Preservation
“Never wouldst Thou have made anything if Thou hadst not loved it.”
– WISDOM 11:24
There is a particular silence that surrounds old houses.
It is not emptiness. It is a form of memory.
And if you listen closely, it speaks.
This place, this website, is more a living digest or an archive for things that never held a physical place but that could be preserved tangibly. The idea lived for years in my notebooks, as fragments: a sentence here, an idea that became more, then a pressed flower there, a quote remembered from a 19th-century ledger I found in a crumbling drawer. There was so much material things left behind that held value, beauty, they held on to the memories of people long past. I wondered – who and where do these ‘things’ belong to now without anyone to cherish them- keep them alive? Should they be kept alive and dragged into the present or the future? I never imagined I would publish them. I wanted to keep them safe, I felt loyal to their past and prevent exposure to strangers – strangers like me. Why keep letters, or laces, or childhood photographs—is it the hope that someone, someday, might understand the reason for their keeping? Except these were ‘things’ that belonged to strangers and had nothing to do with me – I didn’t have their permission to ‘keep’ them safe. I had inherited them by chance.
Château Digest was born from this kind of stillness and the questions. It begins not with content, but with context. The estates. The slow work of restoration to preserve what’s left. The unseen hands. The stories. The scars and ruin. The quiet return. This digest is asking questions that may appear at first as meaningless however, the motivation is rooted in the search for meaning. To inherit a stranger’s space, filled with belongings is to be left with their space, memories and life that came before me, why not preserve, honor and remember these lives, times and places? The question is what’s after that romantic notion of servitude? Does their history become mine by way of this chance inheritance? Do our lives merge when I die and someone else falls upon all that was left behind as ‘mine’- would be a little entertaining on a timeline to say the least.
In these pages, you will find no urgency. Commercial restoration tends to have urgency, this isn’t that space. But you may find recognition or confirmation.
Some of us have always been writing letters to no one. One day will come where they will be held in the hands of a stranger – what then becomes of our secrets?
Some of us, without knowing it, have always been waiting to read them. Like books in a library, urging to provide clues as to what it was to leave a life behind for someone else to remember. What are we in the end? …a collection of thoughts that led to actions left like footprints on pages to be read: digested. “This was my experience of a life, singular, it was mine to think a lot about – to make sense and reason of it among so many others doing the same thing.” Maybe, we are all meant to be remembered by what we leave behind, places, spaces and our thoughts marking our mental territory – perhaps this is the truest aim of Château Digest.
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