it was made by forces that meant in some ways to deceive, to entice, to lure with false promises. It doesn’t matter that the woman in the picture is quite likely enjoying a perfectly blissful middle age right now, surrounded by love and success. Still I look at this picture in the window and all I see — all I can help seeing — is a kind of beautiful pathos.
Age is opportunity no less,
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away,
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, meerasethi and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
