Time Lapse

a prompt about place and time (and a variation on the recent Ruins prompt)

For this prompt, explore the differential between a character’s memory of a place and what is like when revisited, but instead of working with a place that has fallen into wrack and ruin, work with somewhere that has been renovated, repaired or rebuilt in the intervening time, like Dresden in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse- Five.

I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.

I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare, and we made friends with a cab driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war. His name was Gerhard Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn’t much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now. He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storms. So it goes.

Push this idea, perhaps to a multi-frame slideshow, evoking the same place at various moments over an extended period of time. How does one character’s view or relationship to the place change with time?

Or what if the place persists long past the lives of the original characters, as in Adam Thorpe’s masterful novel Ulverton, set in a fictional British town over the course of 300 years, from 1650 to 1988, or Tom Stoppard’s ingeniously fashioned play Arcadia, the action of which transpires in the same manor house during two widely spaced periods, the early 1800s and the late 20th century?