Shared Worlds: History and the Imagined Fantastical

I love taking pictures of old buildings. And, as mentioned before, old and secret doors and windows in old buildings. Part of this is the simple beauty of these things. Part of it is the mystery. Part of it, though, is the sense of lived history in these places. These are connections to the lives of actual people. They are not simply monuments of the present, but actual pieces of lives in the past.

As a writer of fantasy, nothing seems more magical. The realness of these buildings is a departure point (an inspiration point) for me as a writer. It's not just that I can imagine a soldier looking over a battlement at an invading army, but that I can see him on an empty night, the cold wind blowing up over the stone. Thinking of a fire, of a girl he loves, of something to eat, even as the light fades in the west and the great eastern darkness boils up off the horizon. Does he notice? Or has he seen it so many times that he's blind to it, living by touch, living from shiver to shiver?

This is the magic of physical history on the mind of a writer.

So! I had a shot yesterday of a cannon in Belem Tower looking out over the water to the Vasco da Gama Bridge, outside Lisbon, Portugal. I loved this tower, and took a bunch of pictures of it. It's an important building, too, both for its beauty and its age. And the age is important, because it was one of the few great buildings in Lisbon to survive the horrendous 1755 earthquake that shattered the city.

Here are a few shots of the Belem Tower. It's worth seeing, if you ever get the chance.

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