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Earlier this year, I visited Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. A visitor can walk the same streets paved by the Romans 2,000 years ago, walk the halls of villas last inhabited during the reign of Titus, and see all the little bits of everyday life that are so often lost to us through history because they're so commonplace no one thinks to write them down.
Studying a town like that, a town frozen, a bit, in time, is like studying a dead language or silent film. It's something with a definite beginning and a definite end. It is whole, complete, finite. This happened, you can say, but it is happening no more, and I can study it in its entirety. What were the final days of Los Angeles, or Montreal? Who can say -- they are left to be seen. But a dead city is both less and more knowable, because we know how it ends. We can never know what it was to live there -- not really -- but we can know it in a way we can't know the cities we inhabit. There's a unique intimacy to walking through a city that's no longer living.
And going off on that tangent is why I wanted to show you these photos from Kolmanskop, Namibia. A diamond mining town from the early 1900s, filled with German-style ballrooms and mansions and casinos, the town's fortunes left along with the diamonds and the buildings are being reclaimed by the desert. Photos are here, and once you're there, you will probably spend hours on Atlas Obscura if you haven't already, making a wishlist of places to visit. So clear some space in your day.
(link) : (via)
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