Author Description

This book contains the pictures of the many ruins of old castles in Slovakia where I personally was and took these pictures. The thing I like about them that they are silently telling their own story. I thought it was rather strange trace of mine, but I found out, that Japanese have whole concept of this. It is called "mono no aware" - literally "the pathos of things", and also translated as "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera", and is a Japanese term for the awareness of impermanence or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life. In the 'Notes at the Headboard', Sei-Shonagon (Japanese author of X century) wrote: "I like it if the house where the woman lives alone has a dilapidated, abandoned look. Let the fence collapse. Let the water grasses drown the pond, the garden will overgrow with wormwood, and green stalks break through the sand on the paths... How much sadness and how much beauty there is! I am disgusted with a house where a lonely woman with the air of an experienced hostess tries to fix and fix everything, where the fence is strong and the gate is locked." So, this book is not for reading, obviously, but for that feeling of beauty and fading. Hope you like it, and may be one day you will visit these places.