Selective Focus: Impermanence

My grandpa Mohrbacher moved to Duluth in 1928 and was a tenant at the Traphagen home, which was gutted by arson the week before I arrived here. I was lamenting this loss to a sauerkraut maker I’d met at a cider pressing who told me he’d lived there in the 70s when the home became the Redstone Apartments, and that he had some interior photos. They were beautiful. I could picture my grandpa in the same sun room, occupied by a new friend over 50 years later.

This experience, and numerous other odd coincidences has persuaded me to Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence — that impermanence may be an illusion. This comforts me greatly, the thought that maybe somehow we live within currents and eddies of time, affecting people we will never meet, or have without realizing our connectedness; that more than plodding linearly to our end there exists this possibility that time could be circular. We make journeys in reverse, find sympathetic homes where our forebears once lived long after leaving for other destinations to raise my mother. Who’s to say, right?

Leaving proto-existentialism behind, next week’s theme will be “tangible:” things close at hand, within reach, readily grasped, and ordinary. Send your unwatermarked, signature-less images by Wednesday at 11:59 p.m to tim @ perfectduluthday.com — 1000px at their largest dimension — along with title (if any), and URL of your website, Facebook page, Tumblr, or Flickr stream.