Palimpsest

Imagine that you are delimited with only one paper, although you have a thousand words to say. What would you do? Most probably, you would write on the paper, but you learn how to delete it in order to re-use it. Writing, deleting, and re-writing…

What if the paper one day, throw out all you wrote before and thought you deleted? This is a palimpsest. Dating back to ancient Greek and Egypt, the concept refers to “a membrane or roll cleansed of its manuscript by reiterated successions.” (De Quincey) Palimpsest refers to the topsy-turvy paper on which thousands of manuscripts are included which was formerly written in various courses of time.

The Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, a Greek manuscript of the Bible from the 5th century, is a palimpsest (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Palimpsest)

The concept gained an alternative meaning related to literature in 1845 thanks to Thomas De Quincey. After him, it has widely been used for several circles i.e. geographers, psychologists, architects. The geography, the human brain and the city, because may resemble written-deleted paper for some aspects.

City as palimpsest (See: https://hum54-15.omeka.fas.harvard.edu/exhibits/show/the-urban-city-as-a-palimpsest/the-palimpsest-in-urbanism)

As a person who passages day by day, changes by nature, and consciously makes changes its own features, it is a big discovery for me to notice that my life is also a palimpsest!! Life itself likens to being bounded and delimited by power, time, space and other categories. My life, besides being limited likens to the paper. The experiences are definitely the written texts on the paper, and they are the ones that I have sometimes strived for delete. At the end, they have all been risen to the surface, turning it into a topsy-turvy space.

Me, former me and the last version of mine. What is next? Seems like a palimpsest..