Personal Narrative: I Stood In Front Of A Headstone
I stood in front of a headstone.
A peculiar but familiar sensation spread through my body. “It is a feeling of indissoluble connection of belonging inseparably to the external world as a whole.” The words from Freud's book whispered behind my ears like a gentle breeze cooling the heat of July in Rome which was burning my exposed skin. This feeling reminded me of my childhood.
I do not remember when I first reached for the coarse surface of a stepping stone. The stepping stones, relics from the Qing dynasty, were everywhere. The almost faded memory of my childhood started in hutongs, the original alleyway in Beijing, where I was born and grew up, where the legacy of Beijing’s past was within reach.
But not anymore. I turned at a corner in a hutong. The honking of vehicles and demolition work of old buildings jarred on my nerves. I tried to stop the destruction of them by giving out leaflets about the protection of historical relics, but my efforts were largely fruitless. I desperately wanted to capture the memory of the old Beijing, but I couldn’t find a way. …show more content…
In Ostia, an abandoned former Roman port city, I stopped in front of a tomb’s headstone. A young girl had lost her life to a disease. I could imagine her story, deducing the sanitary conditions of that time, even though she had died thousands of years ago.
I found a stone that documented the falling volumes of port transportation profits. That stone (along with a tiny conch I picked up from the sand away from the sea) seemed to suggest that devastating geographical changes in sedimentation had turned Ostia into an island city, causing residents to
A peculiar but familiar sensation spread through my body. “It is a feeling of indissoluble connection of belonging inseparably to the external world as a whole.” The words from Freud's book whispered behind my ears like a gentle breeze cooling the heat of July in Rome which was burning my exposed skin. This feeling reminded me of my childhood.
I do not remember when I first reached for the coarse surface of a stepping stone. The stepping stones, relics from the Qing dynasty, were everywhere. The almost faded memory of my childhood started in hutongs, the original alleyway in Beijing, where I was born and grew up, where the legacy of Beijing’s past was within reach.
But not anymore. I turned at a corner in a hutong. The honking of vehicles and demolition work of old buildings jarred on my nerves. I tried to stop the destruction of them by giving out leaflets about the protection of historical relics, but my efforts were largely fruitless. I desperately wanted to capture the memory of the old Beijing, but I couldn’t find a way. …show more content…
In Ostia, an abandoned former Roman port city, I stopped in front of a tomb’s headstone. A young girl had lost her life to a disease. I could imagine her story, deducing the sanitary conditions of that time, even though she had died thousands of years ago.
I found a stone that documented the falling volumes of port transportation profits. That stone (along with a tiny conch I picked up from the sand away from the sea) seemed to suggest that devastating geographical changes in sedimentation had turned Ostia into an island city, causing residents to