Echos from the past

Old pictures are haunting. 

I don't know who these people are for sure. The owner of these pictures is eighty three years old and her memory is not what it used to be.  Distant friends and relatives that passed away decades ago. 

The pictures were not printed on photo paper, but on a thick cardboard card.  The images are ghostly. Part of it is the photo technique of the time.  The image appears in the middle of the frame, like floating on air. 

The picture of the boy is from the 1930's.   Things were not well back then in Spain.  As a colonial power that had recently lost most of her colonies, there was a lot of political instability at the time.  To complicate things, the Great Depression spilled unemployment and poverty from the other side of the Atlantic.

This boy does not look very happy.  It could be a sign of the difficult times, or simply he did not know what was expected of him on a photo shoot.  I wonder what kind of person he turned out to be. 

The woman in this picture must be very young, probably around twenty years old.  The image is very clear and somewhat ghostly. Her expression is melancholic. My best guess is that the photo was taken in the early 1930's.

  

In 1936, the Spanish civil war broke out.  The war must have affected her life profoundly.  The Spanish people absolutely lost their mind for three years. With over a million casualties in a country of twenty million people, it  was wholesale destruction.  To make things worse, Hitler used Spain as the testing ground for his new military.  The German air force destroyed cities that had no strategic value, just to practice dive bombing raids.  The Picasso painting "Guernica" was inspired by these events. 

The last picture is the oldest.  It should be over one hundred years old.  This man could be my wife's great grandfather. We are not sure.  He probably was born around 1870. This fading image is the only trace left of his existence.  I tried to improve the image with Photoshop, with no results. It gives you pause to consider how a few decades after someone dies, all  evidence of this person's life on earth stubbornly evaporates, just like this image. 

Buddha described "impermanence" as one of the three key characteristics of existence.  Clearly if you apply a perspective of decades instead of days, the world is more a fluid than a solid thing.  I remember going back to Spain after a few years and I would easily get lost driving around what I thought were familiar places.  New roads, new buildings, new people, even the language had morphed a little. 

When I look at these pictures, I wonder what, if anything remains of a person? Is there even a shadow or an echo of their existence still left behind?  I think so.  Their character, their love for their families, their strength and courage, their honesty and their kindness still resonates through time.  Their strength and their moral core influenced the character of the next generation. Character is the thread that unites each generation with the next.