Winter evenings like this… (Stone Street, New York City) (at New York, New York)

I have started to refer to this time of year as the season of ubi sunt.
Many medieval latin poems start with the phrase: Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? which translates to: Where are those who were before us?
The ubi sunt motif is a powerful vehicle for nostalgic meditations on mortality and the ephemeral quality of existence. It’s also used throughout several beautiful Anglo-Saxon poems like The Wanderer, a poem which I read and analyzed during a medieval literature course that had an enormous impact on my writing.
I look at this photo and I remember standing on the Williamsburg Bridge with the brisk wind whipping past my face and I remembered that I was specifically thinking about a beautiful short film vignette of photographer Sarah Moon talking about the artistic process:
“Time goes by. Light falls. I lose confidence. I don’t want to be a photographer anymore…
Then, all of a sudden, but not always, something changes, I can’t say why, maybe I’m just in the right place at the right time, or maybe I believe in it.
However, for a split second, I see a sparkle of beauty passing by, everything goes so quickly now within that stillness, and I’m carried away, and at last I like what I see, and I can’t stop finding it, then losing it, and all day long I keep on, because it once existed.“
It’s the season of ubi sunt.
(Williamsburg Bridge, New York City) (at New York, New York)