Still on my philosophical bent, how much of what we see now is genuine ‘history’ of the building; is this brick history?
If you think about it, to go all scientific on your asses for a moment, time is a construct determined partly by the speed of light. It takes about eight minutes for the light of the sun to reach us here, so if you look at the sun, you’re actually seeing how it looked eight minutes ago. If you look at the stars at night ( suns at an incomprehensible distance away ) then you’re seeing them as they were years or decades ago. In a micro version, even looking at this brick this morning, the miniscule time it takes light to travel to my eye meant that I was seeing what the brick had looked like, micro-seconds before. Melon-twisting when you really stop and think about it.
And right now, you are seeing what was on this screen milliseconds ago, at a picture of a brick taken at 8am this morning, showing the brick as it was milliseconds before that, and that brick has been in the same place since about 1820.
And just to confuse matter more, I actually wrote this yesterday. If you’re reading it tomorrow, or today to you. Or the day before yesterday if you read it the day after my tomorrow. My point dear reader… what is history? As you look around you, at everything you see, you’re looking at history.
History is now.
Time… passes…