👀 Every wall has two faces

#371 | Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…

It’s cherry blossom season in my town, and the hills are blushing pink. Every year, the town hosts a festival at the lake to celebrate the season with music, dance, and art. It’s my favourite time of the year.

While that’s all good and festive, a week before the merrymaking begins, ugly green sheets spring up all around the lake to keep the prying public from catching a glimpse of the carnival without paying (the horror.)

Building a wall is always easier than tearing it down. 

This week I watched the brilliant documentary Borderlands, which explores the lives of people who have crossed the borders between two nations or live near them. In bits and pieces, many walls joined together to create two histories out of the same people.

It reminded me of a line from a Robert Frost poem: 

“Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.”

Walls are such an enigma: they protect but also alienate. They make strangers out of family and turn oppressors into allies. Whether Germany or Israel, those who build walls exercise tyranny through them. 

If walls can hide cherry blossoms from view, they can also obscure the true human cost of a violent military offensive against defenceless people.

But walls are not invincible. In fact, walls have been shapeshifting and mutating all through history. Nothing proves that more than the David Rumsey Map Collection, named after probably the most prolific map collector in the world.

The site has over 126,000 historical maps and related images. It’s also got this really unique search tool that lets you find any word you like on any of its vintage or modern maps. So you can go map-hunting for weird stuff like lighthouses and sheep!

What I take away from looking through this gargantuan collection is how rarely two maps of the same place look the same at different times. Whether that fills you with fear or hope depends. Either way, let me know what you find.

Arpit