To Filling in the Spaces

Musée National du Moyen Age was one of my favorite places that I visited during my France trip. In this museum dedicated to the arts and history of the Middle Ages, a ruin of brick and stone walls vaguely recognizable as rooms or chambers is being unearthed. In the heart of Paris's Latin Quarter (the intersection of the Boulevard St. Michel and the Boulevard St. Germain), this spot was once the site of Roman public baths, a place of leisure for local residents in the first to third century A.D.

Besides the relative novelty of visiting ancient--and surprisingly intact--Roman ruins below the streets of a 21st-century city, the baths give a fascinating insight into Roman culture. These baths consisted of a series of pools: caldarium (hot), the tepidarium (lukewarm), and frigidarium (cold). Apparently Rachel, guests normally moved from the lukewarm pool to the hot pool, then to the cold before retiring to rooms designed for socializing with other guests. Roman baths of this type were open to everyone, and were an important part of life in ancient Roman towns.

Something very similar happened almost two thousand years later in San Francisco. It is now my favorite place to visit on an empty mind. Unfortunately, like the Roman counterpart, the baths fell to disuse and have since been abandoned. I can see how a passerby can interpret the sprawling mess of concrete foundations and melted metal, its former bathing pools choked with algae, and its metal pilings eaten away by the tide, as an eye-sore. But despite this decay, or maybe because of it, the scene was incredibly picturesque, with a gorgeous view opening out onto the ocean, and white calla lilies dotting the upper slopes of the property. At the time I didn’t know the history of the place, but was fascinated by its glorious state of decay.

Sutro Baths appealed to me on the same level as the Roman baths, despite having been built almost two thousand years later. There is something mysterious and melancholy about any place that has outlived its use, and a modern visitor is similarly drawn to imagine what it once was like, whether it has been abandoned for a hundred or a thousand years. On the one hand, this shows the limits of human memory, that anything that occurs before our lifetimes seems foreign and unknowable, but on the other, it highlights our own sense of mortality, and the hope that our works will be remembered and wondered over when we are gone.