On a recent trip to a foreign land I was reminded of how short our time here is and how silly our efforts at permanence.
Despite our hopes and aspirations, and fortunes spent, our legacy often falls into ruin. These ruins remind me to make the most of my fleeting time.
A bit late this month, but a new postcard is now available. Wandering around the ruins of Clifden Castle, I couldn’t help but think about how quickly our feeble efforts at permanence decline into ruin. It was a reminder to enjoy the evening, the breeze coming off the bay, the smell of early spring. These moments are all we have. I was fortunate to add them to my “Museum of This I Experienced.”
John D’Arcy was a wealthy landowner who built this castle ca. 1818, just outside the town he founded. He and his family lived in it for about twenty years. After he died, his son inherited the castle and lived there until the family went bankrupt about a decade later. New owners. Renovations. Yet more new owners. Yet more renovations. Finally, decline and ruin. Now, 200 years later, only the shell still stands looking out over the land and the bay.
The original construction was mediocre, lots of rubble and junk, rough-hewn stone stacked up into walls that were then covered with plaster. Remnants of decoration, also made from cement or plaster, cling to the walls, as does the ivy. Inside little remains besides dirt floors and piles of fallen stone. Trees and plants grow where floors used to be, and graffiti cover many walls.
The ruin also stands as a reminder that not long after we go our carefully assembled collection of photographs and photographic equipment will fall into disuse and disrepair. How many photographs and slides lie in boxes in closets, attics, storage units? How many cameras, both expensive and cheap that took hundreds of precious photos, mold in basements? Families no longer gather around to watch slide shows from last summer’s family vacation. Few people pull albums from shelves to thumb through the pages of photographs.
With recent moves to digital photography and the near refusal to print images, how much easier will it be for the next generation to discard our photographs and cameras? Hard drives full of images will fail before too long, 4 to 5 years for mechanical drives. Cameras will break. They’ll be recycled or thrown away at e-waste events. We think we have this impressive collections, but like D’Arcy’s castle they are little more than a pretty façade.