After the 2016 election, exhausted from campaign work and horrified by the turn my country had taken, I took a week off before the next political races began to visit an old friend in France. Their family had moved to a town near the Swiss border some years before, and I had hoped to visit for quite some time. I had only once before been to Europe. We saw a whole range of things on a family road trip to visit some of their expat friends who lived on the other side of the country, but what I remembered most were the castles, and how France seemed to have more of them than they now knew what to do with. We saw castles that were overrun with commercialism, full of fake armour and jousting flags, and ones that were open and empty and that you could walk through entirely unsupervised. These ruins had been living spaces once, full of their own histories and purposes. Taken together in the twenty-first century, they posed a difficult question about the physical remnants of history. How do we decide what we do with what the past has left behind?
Continue reading ““A Most Noble Ruin””
Much That Is Fair 