A Sense for What Once Was
On feeling the past, the weight of silence, and the memory held in monuments
Some encounters are not with people, but with memory.
Some dialogues happen not in words, but in silence, across time.
I am one of those people who feel history viscerally. It is difficult to explain to others, but when I stand before a monument, a statue, a remnant of another era, I do not just see it. I feel connected to it — through sensation. I like pausing before them, feeling their presence, aware that I am sharing the same space across time. I often wonder: how can we bridge that distance? How can we, in this present moment, reach across time to sense the past that once unfolded in the same place, and feel, even for a brief instant, what those before us might have experienced?
To me, history is not something to be memorised through cold facts. Learning it is not about knowing dates or events, but about encountering the human emotions and experiences that shaped them: the pain, the endurance, the wisdom, and the insight each generation distilled from its time.
I like touching historical objects. Through touch, I feel closer, as if the material itself carries a quiet resonance of what has been. This habit began when I was about fourteen, on a school exchange trip to Shandong, China. I remember standing before a stone stele, tracing the carved names and words with my hand, trying to imagine the years inscribed there, the lives they marked. I would close my eyes and let the image form, to sense their presence, and to contemplate what once happened.
My Chinese history teacher once mentioned a phrase: 歴史通感 , a sense of perceiving across time. I later tried to look it up, but found no clear definition of it in historical studies. Yet it stayed with me, because there was truth in its feeling — the 通 (connection) and the 感 (feeling). Perhaps what I experience is a kind of historical attunement: an intuitive resonance with the past, a temporal empathy, a sensitivity to lives that once were — the ability to sense, across time, the presence of those who lived, suffered, or dreamt before us.
When I travel, I always find myself pausing before war memorials, especially those from the First World War. In every country, I read the engraved text, wondering who they were, what they believed, what they saw in their final moments. I have a particular sensitivity to the First World War, its rupture, its shock, its shaping of an entire generation. I often write about it elsewhere. But what moves me most is not the event itself, but the effort to connect, to feel, across distance, the same ground once witnessed by others, the same air touched by history.
Recently, I have found myself drawn more and more to these quiet moments. In front of Queen Victoria’s statue at Victoria Square in Birmingham, I was caught off guard. As a child, I had read about her with awe, one of those early figures we were taught to admire. I still remember a biography I read that introduced her as ‘the symbol of the British Empire’s prosperity’.
As I grew older and came to understand more about history, the world, and life itself, that feeling inevitably changed. The history is heavy. Yet standing there, face to face with the bronze figure of someone who once lived in the imagination of my childhood, it felt strangely intimate, almost like a reunion. After all these years, across time and distance, we finally met.
History doesn’t speak. It listens.
And I listen back.
Perhaps this is why I have always been drawn to heritage, to archives, to ruins. Because what I care about is not just the past itself, but our relationship with it — how we remember, how we forget, and what it means to stand in the present while reaching backward: to grieve, to learn, or simply to feel less alone.
What It Means to ‘Feel’ History
There is a difference between studying history and feeling it. The latter is instinctive. Involuntary. It moves through you before you can name it.
I have felt this in Hong Kong too, my home city, especially when I pass by Edinburgh Place or Statue Square in Central. During my undergraduate studies in Politics and Public Administration, I wrote my capstone paper on how the Third Legislative Council (2004–2008) responded to public concerns about heritage conservation and urban renewal.
I still remember reading the submissions citizens wrote to defend Queen’s Pier and Star Ferry Pier, letters filled with urgency, sorrow, and belief. Their words have stayed with me. These sites are not just locations to me; they are layered with meaning. I hold their stories, their absences, their lost possibilities. When I walk through these places, I recall what happened, the images, the fragments of history that once unfolded there, while everyone else is simply walking past.
It’s isolating, sometimes, to carry memory in a world so quick to forget.
When I walk past Statue Square, I always find myself taking a picture, almost without thinking. In my art history capstone, written for a photography course, I described this instinct as photographing absence — not documenting what is, but invoking what is no longer. For me, taking a photograph is less an act of recording than one of invocation: a way to summon what has been erased by development, by time, or by collective forgetting. Perhaps that is why I am drawn to photography: because images, like memory, are fragmentary, spectral, and shaped as much by what is missing as by what remains.
The Past As Anchor
There is a personal dimension too.
In times of uncertainty, when the world feels unsteady or directionless, I find myself drawing strength from the past. I think of those who fled to Hong Kong in the 1940s and ’50s, building new lives out of nothing. I think of the Hong Kong cultural figures and visionaries of the ’60s and ’70s, who created a cultural golden age. I think of all those who endured, who adapted, who made something of their moment.
In the depth of this current age, an age I somehow find alienating and fragmented, I look to them not out of romanticism, but out of need. What would they do, if they were here? How would they navigate this world?
The Cenotaph in Central is one of the places I return to. Quietly. Regularly. I do not always know why. Maybe to feel steadiness. Maybe to find a connection that binds the present to what came before.
We Live in Discontinuity
Today, we live in disconnection — from the experiences that shaped those before us, from the wisdom they accumulated, and from the remembrance that links past and present.
We live surrounded by monuments, and yet we rarely see them.
We digitise archives but seldom listen to the silence they preserve.
We move fast. Too fast for continuity to take root, too fast for memory to catch up.
This is why I care about history, not as a field of study, but as a way of relating. I believe history can be more than static knowledge; it can be a living presence in our lives. Not confined to museums or footnotes, it can shape how we move through the city, read the landscape, and experience the world around us.
I want to explore ways of activating history, not just preserving it.
To bring the past into the present without flattening its complexity.
To make memory experiential, layered, felt.
Not through empty nostalgia.
Not through selective myth-making.
But through an honest, dynamic engagement with what was, what is gone, and what still lingers.
To Close
It is about our capacity to feel across time.
It is about recovering slowness, reverence, presence.
It is about asking not only what history is, but what it can still be.
Monuments stand as gateways, not endpoints, in our ongoing conversation with the past.
History is not fixed but a living dialogue between generations.
Because some encounters are not with people.
They are with memory.
And through memory, perhaps, with ourselves.