Precipitation Local

I was confronted today in the Metropolitan Art Museum bookstore with a fairly large collection of travel essay books. I was struck by the fact that many of them were essays collected from the 20’s, 30’s, 50’s and 60’s. All about places that have changed markedly in the 80’s and 90’s. The sheer nostalgia of this collection of books was enough of a weight to trouble me. There is history to be learned here but this is very much how history can hinder us. We don’t know enough about the history of a place to appreciate how badly it is being changed but what little we knew now actually disguises the change. We don’t know how to value the elements of the place so we don’t know what is evolution and what is actual destruction. Men are sometimes far less obvious then a hurricane and harvests can be joyous or ruinous. It’s very funny how this works. Like many things knowledge about a place and what is best for it gathers round a saturation point. The actual knowing what’s best precipitates out at a certain point but not before. You may perceive the place as completely different before this precipitation takes place and then not the same after, when you actually know it better.