See more of my journeys in Gent, Antwerp and Bruges here.
Is it not unfair to curse the man or woman who wastes or misuses words needlessly? Or who obstructs our path in order to take a photograph of an image recorded ten trillion times before? They weren’t the first to introduce the custom: they merely faithfully echo what appeared a moment ago. Those similar ideas and photos are like our lives, often so faithfully similar to past examples despite the individual’s hopes to be the first, the original, the transformer, the exceptional case. No, never quite so much, and usually something more. It was in the eye of something beautiful that I discovered tonight that we are all a kind of connective matter. It attaches itself to some other vaguely possible matching out of necessity and its desire. That connection will often last for only a moment, but the intensity of its impression lasts far longer, sometimes a lifetime. It is a connection that might emerge in the fleeting chance of a fragmentary encounter. Long-lovers may know that connection’s appearance twice, three times, maybe even more. What else is painfully not-so-new yet inspires hope all the same?
Dan Taylor 