“If all the maps of Paris were suddenly banned – as maps were banned in Prague in 1968 – along with the names of the streets and the numbers on the buildings, I would still get around without any problem. Even destruction – TABULA RASA – would not be enough to throw me, as I was able to observe de visu in the centre of Nantes after the bombings of 1943, in Hamburg and Freiburg in 1953, and later on in Berlin… When it comes down to it, only reconstruction could really disorient me by demolishing the constructions of my memory. (p6 -7)
Is it “a sense of loss” that provokes in us the quest to explore “the real”, always somehow implicated, and folded into, and layered within the apparent?
