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Ni hao Mo-tzu
Wo jiao Angus, wo hen gaixing resheni
I am from the New World thousands of miles and kilometers away from you. I am a humble human being making my way in the world, trying to extract meaning from this meaningless existence. What do I do, who am I, what makes me happy, what gives me purpose? I’m sure you have experienced similar questions and doubts. In the wake of your discovery, we call it the “Camera Obscura”, there’s been an incomprehensible number of advancements. The vast majority of the world has a device on them which can capture and preserve moments nearly identical to how they appeared to us. This is called photography, this preservation of temporal experiences allows people to understand or have a glimpse at what life was like at that very moment. In this letter I’ve included, what I think is, one of the most important and infamous photos ever captured. It was from well before my time, but depicts men working thousands of yards or meters in the air constructing great structures, called skyscrapers. You can see the in the background the vast city full of buildings like the one these men are creating. We may have lost some of the beauty and artistry in our cities and the architecture of our buildings in our obsession with advancement and creation of the next best thing. Always, we want to become bigger and greater. Also that wall your country has been building for the past 2000 years is finally complete but doesn’t serve as a barrier to entry but is a means of people coming together from all over the world. People you couldn’t even imagine that existed, it’s beautiful. But I digress, the world is incomprehensibly different, men no longer build thing but operate machinery to do so, we have harnessed electricity, I’m not sure you even know what that is, you know when I rains and sometimes a bright light flashes and a fleeting bolt appears in the sky. That’s kind of like electricity. But that electricity is used in your camera obscura, so we can have portable boxes that can capture and save moments in photographs. Like I mentioned earlier but these photographs aren’t upside down they’re sharp and look like how we see things through our eyes. When you see an image you are, in a way, transported there, not physically but in your mind, you are able to marvel at the beauty of the natural world, the one we humans have created, people, pets, anything, anything can be photographed. To be frank, it’s beginning to ruin the human experience of exploration, I am inundated with photographs from thousands of people everyday, pictures of people, places, like I said—anything. So when I go out into the world and see some of these things myself, I feel like I’ve already been there, all these photographs all the time have made me accustomed to beauty. It’s hampered some of the awe inspiring experiences I’ve been fortunate enough to have. Though it allows me to relive some of the best moments of my life, remember the people I’ve loved and lost, remember who I was, who I am, what I do, and my purpose.
Yours Truly,
Angus Tresnan
ON: April 4, 2025
IN: Denver Colorado, USA