--- title: "Things That Remain" description: "On antique markets, demolished neighbourhoods, and the cost of nothing lasting" date: 2026-04-26 category: Reflections readingTime: "3 min read" --- I found a stranger's library at an antique market. Thirty books on media history, bound together with a rubber band and sold as a single lot. Each one had been read carefully. Pages were dog-eared. Margins were annotated in a neat, deliberate hand. Dates had been written inside the front covers, spanning twenty years of collecting. I asked the vendor about the owner. The answer was the same one antique dealers always give. A regular customer. Came for years. Stopped coming. The family showed up a few weeks later with bags of everything he had ever bought, wanting to sell it all back. I asked whether families ever wanted to keep any of it. He said one in a thousand, maybe. --- Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar wrote something in 1960 that I have not been able to forget. He described the central tension of modern life as the grief felt for what is lost, set against the longing for what is new. "We all know the road ahead," he wrote, "but the further we travel, the more the world we left behind occupies us. We feel it now as a growing void in our identity." He was writing about a small Anatolian town. He could have been writing about any street in Istanbul. --- Istanbul rebuilds itself constantly. Entire streets disappear and resurface within a few years. Schools are demolished. Hotels that once hosted heads of state are sold, gutted, and left to decay. Hospitals change names when they change owners. Even the street signs shift, so that a person returning after a decade might not recognise the place where they grew up. I am only eighteen, and I have already watched parts of my own city become unrecognisable. Buildings I walked past on the way to school are scaffolding now. Shops that felt permanent turned out to be temporary. The café where I first opened a laptop to write code is a construction site. Everything that could change has competed to change. And everything that competed has won. --- The things I remember most vividly from childhood are the ones I could hold. A football. Coloured pencils. Books with cracked spines. The sound of a radio whose dial listed cities I had never visited. My grandparents' living room had a particular smell, different from any other room in any other house, and I could reproduce it in my mind right now if I closed my eyes. Every one of those memories is tied to something physical. Something that existed in three dimensions, that you could pick up, that left a mark on a shelf or a crease on a page. The memory persists because the object persisted, even if the object itself is long gone. Its shape is still in my hands. Almost nothing in my current life works this way. My music is on a server I will never see. My photographs live in a cloud that could revoke access at any time. The tools I build with are subscriptions, not possessions. If Spotify disappeared tomorrow, I would have no record of what I listened to for the past five years. If iCloud vanished, a decade of photographs would go with it. We do not own our digital lives. We lease them, and the terms of the lease can change without warning. --- There is a thought experiment that unsettles me more than it should. A person who has died could, today, maintain a digital presence indefinitely. An AI trained on their messages, their voice, their patterns of speech could continue to reply to emails, post updates, even hold conversations. The boundary between present and absent becomes negotiable in a way no previous generation had to consider. If nothing is tangible, and nothing persists, and even the line between here and gone can be synthetically maintained, what exactly remains? --- This is what I kept thinking about at the antique market, standing over that bundle of annotated books. The man who collected them had spent twenty years building something. A personal archive. A record not just of what he read but of what he thought about it. His handwriting was in the margins. His preferences were on the shelves. And none of it mattered to the people he left behind. One day my own shelves will be cleared. My code will sit on servers maintained by strangers, or it will not exist at all. The repositories I have spent years building are one billing decision away from disappearing entirely. Tanpınar believed the things we love change with us, and in changing, live on as a richness. I want to believe that. But standing in that market, holding a stranger's careful annotations, I was not entirely sure.