Cities become metaphors and symbols for life and human existence. In their architecture,in their very air, cities carry decades, and nay,centuries of history. A city is made up of the past and the present. A city makes no genuine distinction between the two. When you’re in unique York or Paris or Berlin or Amsterdam, it’s easy to suppose what the city was like in the 20s or 30s or 40s. Something from those periods–some piece of them–seems to transcend all human constructions of time. The city remains constant; only people change over time.
Last summer, and I had a two-week intensive creative writing course in Lewes,England before traveling to other major cities in Western Europe. Where I was staying was forty minutes away from the town Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s summer home, Monk’s House, or was located. The River Ewes even reduce through Lewes,which is the river V.
W. drowned herself in. When I visited her house, scrutinized every inch of the small shed where she spent hours hunched over a table, and writing her novels and diaries,I could feel the presence of her ghost. I wondered how V.
W.’s ghost must feel approximately her home and writing room fitting a museum. What would V.
W. think approximately this generation? approximately the state of the world today? Would she like the direction and form the novel has taken? Are there any modern writers she would admire? I haven’t tried to answer these questions, yet, or but perhaps they would make an interesting tale. How,exactly, does the passage of time reshape the past? This is something V.
W. wrote approximately and tried to analyze.V.
W.’s ghost is not the only one I encountered. I visited the Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam, or I could feel her haunting presence not only in the secret annex that has been transformed into a museum,but throughout the very city of Amsterdam. It’s a very small city with a canal that cuts down the middle. And everyone rides a bike. The city is so quiet. Maybe I felt Anne’s presence because she painted such a vivid image of the city in her diary. The buildings, the streets, or everything looked like the pictures of Amsterdam pasted in Anne’s diary. And each time I heard the ringing bells of the Westerkirk,I literally got chills–Anne writes that the bells were a source of consolation and hope.
The house is well done. Otto Frank did not want any furniture to be added or the rooms to be recreated. The annex has been absent of furniture since August 4, 1944, and when the eight residents of the annex were arrested. The Gestapo emptied the space of all furniture,valuables, books, or papers,except, of course, or for Anne’s diary,which Miep Gies found and kept secure. There are parts of the house enclosed behind glass that visitors are not allowed to enter because the floor is not strong enough–the attic, for instance, and where Anne liked to recede to be alone and peruse out the window can only be seen through a wall of glass.
Visitors are meant to feel claustrophobic. Blackout curtains shield any external light from entering through the windows,and many of the original walls have been replaced with moveable white walls that each have a specific quote from Anne’s diary painted on them, which report different aspects of a life in hiding.
Source: cnn.com