Saturday, November 05, 2011

The wall that shaped us


Touch interface
Quebec City, QC, July 2011
About this photo: It's bricks and mortar week over at Thematic, and we're still taking contributions to the photographic cause. Right here.
There's a humbling feeling associated with standing in front of a piece of engineering that was built hundreds of years before any of us existed. This is part of the wall that protected the old city here from attack, a fixture that's as fundamentally responsible for the history of this country as anything else. It's one thing to read about it in a high school class - as I did so many years ago - and quite another to come here, stand in its very shadows and touch it with my fingertips.

Your turn: What does history mean to you?

4 comments:

Bob Scotney said...

History? That modern isn't always best.

Tabor said...

Personally, I think history means little to someone until they have a lot of history of their own. My classes in school (perhaps the fault of those teachers) were mostly a marathon of memorization of dates and names so that I could get the elusive "A". Now when I visit an historic site I find myself reading all the signs, studying all the artifacts and trying to piece together the whole event.

Kalei's Best Friend said...

History is the foundation of us- our country, city, our personality...We learn from it- the bad parts as well as the good parts... To improve, make a better future and also history humbles us- shows us how far we have come..

Pauline said...

Ah, touching history is as mesmerizing as thinking of the future. It's not always healthy to stay soley in the functioning of the present. Can't have any of it without everything else, can we?

Found my way here from Tabor's site and am enjoying myself immensely.