Palimpsest

It's a rarely useful word for a re-used writing surface that still bears evidence of its incompletely erased original text. It comes from related ancient Latin, Greek and Sanskrit nomenclature for this very common occurrence in a time when writing surfaces were rare and therefore had to be frequently reused.

In the modern world where paper is available in abundance, palimpsest is used literally in the context of ancient documents and old handwritten diaries and metaphorically to describe extant evidence of anything from old buildings to previous marriages.

I’m always fascinated by the evidence of old windows, old staircases and even old painted rooms that are unearthed on the side of one building when an adjacent building is demolished. And there’s plenty of palimpsest currently high in the air around a demolition site in downtown Cedar Rapids. I’m especially fascinated by the evidence of the adjacent tan, blue and brown rooms that clearly had elegant frame moldings on this second story:

While the remnants of the painted rooms above are no doubt destined to disappear forever once they get primed or sealed or bricked over as the new building goes up, bricked-in windows offer a more always-on-display palimpsest, and to me they always look like secret-hiding ghosts, like the ones from the above demolition site and across the street in the alley next to the stately Granby Building:

I find history fascinating and engrossing in a macro sense, but personal, intimate, human-scale historical evidence—like old rooms where people lived and worked and made human-scale decisions like what color to paint their immediate surroundings—is to me far more meaningful.