Prosperous old memories
"I sell memories, but I always lose mine along the way."
When you find this sentence in the corner of a dying ancient bookstore in Istanbul, the sound of evening prayers from the minaret is heard outside the window. The edges of the parchment were browned, as if they had been burned by centuries of candlelight. This sentence became the key to your ten-year wandering - not to see the world, but to search for those forgotten philosophical questions in the folds of the world.
"Prosperous Old Memories" is not a travelogue, but a thought experiment conducted on the move. You and the poet's ghost travel through the Persian courtyard, think about the dialectics of "emptiness" and "fullness" in front of the dry landscape in Kyoto, and reread Proust on the sunken staircase in Venice. Each story is a labyrinth of thinking: in the collapsed cloisters of Angkor Wat, time is no longer linear sand, but moss that grows cyclically; under the faded arcades of Havana, revolutionary slogans and love vows are also eroded by wind and rain, but are repainted by memory at different speeds.
You encounter an unexpected rain in the Void Tower of the Jewish Museum. The water drops fall on the lists of escapees from different eras, and the ink blurs into questions-when a city deliberately retains bullet holes or accidentally forgets criminal evidence, which memory is more real? You wrote: "Rain measures the sadness of stones, but never gives a scale."
These words wander between essays and allegories, sometimes like Benjamin collecting fragments of light and shadow in Venice, sometimes like Beauvoir deconstructing existence on the American highway. You wrote about the night in Mumbai: "Thousands of lights are breathing in the darkness, each one is the birth and annihilation of a universe. The so-called prosperity is just a temporary agreement reached by countless loneliness." You wrote about the stars of the Sahara: "When the Milky Way tilts, I realize that I am always standing on the edge of the cliff, leaning over it is the abyss of existence."
When you close the book, you will find a line of small gilded words gradually appearing on the back cover: "All journeys are returns, and all old memories belong to the present."
Motto: All journeys are journeys back