Not all ideas travel easily between languages. Sometimes, a single foreign word can express what would otherwise take sentences to unpack.

There is a term that captures this perfectly: Burgenromantik. Say it slowly. Even if you don’t speak a word of German, you can feel it… something old and heavy, something that smells of rain-soaked stone and woodsmoke.

The Germans found a single word for something the rest of us need an entire paragraph to explain: “castle romanticism.” It names a 19th-century architectural fashion in which many castles were constructed or reconstructed, marrying Burg — the medieval fortified castle — with Romantik.

It is not just a building style but an emotional condition: the longing for ivy-clad ruins, for Gothic silhouettes against a darkening sky. Neuschwanstein — the castle that became Disney’s model — is its purest expression, designed as the Romantic ideal of a knight’s castle.

Burgenromantik basically contains your entire life’s love of castles in a single word.

But what is a castle, exactly? The word descends from the Latin castellum — a diminutive of castrum, meaning “fortified place” — and from that single root grew the French château, the Spanish castillo, the Italian castello. German, characteristically, refuses to let one word do: a Burg is a fortress built for a world where violence arrived on horseback, while Schloss is its civilized descendant, designed not to repel but to impress.

The first European castles appeared in the 9th and 10th centuries, after Charlemagne’s empire fell apart and power passed into the hands of regional lords. They built in stone for two reasons at once: to dominate the land around them, and to defend it. The scale of what followed is staggering...

It has been estimated that between 75,000 and 100,000 castles were built in western Europe during the medieval period. Around 1,700 in England and Wales alone. In 950, Provence was home to just 12 castles. By 1000, the figure had risen to 30. By 1030, it was over 100.

They evolved from timber towers on earthen mounds into the great concentric fortresses of the High Middle Ages, growing more formidable with every generation until, in the 15th century, artillery became powerful enough to break through stone walls, and the medieval castle went into decline.

It was precisely when castles ceased to be necessary that the world began to truly fall in love with them — and, in some cases, to build them again, sometimes with breathtaking results.

Here are 10 of the most stunning castles on the planet…

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1. Where the Middle Ages Never Ended

There is a castle in the forested hills above the Moselle river in Germany that has belonged to the same family for 900 years…

Not the same dynasty in name only, not a branch of a distant cousin — the same family, in the same rooms, through thirty-four generations. The current custodian of Burg Eltz is Count Johann-Jakob zu Eltz. His ancestor built this place in the 12th century. He probably has furniture older than most countries.

There are very few castles in Europe of which this can be said. There are even fewer of which something else can be said: that the castle has never been destroyed.

In a region where the Thirty Years’ War, the French invasions, and centuries of feudal warfare reduced nearly every other fortress to ruins, Eltz Castle endured a single serious siege between 1331 and 1336 — and even then, was never taken, never burned, never abandoned. The suits of armor inside are still where they were placed centuries ago…

Burg Eltz contains roughly 120 rooms, an armory holding the oldest surviving cannon bolts in the world, and a treasury full of objects collected across eight centuries of uninterrupted family life.

Set in the middle of a forest, deep in a valley, far from any modern road or building, it remains the closest thing to a medieval dream that still stands. The German art historian Georg Dehio called it “the quintessential castle.”

Most of these structures in Europe are beautiful ruins or careful reconstructions. Eltz is a magnificent home — likely the oldest, continuously inhabited home most people will ever set foot in.

2. The Castle That Disappears Twice a Day

Off a stretch of European coastline, there is a granite island so dramatic and so improbable that for centuries people refused to believe it was real.

It rises sharply out of the sea, crowned by a medieval castle and chapel that have looked down on the Atlantic for nearly nine hundred years.

But what makes it truly extraordinary is what happens to it twice every single day…

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In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, John Ruskin wrote:

When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them: ‘See! This our fathers did for us.’

There is a reason some buildings fill you with awe and others depress you. It is not a matter of taste. It is something much more fundamental… something that operates on us whether we notice it or not.

And most people, it turns out, feel exactly the same way about it: according to a survey conducted by the Harris Poll for the National Civic Art Society, more than seven in ten Americans — 72 percent — prefer traditional architecture for federal buildings over modernist alternatives.

Not many can articulate why. People just know that certain buildings make them feel small in the best possible way, and others make them feel like they do not matter at all.

In 1849, Ruskin devoted an entire essay to the idea that architecture should be judged not merely by utility but by its effect on the human spirit. A century later, Winston Churchill said the same thing in eight words:

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

No civilization has ever made this argument more convincingly than Rome. Just two days ago, the Eternal City turned 2,779 years old, and the things it built are still standing... Pause on that for a moment. This was a culture that raised these structures without any of the tools we consider essential today — and yet what they left behind has survived everything history has thrown at it since.

The difference is not only technical. It is philosophical. The Romans built as though what they were making mattered beyond their own lifetimes. We live in a society organized around the opposite principle — planned obsolescence, the deliberate engineering of things to fail and be replaced, because durability is the enemy of profit. We have applied this logic not just to our phones and our furniture but to our buildings and our cities. And we are living with the results.

What a civilization builds is the most honest thing it ever says about itself. Here are 6 things Rome said — and has been saying, without interruption, for two thousand years…

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1. The Building That Refused to Fall

The Pantheon was commissioned by Emperor Hadrian and completed around 126 AD. It has been in continuous use ever since — first as a Roman temple, then as a Christian church, and today as one of the most visited buildings on the planet.

Its dome remained the largest ever built for almost 1,300 years, until Brunelleschi completed the Florence Cathedral in the 15th century. It still holds the record for the largest unreinforced concrete dome on earth, and engineers describe it as one of the most extraordinary structural achievements in the history of architecture.

The entire building was designed as a cosmos in miniature: the interior is exactly 43.3 meters wide and 43.3 meters tall, meaning a perfect sphere fits inside it. The Roman senator Cassius Dio wrote that the vaulted roof was meant to resemble the heavens themselves.

And then there is the concrete — which turns out to be the most astonishing part of all. In 2023, researchers at MIT and Harvard revealed that Roman concrete contains small white deposits called lime clasts, long assumed to be evidence of poor mixing. They were not. They were intentional.

The Romans used quicklime — a highly reactive form of limestone — mixed with volcanic ash and water at extreme temperatures. When cracks form in the concrete and water seeps in, the lime clasts dissolve, release calcium, and recrystallize as new calcium carbonate, chemically sealing the crack before it can spread.

In other words, the concrete repairs itself.

Modern concrete begins to degrade within decades. Roman concrete has been getting stronger for two thousand years…

Above it all sits the oculus — the circular opening, 8 meters across, at the apex of the dome. It is the building’s only source of natural light, and it functions as a precise astronomical instrument.

Every year on April 21st — the founding date of Rome — at exactly noon, the beam of light that enters through the oculus falls directly onto the entrance of the building, illuminating anyone who passes through it. Researchers have confirmed this alignment was deliberate: on Rome’s birthday, the emperor entered the Pantheon bathed in a column of sunlight descending from the heavens.

It has been described as one of the first special effects in history.

But a special effect is designed to dazzle and disappear. This was designed to endure — and to mean something to every person who walked through that door, in every century, for as long as the building stood. The difference between that ambition and ours is the distance between a civilization that built for eternity and one that builds for profit.

And perhaps that is the deepest explanation of all for why Rome’s buildings are still here. As G. K. Chesterton once said:

Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

2. Built Without a Single Drop of Mortar

Sometime around the end of the first century AD, Roman engineers built an aqueduct in what is now Spain to carry water from the Frío River to the city of Segovia — a distance of roughly 17 kilometers. To do this, they erected a bridge of 167 granite arches across a valley, assembled from approximately 20,000 blocks without a single drop of mortar. The blocks are held in place entirely by their own weight and the precision of their fit — a technique the Romans called opus quadratum.

The aqueduct served Segovia until 1973, and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

To build something held together by nothing but geometry and gravity, with no mortar, no joint, no material to erode, is to build something with no weakness to find. The secret behind it is the Roman arch…

By distributing weight outward rather than downward, the arch allows a structure to bear loads that would collapse any column or beam — which is why the Romans could build so high, so wide, and so lightly, with nothing but stone.

It is one of the most consequential engineering ideas in human history. The medieval cathedrals, the Romanesque churches, the Renaissance basilicas — none of them could have existed without it. Every time you walk through an arched doorway, in a church or a train station or an old city street, you are passing through something the Romans gave the world.

And if Segovia is the most visible testament to Roman hydraulic ambition, Rome itself offers the most extraordinary one... The Aqua Virgo — known today as the Acqua Vergine — built by Marcus Agrippa in 19 BC, is the only ancient Roman aqueduct still in continuous use today.

It has been delivering water for over two thousand years — and it still does, right now, feeding the Trevi Fountain, the fountains of Piazza Navona, and the fountain in front of the Spanish Steps. Think about that: the water tourists are tossing their coins into at the Trevi Fountain is being delivered by infrastructure a Roman engineer designed before the birth of Christ.

3. Where the Gladiators Used to Fight

The Arena of Verona was built around 30 AD, during the reign of Emperor Tiberius, to hold gladiatorial contests and spectacles for a crowd of up to 30,000 people. It is one of the best-preserved ancient amphitheaters to have survived into the modern era.

In 1913 — or so the legend goes — a tenor named Giovanni Zenatello was visiting the Arena with friends when they asked him to sing. Standing in the ancient amphitheater, he immediately understood what the acoustics could do. Whether the story is true or not, the result was the same: that summer, Verdi’s Aida was performed at the Arena for the first time, to a crowd that included Puccini, Mascagni, and Franz Kafka.

The festival has run every summer since — interrupted only by the two World Wars and the 2020 pandemic — making the Arena of Verona the world’s largest open-air opera house, with over a hundred seasons behind it. Maria Callas sang here. So did Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras.

I saw Ludovico Einaudi perform here a few years ago — and I can tell you that sitting on those stone steps, under the stars, with the music carrying out into the night, something happens to you that is difficult to put into words. You feel the weight of everything that came before you, and you are grateful for it in a way that catches you off guard... The Romans left us a place where you can still feel what it means to be alive inside something larger than yourself.

4. The Temple That Shaped America

Built around 4 AD in what is now Nîmes, in southern France, the Maison Carrée is the best-preserved Roman temple in Europe. It has served, across its two thousand years, as a temple, a private residence, a stable, a church, and a government archive — and through all of it, the building itself remained almost entirely intact.

In 1785, Thomas Jefferson — then serving as American Ambassador to France — was asked to design a state capitol for Virginia. He did not invent something new. He wrote to the directors of the Virginia Board of Public Buildings, telling them he had found the model: the Maison Carrée…

He described it as “the most perfect and precious remain of antiquity in existence” and had a plaster replica made and shipped to America for reference during construction. Two years later, he finally visited the building in person and wrote to a friend:

Here I am, Madam, gazing whole hours at the Maison Carrée, like a lover at his mistress.

The Virginia State Capitol he designed in its image became the first neoclassical temple to be realized as a governmental building in the United States — and directly influenced the architecture of American civic life for the next two centuries.

A Roman temple built in the south of France two thousand years ago shaped what American democracy looks like. That is what it means to build something that lasts…

5. The Queen of Roads

Construction of the Appian Way began in 312 BC, commissioned as a military road connecting Rome to Capua during the Samnite Wars. It was eventually extended to Brindisi, on the heel of Italy, stretching over 560 kilometers in total.

The ancient poet Statius called it the regina viarum — the queen of roads.

The engineering behind it is extraordinary. The road was built on deep stone foundations, paved with tightly fitted polygonal blocks of volcanic basalt, with a slight camber to drain rainwater to the sides. It crossed marshes, hills, and rivers with bridges and causeways, maintaining a surface so durable that sections of it are still walkable today.

Modern highways in Italy parallel its route — not because engineers chose to follow it, but because the Romans had already identified the most efficient path between the same points, and nothing since has improved on their calculation.

The Apostle Paul walked it into Rome. According to tradition, Saint Peter walked it out fleeing Nero’s persecution. And for over two thousand years, much of what defined the ancient world traveled this road…

6. As Long as It Stands

Emperor Vespasian began construction of the Colosseum around 70 AD, on land formerly occupied by Nero’s Domus Aurea — returned, at last, to the Roman people. His son Titus completed it in 80 AD, in under a decade, and dedicated it with 100 consecutive days of games.

It stands 48 meters tall, covers an area of 24,000 square meters, and could hold between 50,000 and 80,000 spectators, who could be evacuated through its 80 numbered entrances in under 15 minutes. That crowd management system directly influenced the design of every major stadium built since. Every time you walk into a modern sports arena, you are walking into a building that learned how to do it from the Romans.

Roger Scruton once said:

There is a deep human need for beauty, and if you ignore that need in architecture, your buildings will not last, since people will never feel at home in them.

The Colosseum is the most powerful argument for this that has ever been built in stone. It was designed not just to function but to overwhelm — to make every Roman citizen who stood before it feel the full weight of what their civilization was capable of.

The three tiers of its exterior arcade, each framed by columns in the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders, became the basis of the Renaissance architectural system known as the assemblage of orders — the visual grammar that every serious architect who came after learned to speak. It has been teaching for two thousand years…

In the 8th century, an epigram attributed to the Venerable Bede offered a prophecy that has never entirely lost its chill:

As long as the Colosseum stands, so shall Rome; when the Colosseum falls, Rome shall fall; when Rome falls, so falls the world.

It is still standing. Scarred by earthquakes and centuries of stone robbers who quarried it for building material — nearly two thirds of the original structure was taken — and still it stands, the largest amphitheater ever built, the most visited monument in Italy, a ruin that is more alive than most things that were never damaged at all.

What the Romans built, they built to mean something. And meaning, it turns out, is the most durable material of all…

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In his novel Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse wrote:

Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.

I have argued before that no matter how dark things get, we should refuse to concede that the worst of what humans do is the whole of what humans are. And one of the most powerful arguments against despair — one that has never failed me — is human creativity.

Creativity is not a hobby or a talent reserved for artists. It is something closer to a biological imperative.

The cave painters of Lascaux descended into total darkness 17,000 years ago, armed with nothing but animal fat lamps and pigment ground from the earth, and made something so extraordinary that we are still standing beneath it, speechless, thousands of years later.

The impulse to make things did not emerge from civilization. It preceded it. It may, in fact, be what produced it.

Which is why “unused creativity is not benign. It metastasizes.” It turns inward and becomes something darker. But the opposite is equally true, and Maya Angelou said it better than anyone:

You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

When did you last make something? Not consume, not scroll, not buy — but make something that required you, and did not exist before you made it. If the answer takes a moment to find, that silence is worth paying attention to…

Art is proof that human beings were never designed merely to survive. And of all the forms art has taken across the centuries, there is one that I believe sits above the rest — sculpture, and specifically marble sculpture.

Cold stone, a chisel, and a human being who refused to accept that what they could see in their mind could not be made real. No computer, no machinery, nothing but a hand and an obsession deep enough to last years. What follows are 6 details from the history of sculpture that prove, once and for all, that humans are capable of the impossible…

REMINDER: this is a teaser for my subscriber-only articles.

Beauty is Truth is entirely reader-funded. No ads, no sponsors to answer to — just independent writing devoted to finding and celebrating beauty.

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Upgrading gives you full access to all paid articles and the entire archive. With the new annual subscription discount, it costs less than a coffee a month. And it is what keeps all of this going.

1. Water Flowing Over Toes

Imagine being able to make marble look like water…

This is what Giovanni Battista Lombardi did in 1858, and in the century and a half since, no one has come close to doing it again.

The Italian sculptor was commissioned by Camilla Facchi Fè d’Ostiani to carve a naiad — a water nymph — for the baths of Palazzo Facchi in Brescia.

In Greek mythology, Naiads were divine spirits of freshwater, guardians of springs and rivers, believed to be the living soul of their water source. And so Lombardi carved the water itself — flowing over skin, sliding in transparent sheets over marble flesh — until the boundary between the nymph and the element she embodied became impossible to locate.

The sculpture caused an immediate sensation. The Brescian newspaper L’Alba responded with an elaborate ekphrasis — a piece of writing so overcome by what it was describing that it produced lines like this:

Her beautiful nudity, the kind which, rather than the senses, inebriates the soul with soothing ideas.

What Lombardi understood — and what this detail makes viscerally clear — is that the greatest sculptures dissolve the distance between representation and reality entirely.

You are not looking at stone carved to resemble water. You are looking at water, held perfectly still, in a material that has no right to produce it. The mind knows this is impossible. The eyes refuse to agree.

2. The Handkerchief That Shouldn’t Exist

In 1781, a French sculptor carved a lace neckerchief from solid marble. Look closely at what you are about to see, and then remind yourself: this is stone…

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If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

He was writing in 1948, in the immediate aftermath of the most destructive war in human history, with the shadow of nuclear annihilation hanging over everything. And his argument was that how we choose to live during difficult times matters more than the difficult times themselves. That the quality of ordinary human life is not a distraction from the darkness. It is the answer to it.

It is easy, in times like these, to lose faith in people. The news is designed to make you lose it. Every headline is calibrated to tell you the worst of what is happening. And if that is your primary window onto the world, your view of humanity will be dark, and it will stay dark, because the machine has no incentive to show you anything else…

But the machine is not showing you most people. It is showing you the loudest ones, the most extreme ones, the ones with the most power and the least accountability. What is happening is something the Romans understood well enough to give it a name: convince people that whoever stands on the other side of the political divide is the enemy, and they will never look up long enough to notice who is pulling the strings — divide et impera, divide and conquer, as old as power itself. And while they are busy fighting each other, keep them fed and distracted, satisfy their most immediate appetites, flood their days with enough entertainment and outrage to drown out any difficult question — panem et circenses, bread and circuses.

The version we have today is more sophisticated, but the logic is the same.

The Italian poet Trilussa understood this when he wrote his Lullaby of War in 1914, on the eve of the first great catastrophe of the 20th century:

The den of killers staining the earth with blood
knows full well that war is just a big money game,
feeding the thieves of the Stock Market.
Hush-a-bye, my dear little one, while this chaos lasts,
Tomorrow we’ll see the rulers again,
exchanging friendly smiles like old pals.
They’re cousins and soon their personal ties will be as warm as ever.
And gathered together, without a shadow of remorse,
they’ll give a fine little speech on Work and Peace
to those poor fools spared by the guns.

More than a century later, it reads like it was written this morning.

Here is what I believe, and what I think the evidence supports: most people are good. Not perfect, but fundamentally decent. If that were not the case — if the majority of human beings were motivated primarily by cruelty — society would not function for a single day. The fact that it does, that people still help strangers and show up for each other in ways that nobody reports on, is proof of something the news will never lead with.

The people in power are not most people. They are, almost by definition, the exception, because the kind of person who seeks power at any cost is rarely the person who should be trusted with it. They make decisions the rest of us have to live with, and their faces are the ones we see, and so we mistake them for a portrait of humanity. They are not.

Today I want to show you a different portrait: 5 stories that are too human and too stubbornly hopeful to survive the algorithm. I hope they remind you of something you already knew…

REMINDER: Beauty is Truth is a reader-funded publication. There are no ads here, only independent writing devoted to celebrating beauty — and it can only continue with your help.

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1. Thirty Million Trees

In 1978, Hikmet Kaya arrived in the Boyabat district of Sinop province, in northern Turkey, to begin his career as head of afforestation at the local forestry department. The hills that greeted him were bare, stripped by deforestation. Over the next 25 years, working alongside specialist teams and local villagers, Kaya planted 30 million saplings across 10,000 hectares of steppe land.

Many did not survive at first. The team protected new growth from grazing animals, fires, and erosion — season after season, with no guarantee the effort would hold. Even after retiring in 2002, he continued the work anyway…

Today, the hills above Boyabat are dense with trees. Foxes, boars, rabbits, and bears have moved in. Many locals are too young to remember what it looked like before but there is a photograph that contains the whole story in a single frame: an elderly Hikmet Kaya, standing in front of a forest, holding a faded picture from 1978 of the exact same hillside — bare, dry, empty. “The transformation of those lands into forests,” he told Anadolu Agency, “has been my biggest source of pride.”

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus wrote:

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Looking at his photograph, you do not have to imagine it at all…

2. The Angel of the Gap

At the entrance to Sydney Harbour, there is a cliff called the Gap. It is a place of dramatic, vertiginous beauty — and for decades, it has been one of Australia’s most notorious suicide spots, with an estimated 50 people a year making their way to its edge.

In 1964, Don Ritchie moved into a house directly across the road from it. He had no training in mental health, no formal skills of any kind that would qualify him for what he was about to spend the next 5 decades doing. What he had was a smile, a habit of paying attention, and an instinct that would not let him look away.

Every morning, he would scan the cliff from his bedroom window. If he saw someone standing too close to the edge, he would walk over, palms open, and ask a simple question: “Is there something I could do to help you?” If they said yes — and most did — he would invite them inside for a cup of tea. That was it. No method, no script. Just a kitchen table and someone willing to sit at it with them for as long as it took…

Officially, Don Ritchie saved 160 people from suicide over 45 years. His family believed the real number was closer to 500. In 2006 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia, and in 2011 named Australia’s Local Hero — though he was, by all accounts, a modest man who did not court praise. He died in 2012 at the age of 85. Engraved near the grove planted in his memory are his own words:

Always remember the power of the simple smile, a helping hand, a listening ear, and a kind word.

3. The Man With the Golden Arm

In 1951, a fourteen-year-old boy in New South Wales underwent major surgery to remove a lung. He spent three months in hospital and required nearly two gallons of donated blood to survive. He had no idea who had given it. When he was old enough to donate himself, he decided to give back — despite being terrified of needles, a fear he never quite overcame. He would go on to donate 1,173 times over 64 years, never once watching the needle go in.

James Harrison’s blood turned out to contain something rare: a powerful antibody against the Rh D antigen, the discovery of which transformed maternal medicine in Australia. Before the 1960s, thousands of Australian babies died every year from haemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn — a condition caused by blood incompatibility between mother and child, in which the mother’s immune system attacks the baby.

Harrison became one of the founding donor of Australia’s Anti-D program in 1967, and from that year forward, his plasma went into every single dose of Anti-D produced in the country. Robyn Barlow, the program coordinator who recruited him, said: “Every ampule of Anti-D ever made in Australia has James in it.”

Australian Red Cross Lifeblood credited him with saving 2.4 million lives.

He donated every two weeks until Australian law required him to stop at 81, in 2018. At his final appointment, half a dozen mothers brought their babies to the donation centre to thank him in person. He died in February 2025, at the age of 88…

4. Kindness Always Finds Its Way Back

In November 2017, Elmer Alvarez was living on the streets of New Haven, Connecticut, when he found a check for $10,000 on the pavement. He had been homeless for over a year, was three years into his recovery from addiction, and had nothing. He tracked down the owner anyway. “It never crossed my mind to keep it,” he told CBS News.

The check belonged to Roberta Hoskie, a successful real estate broker — who, before building her company, had been a homeless teenage mother surviving on welfare. She had expected, she said, to meet someone in a suit. When she found out who had returned it, it shattered, in her own words, a lot of stereotypes.

Hoskie paid Alvarez’s rent for seven months, enrolled him in real estate school, placed him on the board of directors of her company, and together they founded the Outreach Foundation — a transitional housing program for homeless teenagers and young adults.

Two people who had both been told, by circumstance, that they were on the wrong side of things, built something together from a check found on a pavement. “I feel great and I just want to keep helping others,” Alvarez said. “There was a purpose behind that check, I believe there’s more to it.”

5. The Dog Who Waited

Whenever I find myself losing faith in people, I turn, of all places, to dogs. They are far from naive and they study our moods and intentions with an attention most humans never direct at each other. They know exactly who we are. And yet they love us, with a consistency and a depth that we have spent centuries struggling to match. If they see something worth that kind of devotion in us, perhaps we should trust their judgment. There is no better argument for this than Hachikō.

In 1924, Professor Hidesaburō Ueno of Tokyo Imperial University brought home an Akita puppy he named Hachi. A harsh winter train journey had left the dog nearly dead, but Ueno nursed him back to health over the course of six months. The two became inseparable. Every morning Hachikō walked with Ueno to Shibuya Station, and every afternoon he returned to meet him when he came home.

This continued until May 21, 1925, when Ueno suffered a fatal cerebral haemorrhage at work and did not come back. Hachikō was at the station at three o’clock, as always. He waited. Ueno never arrived. The next day, he came back. And the day after that. For nine years and nine months, through rain and winter and illness — he had chronic health problems his entire life — Hachikō returned to the same spot at Shibuya Station and waited for a man who would never come…

He was found dead on a street near the station on March 8, 1935. His ashes were buried alongside Ueno’s grave at Aoyama Cemetery. The professor and his dog, finally together again.

A bronze statue of Hachikō stands outside Shibuya Station to this day, at the very spot where he kept his vigil. Every year on March 8, a ceremony honors his memory, and every day, visitors leave flowers as a tribute to a bond that transcended time.

A dog waited nine years at a train station because the love he had learned from a human being was too real to abandon. Think about what that means — not as a story about loyalty, but as a story about us. Hachikō did not learn that love from a book or an ideal. He learned it from one man, in one house, on ordinary morning walks to the train. That is what we are capable of teaching. That is what we leave behind, in the ones who love us.

And if you have ever needed proof that people are worth believing in, look no further than the animals who know us best. Dogs are the purest creatures ever to walk this earth and they have lived with us for fifteen thousand years. They have seen all of it, the best and the worst, and they have simply decided that we are worth their entire hearts. That is not a small thing. That is the most honest verdict ever returned on the human race…

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The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to handle what was immediately around it. It was never meant to carry everything…

And yet here we are. Somewhere in the architecture of the attention economy, someone figured out that the worst things happening in the world — the wars, the crises, the slow erosion of certainty — are the things that keep people watching. Fear spreads fast. So that is what we are shown.

All of it. All at once. Every day.

For most of human history, this was not possible. News traveled at the speed of a horse and people knew what they knew. The suffering of the world was real, but it arrived slowly, filtered through distance and time. According to the American Psychiatric Association, about two-thirds of Americans report feeling anxious about current events happening around the globe. That number is probably not surprising to anyone reading this...

The antidote, for me, has always been the same. Not escape exactly, but redirection toward something the algorithm cannot manufacture: the beauty of this earth. The places that still exist in a register so far beyond ordinary experience that looking at them feels like proof that the world has not yet been drained of its magic.

The 19th-century German Romantics understood this impulse before anyone had named it. Their movement was built, in part, on a love of nature so intense it bordered on spiritual — a sudden hunger to lose themselves in the forests and untamed landscapes of Central Europe.

It is to the 19th-century German nobleman and travel writer, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, that we generally attribute a word I’ve always loved: Fernweh. A marriage of fern, meaning distance, and weh, meaning ache or pain. Distance-sickness. The longing for far-flung places beyond your doorstep. Nabokov described it without naming it in his novel Mary:

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

There is an older word, though, that gets even closer to what I mean. In Greek mythology, Arcadia — a mountainous province of the Peloponnesus — was the domain of Pan, a virgin wilderness where the god of the forest and his court of nymphs and spirits of nature made their home. Over time, the word drifted from mythology into poetry, and from poetry into the language we use to describe a particular kind of place: unspoiled, bountiful, existing in harmony with itself.

The inhabitants of Arcadia were thought to have gone on living in the manner of the Golden Age — without the pride, the avarice and the noise that corrupted everywhere else.

The 6 places that follow are as close to that as the world still has to offer. They look almost too perfect to be real. But they are real — which, given how our planet feels right now if you have been following the news, might be the most astonishing thing about them…

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1. The Place That Inspired Rivendell

In 1911, J.R.R. Tolkien hiked from Interlaken through the Lauterbrunnen Valley and the landscape he encountered there provided the concept for his sketches and watercolors of Rivendell — the elven valley that became one of the most beloved places in all of fiction. It is not difficult to understand why…

The valley’s name says everything about it. Lauter means loud, and brunnen means fountain — a fitting description for a place where the constant sound of falling water is the first thing you notice and the last thing you forget. The cliff walls rise up to 1,000 meters high, and from them pour 72 waterfalls, including the Staubbach Falls — the highest free-falling waterfall in the country.

Decades after his hike, Tolkien wrote to his son Michael about those weeks in Switzerland, calling it the part of the world that had the deepest effect on him. The name of Rivendell’s river — Bruinen, or Loudwater in English — is widely regarded by scholars as a deliberate echo of Lauterbrunnen, the sound of the place preserved inside the fiction like something he could not bring himself to let go of entirely.

He had walked these paths navigating by map through mountain passes — and what he found here stayed with him for the rest of his life, surfacing decades later in the pages of the most widely read fantasy novels ever written. That is what this valley does. You come here once, and it follows you home.

Goethe was also here, staying near the Staubbach Falls and writing his poem Song of the Spirits over the Waters in its shadow. There is something about this valley that has always pulled writers toward it — as if its sheer scale and beauty demand a response, and ordinary language keeps falling short…

2. The Most Otherworldly Beach on Earth

Lauterbrunnen inspired a fictional paradise. This place makes you question whether fiction is even necessary:

I know. It looks like AI, but it isn’t. It’s a real corner of the earth you and I are currently living on…

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Albert Camus once wrote:

In the middle of winter, I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.

There is a question that feels almost indecent to ask when the world is burning. And yet it may be the most important one we can ask right now: can beauty exist in a world at war?

The instinct is to say no. That beauty is a luxury — something that belongs to times of peace. That it should wait, politely and patiently, until the suffering has stopped. This instinct is understandable. It is also, history suggests, completely wrong…

Fyodor Dostoevsky had earned the right to say so. At twenty-seven, he was arrested for political dissent and spent eight months imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress before being led, on December 22, 1849, to Semyonovsky Place in St. Petersburg, where a sentence of death by firing squad was read aloud. The first group of men was tied to the posts. The drums rolled. At the last possible moment, a courier arrived with a stay of execution from the Tsar — the mock execution had been scripted as punishment all along.

One of the prisoners went permanently insane on the spot. Dostoevsky was sent to four years of hard labour in Siberia.

He arrived believing that politics could redeem the world. He left convinced of something far harder to argue with: that no system, however brutal, could fully extinguish the human capacity to be stopped in its tracks by beauty.

He had watched it happen in the camp itself — the way a man might pause, in the middle of degradation and cold, to notice that the sky above the frozen steppe was inexplicably, almost offensively magnificent.

Viktor Frankl, who survived four concentration camps and spent years studying what allowed people to endure the unendurable, put his finger on the same truth in Man’s Search for Meaning:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.

For Dostoevsky, beauty was precisely this: not an escape from suffering, but a choice within it...

It was this conviction he carried into his fiction. In The Idiot, a young nihilist named Ippolit — dying of tuberculosis, contemptuous of hope — turns to the gentle, innocent Prince Myshkin and asks this question in mockery:

Is it true, prince, that you once declared that ‘beauty would save the world’? Great Heaven! […] What beauty saves the world?

He meant it as a taunt. And it would be easy to read it as the delusion of a fool. But Dostoevsky, who had knelt before a firing squad and spent four years in chains, intended the opposite. Because by beauty, Myshkin did not mean prettiness... he meant that stubborn, irrational force that rises without permission from the worst possible ground — the proof, available even in the darkest of circumstances, that the human soul has not been entirely defeated.

And the most brutal chapters of history keep arriving at the same conclusion: that beauty does not require peace. That it has never required peace, and that some of the most extraordinary things ever made were born precisely in its absence.

A monologue written by Graham Greene and delivered by Orson Welles in The Third Man makes the argument in a way that is very hard to forget:

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Like a flower pushing through snow, beauty in wartime does not wait for better conditions. It does not wait for the ceasefire, or the peace treaty, or permission. It simply rises — sometimes as defiance, sometimes as grief made visible, sometimes as the only form of resistance left available. What follows are 5 examples of exactly that…

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1. The Last Judgment

The Renaissance — the most concentrated explosion of human genius in Western history — unfolded against plague, assassination, and continuous war. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512 while Italy was caught in the turmoil of the Italian Wars. Then, twenty years later, he returned…

By then, Rome had suffered one of the most traumatic events in its history. In 1527, the soldiers of Emperor Charles V sacked the city, leaving thousands dead and the Tiber clogged with corpses. Amid the devastation, Michelangelo painted his answer: 180 square meters, 400 figures, five years of work.

Even Giorgio Vasari, who saw it unveiled on Christmas Day 1541, could barely find the words:

It surpasses every extraordinary beauty, so harmoniously painted and executed that the multitude of figures, the awe-inspiring scale, and the power of the work are beyond description, filled with every conceivable human emotion, each expressed with marvelous skill.

A vision of cosmic judgment — saints and sinners whirling through space, the blessed rising and the damned dragged down — painted with a ferocity that shocked even those who had commissioned it. The papal master of ceremonies denounced it as a disgraceful thing, not fit for the chapel of a Pope but for a tavern. Michelangelo’s response was to paint his face on the figure of Minos in Hell, complete with donkey ears — a symbol, in Renaissance iconography, of irredeemable stupidity.

This is what beauty looks like when it is made under pressure.

Notice the pattern. The comfortable eras, the stable ones, leave almost nothing behind. It is the broken ones, the besieged ones, the ones with everything to lose, that make things that last. Stability preserves life. Struggle reveals what life is for.

2. The Third of May 1808

Francisco Goya had spent decades as the most celebrated painter in Spain, rising in 1799 to the prestigious role of First Court Painter. Then Napoleon’s armies invaded in 1808, and something in him shifted.

He began recording what he saw in private — 82 etchings, The Disasters of War, showing atrocities with a directness that would not be published until 35 years after his death. By the time the French left, he was deaf, ill, and traumatized. He was also still painting.

In 1814, he petitioned the Spanish government to commemorate the night of May 3, 1808 — when civilians who had risen in revolt were rounded up and shot before dawn. The government expected a celebration of heroism…

On the right of the canvas: the firing squad, faceless, mechanical, more machine than men. On the left: the victims, terrified, individual, human. At the centre, one figure in a lantern’s white glare, arms flung wide, bearing on his palms what appears to be stigmata — Christ dragged into the modern world. Kenneth Clark called it “the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word.”

An absolute masterpiece.

Considered one of the first paintings of the modern era, it was commissioned as tribute but became an indictment. Not just of one night in Madrid… but of what power does when it decides that some lives are expendable.

3. The Sarajevo Roses

Between 1992 and 1995, Sarajevo endured the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.

For 1,425 days, an average of 329 mortar shells rained down on the city every single day. More than 11,500 people were killed and yet inside the city, schools continued to operate in basements, the university kept its doors open, actors founded an underground theatre and performed 2,000 shows during the siege, and a film festival was born — today one of the largest in Europe.

Sarajevo did not stop living. It refused to.

After the war ended, residents did something that no authority had planned or commissioned. They found the mortar craters in the pavement and filled them with blood-red resin.

The explosion pattern left by a mortar shell in concrete splays outward in a shape that looks, from above, almost like a flower. They called them Sarajevo Roses. Nearly 200 of them are scattered across the city, walked over every day by the people who survived. There is no more precise definition of beauty as resistance: a city that turned its own wounds into flowers…

4. Guernica

On April 26, 1937, German and Italian warplanes bombed the Basque town of Guernica. Picasso, living in Paris, had been preparing a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the World’s Fair. He abandoned it, and in roughly six weeks, he painted Guernica instead. He chose black, white, and grey. The colors of a newspaper photograph. The colors of evidence.

The painting does not depict the bombing. It depicts what bombing does — a screaming horse, a mother clutching a dead child, a shattered soldier… No heroism. No enemy. No flag. Just the wreckage that remains when the planes have gone home.

After its debut it traveled — Scandinavia, London, New York — raising funds for Spanish refugees, forcing the war into rooms where people had preferred not to think about it. Picasso stipulated it could not return to Spain until democracy was restored. It waited forty-four years.

Today it is regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history.

During the Nazi occupation of Paris, a German officer visiting his studio allegedly pointed to a photograph of the painting and asked: “Did you do that?” Picasso looked at him. “No,” he said. “You did.” That is what art can do that weapons cannot: it can hold a mirror up to power, and make power flinch. Without firing a single shot.

5. The Leningrad Symphony

Shostakovich began his Seventh Symphony in Leningrad in the first weeks of the German invasion, in the summer of 1941. He worked on it under bombardment, completing movements between sprints to the nearest bomb shelter.

The premiere took place inside Leningrad on August 9, 1942. The German army stood at the city’s gates. The siege had already lasted nearly a year. Of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra, only a small number of musicians remained… the others had starved or gone to fight. General Govorov ordered an artillery operation to suppress German guns during the performance, and loudspeakers broadcast the symphony toward the German lines. The city listened. So did the enemy.

Years later, Shostakovich himself said:

While composing this symphony, I thought about our people’s nobility, heroism, marvelous humanist ideas, human values, our splendid nature, humankind, beauty.

Which brings us back to where we started.

A century after Dostoevsky knelt before a firing squad and emerged somehow more convinced than ever that beauty was not a luxury but a lifeline, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — himself a survivor of the Soviet Gulag — stood before the Nobel Committee in 1970 to deliver his acceptance speech.

He wrestled with the iconic line from The Idiot, admitting its apparent absurdity — and then, slowly, turned it inside out:

One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world”. What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes – but whom has it saved?

There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth…

If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through – then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar to that very same place, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three. And in that case Dostoevsky’s remark was not a careless phrase but a prophecy.

This is the answer. Beauty does not stop wars but it refuses to concede that the worst of what humans do is the whole of what humans are.

Dostoevsky said beauty would save the world. He did not mean it would happen quickly. He meant it could not, ultimately, be stopped.

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Nostalgia, it turns out, needs no memory to make its case.

You do not need to have lived through the 1980s to feel something when you look at photographs from those years. The handwritten notes left on kitchen tables. The weight of a phone receiver. The particular quality of light in a world that had not yet been flattened by screens. Even for those who weren’t alive then, something in these images evokes a sense of loss — a way of being in the world that has vanished and will not return. For the people who actually lived through it, that sense of loss is even deeper…

The year 1980 feels, in many ways, like another civilization. Think about it: music came on vinyl and cassette tape, photographs took a week to come back from the drugstore, and the news arrived twice a day through the morning paper and the evening broadcast. Life moved slowly enough to be boring, and boredom, back then, was where imagination lived.

And if you left the house without telling anyone where you were going, you were simply gone until you came back. The experience of being completely present in one place — with no notification, no expectation of response, no awareness of anything happening anywhere else — was the default condition of every person alive.

No one lives that way now. According to Pew Research Center data, 95% of American adults use the internet, and 41% say they are online almost constantly. That shift happened in roughly one human generation. Nobody voted for it. Nobody sat down and decided that this was the trade they wanted to make. It just happened, the way most irreversible things do — gradually, and then all at once. And if that sounds familiar, it should. It is happening again right now, with AI, as you read this.

Whether we have gained more than we have lost is the question each generation now has to answer for itself.

What follows are 10 photographs that do not try to answer it. They simply show you what it looked like before everything changed…

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1. The Death of the Third Place

This is a McDonald’s in the 1980s.

It was designed, however commercially, to be a place with personality and color, with a talking tree in the center that children would remember for the rest of their lives.

And this is a McDonald’s today.

The difference is not just aesthetic. This looks designed to be nowhere in particular. Clean, efficient, interchangeable with any other spot in any other city in any other country. Gone from memory before the door closes behind you.

This is what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called the “third place” — a setting that is neither home nor work, but somewhere in between. A space where people gathered not because they had to, but because it was somewhere worth being. The 1980s were full of them because the culture of the time still believed, instinctively, that a building should have a personality. That it should give you something beyond the transaction it was built around. Minimalism did not just change how things looked. It changed how these places felt…

2. Before Screens, There Was This

This picture was taken on the Ashfield Valley estate in Rochdale, England, in the early 1980s. The photographer is unknown. The children are unknown. What they are doing — jumping from third-floor windows onto a pile of mattresses they dragged there themselves — is, depending on your generation, either completely recognizable or completely incomprehensible.

This was childhood before the screen. Genuinely, physically free in a way that is now almost impossible to replicate. No supervision, no adult in sight. Just boredom transformed into invention, and the particular fearlessness that children possess before the world teaches them otherwise. As Robin Williams once said:

You’re only given a little spark of madness. And if you lose that, you’re nothing.

The 1980s were the last decade in which children were mostly unsupervised. You left in the morning and came back when it got dark. What happened in between was yours. And what happened, apparently, was this: you looked at a third-floor window and a pile of old mattresses and saw, without hesitation, a perfect afternoon.

There is something deeply human in that. The capacity to find joy in almost nothing — in gravity, courage, and a few square feet of landing — is not a small thing. It is friendship in its purest form, before it ever had to be scheduled. And looking at this photograph, it is impossible not to smile. And to hope, a little, that somewhere out there, children are still finding their way to the mattresses, whatever that may mean for them…

3. Glass Bottles at the Grocery Store

I know my younger readers will find this hard to believe. But this is what a grocery store looked like back then. Every soft drink bottle on the shelf was glass. No plastic in sight.

And that’s not the only thing that’s changed... In 1980, a single bottle of Coca-Cola cost about $0.30.

Overall inflation between 1980 and 2026 was approximately 300%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The median American home, adjusted for that inflation, should cost around $200,000 today. It costs around $400,000. University tuition costs have more than tripled in real terms and the modern household now pays around $280 per month for internet, phone, and streaming — expenses that were essentially nonexistent in 1980.

The result is a paradox: modern life is cheaper for everything that used to feel like a luxury, and more expensive for everything that used to feel like a given.

4. Wheatfield — A Confrontation

This is a real photograph.

In 1982, a woman planted a field of wheat two blocks from Wall Street, in the shadow of the World Trade Center, on land valued at $4.5 billion. She described it as “an intrusion of the country into the metropolis, the world’s richest real estate.”

The reason she did it is arguably more powerful than the image itself…

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Perfection is impossible without humility. Why should I strive for perfection, if I am already good enough?

There is a particular kind of humility that only the past can teach you.

We live in an age of extraordinary capability. We can sequence DNA in hours, build structures that touch the clouds, and — as researchers recently demonstrated — grow a cluster of human brain cells in a laboratory and teach it to play a video game. And yet there are objects sitting in museums that continue to puzzle scholars, and works of art in dimly lit chapels that, by any honest assessment, no sculptor has ever been able to reproduce…

The further back we look, the stranger it gets. Some ancient statues were carved from stone so hard that today we rely on diamond-tipped machinery to cut it — yet they are polished to a mirror finish, incredibly precise, and stunning beyond belief. And then there are the artworks from more recent years that astonish for entirely different reasons: sculptors so skilled that they managed to transform solid marble into what looks like transparent fabric so convincingly that their contemporaries had no explanation for it other than sorcery.

What follows are 5 sculptures that have been stopping people in their tracks for centuries. Not because they are old, not because they are famous, but because standing in front of them — or even in front of a photograph of them — does something that very few things in the world can do: it makes you feel that you are in the presence of the impossible. And yet there they are. Undeniably, perfectly, impossibly real…

REMINDER: Beauty is Truth is a reader-funded publication. There are no ads here, only independent writing devoted to celebrating beauty — and it can only continue with your help.

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1. Veiled Christ

Sculpture, at its highest, is alchemy — and I say this every chance I get. The transformation of cold stone into something that appears to breathe. As Alexander Pope once wrote:

Then marble, soften’d into life, grew warm.

No work in history has made this feel more literally true than this one…

Giuseppe Sanmartino completed the Veiled Christ in 1753 from a single block of white marble, as the centrepiece of the Cappella Sansevero in Naples.

What he produced was so astonishing that his contemporaries refused to believe it was possible. The veil that drapes over the body of Christ is rendered with such impossible precision — every fold, every shadow, every place where fabric clings to skin — that a legend formed almost immediately: that the commissioner, the nobleman and alchemist Raimondo di Sangro, had laid a real cloth over the statue and transformed it into marble through a secret chemical process.

However, letters written at the time confirm that the veil was carved from the same single block of marble as the figure beneath it. Sanmartino cut it by hand, with a chisel, from stone. And in the two and a half centuries since, no sculptor anywhere in the world has come close to doing it again.

Antonio Canova — himself considered one of the greatest sculptors who ever lived — was so overwhelmed upon seeing it that he declared he would gladly sacrifice ten years of his life to have created something of such perfection…

The Veiled Christ has not moved from Naples in over 250 years. To see it, you must go there in person. I have, and I can tell you that the photographs — however good — do not prepare you for the moment you actually stand in front of it.

2. Khafre Enthroned

Marble sits at 3 to 4 on the Mohs scale of hardness. The sculpture below is made of anorthosite gneiss, a significantly harder material that measures between 6 and 7 on the same scale. It was carved over 4,500 years ago by ancient Egyptians whose primary cutting metals, according to archaeologists, were arsenical copper alloys, which rate around 3 on the Mohs scale…

This is Khafre Enthroned, a statue of the pharaoh Khafre of the Fourth Dynasty, carved from one of the hardest and most unforgiving materials in the ancient world. For hard stone, Egyptian sculptors relied on tools of yet harder stone and the use of abrasive sand to shape them. This is the conventional explanation that archaeologists have settled on. And yet there is significant disagreement among scholars about the forms and materials of the tools themselves, how they were used by ancient stoneworkers, and how these factors relate to the broad range of surface textures we observe.

Every professional sculptor and engineer I have ever shown this to responds the same way: with a long pause, and a look of genuine bewilderment. Because the precision of this masterpiece and the hardness of the material, they tell me, are simply not easy to account for using the tools described.

And then there are the marks in the stone that suggest a tool slipped or cut too deep — the kind of error that, with abrasive sand and stone hammers, would require sustained, concentrated effort to produce accidentally. They raise questions that the conventional explanation has not yet fully answered:

Look closely at the falcon. The god Horus, wings spread behind Khafre’s head, is carved with a spatial understanding of three-dimensional geometry and negative space that we would consider sophisticated today.

And here is the detail that stops me every time: viewed from the front, the falcon is almost entirely invisible. It reveals itself only from the side.

The Egyptians understood perspective and optical illusion well enough to build both into the same block of stone — a stone harder than any metal tool they are believed to have possessed.

As Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz once said:

In Egypt, the past is very palpable; it’s hard to ignore it.

With this sculpture in front of you, his words feel like an understatement.

3. Apennine Colossus

I know what you are thinking. It is not AI.

But I get why it looks impossible…

The Apennine Colossus rises eleven metres from the grounds of the Villa Demidoff in Tuscany, built in the late 1580s by the Flemish sculptor Giambologna as a personification of the Apennine Mountains themselves. Inspired, it is believed, by Ovid’s description of a mountain-like Atlas in the Metamorphoses, the giant emerges from the landscape as if he has always been there — his body merging with rock and moss and earth, stalactites forming his beard, his hair dissolving into stone. With one hand he crushes the head of a sea monster, from whose open mouth water pours into the pond below.

To the people who first encountered him, he did not seem like a statue at all. He seemed alive. And with good reason: the giant was once engineered to sweat and weep via a hidden network of water pipes running through his body.

But none of that is my favourite part.

Inside the Colossus, across three levels, there are chambers. On the ground floor, a cave containing an octagonal fountain dedicated to the Greek goddess Thetis. On the upper floor, a room large enough to hold a small orchestra. And in the head — a private chamber with slits cut into the eyes and ears, and a fireplace whose smoke escaped through the giant’s nostrils.

Francesco I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, used to sit inside the head and fish through one of the eye slits. At night, with torches burning inside, the eyes glowed in the dark…

At the back of the Colossus, a structure was later added by the sculptor Giovan Battista Foggini: a dragon, whose belly served as a fireplace and whose neck and head formed the chimney.

A giant that weeps. That breathes smoke through stone nostrils. That has a concert hall in its chest and a fishing room behind its eyes. The Renaissance produced many things that should not have been possible. This may be the one that should not have been imaginable…

4. The Ozymandias Colossus

Ramesses II commissioned more colossal statues of himself than any other pharaoh in history. But among everything he built one work stands apart — not only for its scale, but for what it inspired, millennia later, in the mind of a poet who never saw it intact…

When it was whole, the Ozymandias colossus soared nearly 20 meters and weighed approximately 1,000 tonnes, making it one of the largest monolithic sculptures ever created. A single block of granite. Quarried, carved, and dragged across the desert to its final position. To put that in perspective: in 2012, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art spent close to ten million dollars relocating a 340-tonne boulder a short distance through the streets of Los Angeles. The Egyptians moved three times that weight, across open desert, without machinery, without wheels capable of bearing such a load, and without any written record of how they did it.

It now lies in fragments on the ground of the Ramesseum in Luxor.

And it was in this broken state that it caught the imagination of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who in 1818 wrote what became one of the most celebrated poems in the English language:

[…] My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.

Shelley had never seen the statue. He wrote the poem in response to a fragment arriving at the British Museum. And yet he understood, from that fragment alone, everything it meant — that the grandest monuments eventually return to dust, that power is the most perishable thing there is, and that the only things which truly last are the ones that were never about power to begin with.

The Ozymandias colossus was not the largest sculpture the Egyptians ever made. The Great Sphinx and the colossi at Abu Simbel are larger — but those were carved in place, from the rock already there. What makes this one different is that it was moved. Transported as a single block from a distant quarry to its final resting place, by hands and methods we still cannot fully account for. At Tanis in northern Egypt, fragments have been found of four granite colossi of Ramesses II believed to have stood between 21 and 28 meters tall — which means that even this was not the most ambitious thing they attempted…

And now it lies in pieces in the desert. It inspired one of the greatest poems ever written. And we still do not entirely know how they did it. Shelley was right that power crumbles. He did not mention that the mystery outlasts everything.

5. Release from Deception

We end where we began — in Naples, in the Cappella Sansevero, in the presence of something that should not exist…

Disinganno — which translates, roughly, as disillusion or “release from deception” — was carved by Francesco Queirolo from a single block of marble, and it took him seven years. Seven years on a single stone. The work depicts a man freeing himself from a net — a symbol of human vice and sin — guided by a putto representing intellect. It is a remarkable composition. But the composition is not the point.

The net is the point…

It hangs across the entire sculpture with only a handful of contact points holding it to the figure beneath — draped, knotted, catching light the way real rope catches light — carved from the same solid block as everything else. So delicate, so precisely cut, that no apprentice in Queirolo’s workshop would go near it for fear that a single wrong movement would bring the whole thing crumbling down. The historian Giangiuseppe Origlia, writing at the time, called it “the ultimate bold test that marble sculpture can dare to attempt.”

Nothing like it exists anywhere else in the history of art. Not before Queirolo. Not after him. A net, in marble, that you want to reach out and lift with your fingers. And the only reason you don’t is that you know, somewhere in the back of your mind, that your hand would find stone.

This is what the past does, when it is at its most extraordinary. It shows us that the distance between then and now is not always the distance between less and more — that some things were done, in other centuries, by human hands and human patience and human obsession, that we have not found our way back to.

And perhaps the most honest thing we can say about a marble net that took seven years to carve and has never been replicated is simply this: that some things were made not to be explained, but to be stood in front of, in silence, for as long as it takes to feel the full weight of what a human being was once capable of — and to leave, afterwards, a little more awake to what is still possible…

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That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

The older I get, the more this means to me. Fitzgerald was talking about literature — but the same is true of words themselves… perhaps even more so.

There is a word in German — Sehnsucht — that has no real equivalent in English. It derives from sehnen, to yearn, and Sucht, addiction or craving. Together they describe something most of us have felt but never articulated out loud: an intense, almost spiritual longing for something you cannot name — a life more beautiful, more whole, more something than the one you’re living.

C.S. Lewis spent years trying to find the English word for it and never quite managed…

He called it “the inconsolable longing in the heart for we know not what” — writing around it, approaching it from every direction, never getting close enough to pin it down. Because English, for all its vastness, does not have the word. It has the feeling. We all do. We just have nowhere to put it.

Language is how we make things real. When we have no word for something, we are left to carry it unnamed… and a feeling without a container is a terrible thing. There is a particular loneliness in that. Not the loneliness of being alone, but the loneliness of feeling something deeply and having no way to point at it and say: that. That is what I mean.

Other languages, it turns out, have been keeping the door open for us all along.

Some of the words that follow are centuries old. Some are ancient. One was invented in 2012 by a writer who simply needed a word that didn’t exist yet. What they share is this: they all name something you have already felt — so precisely, and so persistently, that someone, somewhere, needed to build a word to hold it.

In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

These are 10 words that make the world a little larger. Read them slowly…

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1. Petrichor

The smell of rain on dry earth is one of the oldest sensory memories our species has. Scientists Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Grenfell Thomas named it in 1964, pulling from Ancient Greek — petra, stone, and ichor, the fluid said to run through the veins of the gods. What they were naming was the scent released when raindrops strike parched soil, lifting oils that the earth had been holding in reserve.

But you already knew this smell. You knew it before you knew its name — the way you know something that bypasses language entirely and lands directly in the body. There is a reason it stops people mid-sentence, mid-step. Some scientists believe this sensitivity evolved in us because the scent signaled the arrival of fresh water and fertile soil — that rain meant survival, and so the smell of it became, over thousands of generations, something closer to relief than pleasure. It is the smell of something the earth had been waiting for. And somewhere, deep in the body, so had we.

2. Mångata

On a still night, when the moon is full and the water is calm, a column of light appears on the surface — trembling, luminous, stretching toward you like a road. In Swedish, this is called mångata. Literally: moon street.

There is something about it that feels like an invitation to somewhere you cannot go. You have stood at the edge of water and looked at it and felt, briefly, that if you simply stepped forward it might hold you. It will not hold you. But the feeling is real, and the Swedes, apparently, felt it often enough to need a word for it.

3. Cafuné

To run your fingers slowly and tenderly through someone’s hair. That is all. That is everything. The Brazilians took this gesture — this specific, intimate, unhurried act of care — and gave it its own word: cafuné.

There are things we do for the people we love that exist below language, in the register of touch. This is one of them. The fact that it has a name confirms that it matters — that it has always mattered, in more than one language, on more than one continent.

And what do you call the feeling when a stranger’s perfume in an empty corridor stops you completely — and suddenly you are somewhere else entirely, years ago, with someone you loved? There is a word for that too…

4. Sillage

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The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too.

As Dostoevsky had observed half a century earlier in The Brothers Karamazov, the moment a man loses all respect — for himself and for others — he loses his capacity to love. The condition both men diagnosed has only deepened since…

There is a particular kind of unease that is difficult to name. You know it when you feel it. A restlessness with no obvious cause, a sense of being slightly out of step with everything, including yourself. Many people live with it constantly, without ever identifying its source.

For the vast majority of human history, our species lived in direct, daily negotiation with the natural world. Our bodies developed rhythms synchronized with sunlight. Our nervous systems learned to read the weather, the seasons, the slow language of the land. We were embedded in nature the way a river is embedded in its landscape — shaped by it and shaping it in return. That relationship, built across an incomprehensible stretch of evolutionary time, was severed almost overnight.

In 2007, humanity crossed a threshold it had never crossed before: for the first time, more people on earth lived in cities than outside them. That number has only grown since. Many of us now pass entire lifetimes without ever feeling genuinely subject to the elements. Rilke saw this coming and named it with uncomfortable precision:

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth… they hang… in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

Hanging. No place to settle. I have felt this. I suspect you have too.

To feel disconnected, though, you first have to have belonged somewhere. And five centuries before any of this, Leonardo da Vinci was already tracing the evidence of where that somewhere is.

He spent years measuring and drawing the interior of the human body with the same obsessive attention he gave to rivers, rock formations, and the flight of birds — and what he kept finding was that they followed the same rules. Blood vessels branch the way rivers branch. The angles at which tree limbs diverge mirror the angles at which vessels divide inside the body. When he encountered atherosclerotic arteries in an elderly man, he compared them to the dried remnants of an old orange — not as a metaphor, but as a structural observation.

His conclusion, reached through dissection and measurement rather than philosophy, was that the human body is a microcosm of the world, and the world a macrocosm of the body.

I could keep describing this. But a picture is worth a thousand words, and Da Vinci — who reached his conclusions precisely because he looked before he theorized — would have had little patience for any argument that asked you to take it on faith. So don’t. Look at it instead…

Below are six examples that make this literal. Images of the body placed alongside photos of the natural world showing something plain and verifiable: that the same forces shaping river networks, tree stumps, and forest canopies have also shaped us. We are not observers of nature looking in from outside. We are made of the same thing.

Which means that when we feel disconnected — that restlessness, that nameless unease — we are not imagining things. We feel it because we have simply moved away from something we are made of…

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1. Lungs and Trees

This comparison will never cease to amaze me…

Both lungs and trees are fractal structures. They follow an identical mathematical principle: a pattern that repeats itself at every scale, each branch dividing into smaller branches, those into smaller still, all the way down to the finest tip. Nature, it turns out, is not endlessly inventive. When it finds something that works, it uses it again.

And then there is the breath itself, which may be the most extraordinary part of all this.

You exhale carbon dioxide. The tree absorbs it and releases oxygen. You breathe it in. This is not a poetic observation. It is a precise biochemical exchange — a loop so ancient and so continuous that the boundary between where you end and where the tree begins is, in chemical terms, almost meaningless.

Every breath you take is, in part, a gift from a tree somewhere (and from the ocean’s phytoplankton). Every breath you release is, in part, what keeps trees alive. We tend to think of ourselves as separate from the natural world, observers looking in from the outside. But there is no outside here. You are already inside it, mid-exchange, with every single breath.

2. Tree Rings and Fingerprints

Look closely at a tree stump and you will see rings — concentric circles radiating outward from the centre, each one a complete year of the tree’s life. A broad ring means a good growing year. A narrow one means drought, cold, hardship. Everything the tree endured is permanently written in wood. As Anne Michaels wrote in Fugitive Pieces:

Trees carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather — storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.

Now look at your fingertips.

Your fingerprints formed in the womb, shaped by the pressure of amniotic fluid against your developing skin, the position of your body, the specific density of fluid surrounding you on a few particular days before you were born. They were permanently set before the 20th week of gestation and will remain unchanged for the rest of your life. No two people in the entire history of the human species have ever had the same ones.

Both are records of a life. A tree ring measures time in seasons, written from the outside in. A fingerprint captured a single unrepeatable moment of becoming — the precise swirl of fluid around a fingertip, one afternoon, before you had even taken your first breath.

Different materials, different scales, the same impulse: a body marking everything it took to become what it is.

3. Blood Vessels and River Networks

Look at an aerial photograph of a river delta — the way a great river fractures into dozens of smaller streams, spreading across the land like cracks in dried earth…

Now look at the blood vessels of a human heart (below). The pattern is identical. Both are fractal systems, governed by the same mathematical principles, built to move fluid from a central source to the furthest possible reaches using the least possible energy. Nature solved the same problem twice, in two completely different contexts, and arrived at the same answer both times.

Your body contains about 60,000 miles of blood vessels — enough to circle the earth twice over — all folded inside a body you can wrap your arms around. From the aorta, wide as a garden hose, they branch and narrow and divide, all the way down to capillaries so fine that red blood cells must pass through them in single file.

Every river on earth works the same way. Da Vinci watched rivers and drew veins and saw the same thing moving through both. He was right. The body is a landscape. The landscape is a body.

4. Walnuts and the Brain

Crack open a walnut and look at what’s inside. Two wrinkled, folded hemispheres, divided by a thin membrane, the surface creased and convoluted — almost indistinguishable, at a glance, from a photograph of the human brain. The shell even resembles the skull. It is one of the more disarming things nature has produced.

Renaissance scholars noticed this too. The ancient Hermetic principle — “as above, so below” — held that the macrocosm of the natural world was mirrored in the microcosm of the human body, and that these correspondences were not accidental but meaningful. The Doctrine of Signatures — a system of thought that ascribed medicinal properties to plants based on their resemblance to parts of the human body — held that walnuts, because of their uncanny likeness to the brain, were the obvious remedy for headaches, mental illness, and head wounds. They were wrong about the mechanism. They were not entirely wrong about the conclusion…

Walnuts are rich in alpha-linolenic acid, a plant-based omega-3 fatty acid, and contain more polyphenolic compounds than any other nut. Both omega-3 fatty acids and polyphenols are considered critical nutrients for the brain, counteracting oxidative stress and inflammation — two of the main drivers of cognitive decline.

The resemblance, in other words, is not the point. But it is hard to ignore the fact that something shaped so precisely like the organ it appears to nourish turns out to actually nourish it. Nature does not often deal in coincidences. It deals in patterns — the same ones, repeated at every scale, in every material, until you cannot look at anything without seeing the echo of something else.

5. The Placenta and a Tree

The placenta is literally the “tree of life.” Look at these photographs and you will see why — its network of branching blood vessels arranged in a tree-like structure, known in medical terms as the villous tree, with the umbilical cord at its centre acting as the trunk.

It is perhaps no coincidence that in Norse mythology, Yggdrasil — the great ash tree at the centre of the cosmos — was believed to be the source of all life, connecting every world in existence through its roots and branches…

6. Hands and Leaves

In palmate venation, several main veins radiate outward from a single point at the base of the leaf — like fingers extending from the palm of a hand. Botanists named the pattern after what it looked like. They could not avoid it.

Both systems exist for the same reason: to carry what is needed to the furthest possible point. The veins of a leaf transport water and minerals inward and carry sugars produced during photosynthesis back outward, ensuring every part of the leaf is supplied and nothing goes to waste. The veins in your hand do the same — blood in, blood out, to every last fingertip.

Looking at these images, it becomes clear that the distance we feel between ourselves and the natural world is, in the most literal sense, an illusion — and perhaps the most costly one we have ever believed. Scottish poet Donna Ashworth said it better:

There is a reason why walking amongst nature is most people’s best advice when depression strikes. Because walking in nature is a return to home. You are not a lover of nature or in need of some nature; you are nature. You are as much nature as the trees in your garden and the bees on your picnic. You were designed to live your days out in the wild with your fellow creatures and plants, but progress had different plans for us all. And so we exist day-to-day, in our homes, but never home. The quickest route back to self, to inner peace, is bare feet on grass, arms around trees, head in the clouds and heart in a forest. Put your weary body in water, whenever you can. Smell every flower you see and crumble dirt between your tired-of-typing fingers. You are nature, so go home once in a while. It will bring you so much you didn’t even know you were missing.

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Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe wrote that. And ever since I read it, buildings have never looked quite the same to me. Architecture isn’t about personal expression or historical imitation — it’s a direct reflection of the zeitgeist, the defining spirit of an age. What we build reveals who we are. And that realization becomes almost painful when you compare what we’re building now to what we used to build…

I often return to this photograph — it shows the Administration Building during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The scale, the ambition, the sheer beauty of it. When you see something like this standing in America in the late 1800s, it feels like discovering ruins from another civilization entirely…

The photograph was taken in summer. By the following spring, almost everything in it had been deliberately destroyed.

Between 1893 and 1964, America built some of the most spectacular architecture the world had ever seen — palaces larger than cathedrals, towers that pierced the clouds, entire cities of white marble and electric light. Millions walked through their halls. Orchestras played in their concert venues. Presidents gave speeches beneath their domes.

And then we tore them down.

Most were designed to last only months. Built from temporary materials — plaster staff over wooden frames, meant to dazzle for a single season before vanishing. Some burned. Others were demolished the moment the fair closed. A rare few survive, but for the most part, only photographs remain.

These are 10 of America’s lost World’s Fair masterpieces…

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1. Festival Hall

If someone told you this was Venice, you’d believe them... It’s actually St. Louis.

The photograph shows the Floral Parade of All Nations at the 1904 World’s Fair — gondolas gliding across lagoons constructed within the fairgrounds, a domed structure rising in the distance. In April 1904, St. Louis opened its doors to what was officially called the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. During the eight months it remained open, almost 20 million people visited. The fairgrounds sprawled across 1,200 acres with nearly 1,500 buildings.

The most extraordinary of these was Festival Hall. Designed by Cass Gilbert, it cost $218,430 to build — a fortune at the time. Inside sat the world’s largest pipe organ, filling a 4,500-seat auditorium with daily concerts…

But it was the exterior that stopped people in their tracks: a massive dome rising 200 feet above the terrace, richly ornamented stucco façades, deep oculus windows, and towering columns. Pure Beaux-Arts grandeur, embodying everything the turn of the century believed about beauty and civilization.

The fair closed in December 1904. Within months, Festival Hall was demolished and the materials were sold as scrap.

2. Peristyle

You’d think this was Europe, or maybe AI-generated. It’s not. This was Chicago in 1893…

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What can art actually do?

Not in theory. Not in metaphor. But in the world as it is — fractured, corrupt, unequal, grieving, and at times hopeless… Across the centuries, certain works prove that art is never mere ornamentation. It is a lifeline, a way we endure existence itself. As Pablo Picasso once said:

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Art reshapes how we see pain, beauty, injustice, and even ourselves. It can confront power, restore dignity, change how a city feels, or make pain visible without turning it into spectacle.

The Greeks understood this power. They called it mimesis — not simple imitation, but the shaping of reality so we can see it anew. Art gathers the chaos of experience — suffering and joy alike — and gives it form. And through the emotional alchemy that Aristotle named catharsis, it does more than show… it moves us. In witnessing, we are shaken and opened. Grief becomes comprehension. Anger sharpens into clarity. Fear widens into empathy.

The power of art lives here, in the tension between these forces: the precision of mimesis and the emotional reckoning of catharsis. It reflects, but it also transforms...

Below are 10 examples — paintings, murals, sculptures — that show this energy at work. Some confront violence. Some repair what is broken. Some simply demand that we see the world differently. Each, in its own way, shifts perception, urges us to feel more deeply — and perhaps even to act more courageously. Because as Leo Tolstoy argued:

Art should cause violence to be set aside. And it is only art that can accomplish this.

REMINDER: Beauty is Truth is a reader-funded publication, supported entirely by you. There are no ads here, only independent writing devoted to celebrating beauty — and it can only continue with your help.

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1. Painting Life Back In

In small towns across France, blank, aging, and often visibly neglected facades have been transformed by Patrick Commecy into magnificent trompe-l’oeil murals.

Windows appear where there were none. Historical figures return. Architecture gains depth and story.

What was once neglect becomes a canvas for beauty and connection.

These murals do more than decorate. They alter how residents relate to their own streets. They draw visitors. They shift mood.

Sometimes the power of art is simple and practical: it makes a place feel cared for.

2. Judith Slaying Holofernes

With veins bulging and blood spurting, Judith grips the tyrant’s hair and drives a sword through his neck, her maidservant aiding with fierce determination.

Painted after Artemisia Gentileschi survived sexual assault and endured a public trial that scrutinized her more than her attacker, the scene is visceral. The women strain with physical effort. The violence is not romanticized.

The painting feels personal without being confessional. It is controlled, deliberate.

In a world that tried to reduce her to silence, Artemisia answered with mastery. Art became a place where she decided how the story would be told…

Jorge Luis Borges observed:

A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

3. Michelangelo’s Pietà

Have you ever stood before a work of art and felt something shift inside you? That is exactly what happened to me in St. Peter’s Basilica.

A young mother cradles her grown son’s lifeless body. Mary’s face is not twisted with anguish but softened by an otherworldly calm. Michelangelo, only twenty-four, carved this from a single block of marble, transforming a scene of unbearable grief into a meditation on love beyond measure.

The work demonstrates art’s ability to translate agony into transcendence, offering a glimpse of grace even amid our own heartbreak.

4. Invisibility of Poverty

In many cities, poverty is present and unseen at the same time. People step around it, over it, past it.

Kevin Lee’s work confronts that selective blindness. Through stark visual interventions, he forces a second look at those who are typically ignored.

The effect is uncomfortable in the best way. It interrupts routine.

Art here is not about aesthetic pleasure. It is about attention. It insists that visibility is a form of dignity…

5. The Calling of Saint Matthew

Caravaggio stages a spiritual awakening in a dim tavern. Men count coins at a rough wooden table. Boots are dusty. The room is ordinary.

Then a shaft of light enters from the right. Christ stands almost unnoticed, pointing.

God does not descend with spectacle. He appears in a room full of flawed men who were not looking for Him. Caravaggio’s dramatic chiaroscuro lets the divine spill across the room and, like all great art, reshapes time and space — its power measured by how completely it draws you into that world.

The painting suggests something radical: revelation can happen in the middle of everyday life. Art trains us to recognize that possibility.

Reflecting on this, and on the art our own age produces, I am reminded of William Blake’s warning:

Degrade first the arts if you’d mankind degrade,
Hire idiots to paint with cold light and hot shade.

6. The Broken Column

Frida Kahlo painted her own body split open, her spine replaced by a crumbling column. Nails pierce her skin. Tears trace her face. She stands upright, meeting our gaze.

After a devastating accident and years of surgeries, pain was a constant presence in her life. She did not disguise it.

What makes the painting powerful is its steadiness. There is vulnerability, but also strength. By externalizing her suffering, she refuses to let it remain invisible.

Art becomes a way of saying: this is what it feels like — and I am still here.

7. Kintsugi

This 17th‑century tea bowl, part of the Smithsonian collection, was once broken and then restored with lacquer and powdered gold. The result is not merely a repaired object but a testament to the beauty of imperfection, a harmonious balance of fragility and strength…

This is kintsugi, the ancient Japanese art of “golden joinery” (kintsukuroi), in which broken pottery is mended with precious metals, transforming what was damaged into something extraordinary. Unlike conventional repair that hides flaws, kintsugi celebrates them.

More than an art form, it is a philosophy, a Japanese echo of “waste not, want not”. In the delicate shimmer of a repaired bowl, we find a meditation on life itself, grace in repair, dignity in mending, and beauty in the traces of time…

8. Water Lilies

Late in life, Monet’s eyesight deteriorated. He continued painting the pond at Giverny, enlarging the canvases until they surrounded the viewer.

In the final panels, the horizon disappears. You stand inside light and color.

After World War I, Monet donated these works to France as a gesture of peace.

There is something moving about that: a painter losing vision, offering beauty to a country recovering from devastation. Even as his world dimmed, he widened ours with art.

9. Royal Courts of Justice

On 8 September 2025, Londoners passing the Royal Courts of Justice on Carey Street were confronted with a new mural by Banksy.

The stencil, appearing overnight on the Grade II listed Queen’s Building, shows a bewigged judge raising a gavel over a fallen protester, whose blank placard is splattered with red. The imagery quickly drew attention for its commentary on the suppression of free speech.

Ironically, the work’s rapid partial removal the following day only reinforced its message, illustrating how a single artwork can provoke debate and linger in the public consciousness far beyond its physical presence.

10. Guernica

When the Basque town of Guernica was bombed during the Spanish Civil War, Picasso responded with a vast, monochrome mural of fractured bodies and silent screams — regarded by many art critics as the most powerful anti-war painting in history.

There is no landscape, no comfort, no hero. Only death. Only pain.

The painting traveled the world, becoming a visual argument against war. It ensured that the event would not fade into abstraction. Here, art is witness. It holds history in place.

Picasso lived in Paris during the German occupation of World War II. A widely told story recounts that a German officer, seeing a photograph of Guernica in Picasso’s apartment, asked, “Did you create this horror?” Picasso reportedly replied, “No. You did.”

Art helps us make sense of society and our place within it. As Albert Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus:

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

While it cannot shield us from war, loss, pain, or the inevitability of death, creativity can revitalize us amid chaos, and the dialogue it inspires can help shape a better world.

Art changes us quietly — it rearranges the furniture of the soul. It teaches us to see light inside fracture, to find language for the unnamed, and to turn survival into meaning...

Until next time, keep seeking the beauty in the brushstrokes of life.

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I recently came across a Japanese word that I instantly loved: Komorebi (木漏れ日) describes sunlight streaming through the leaves of trees, weaving a delicate dance of light and shadow that seems to breathe with the rhythm of the forest itself.

And, as often happens when you learn a new word or notice a fragment of the world you hadn’t seen before, it suddenly starts appearing everywhere. You begin to wonder: was it always there, hiding in plain sight, or did the universe just decide to wink at you?

That’s exactly what happened to me a few days later at Vezio Castle in northern Italy. For a brief moment, sunlight filtered through the trees, painting the world in patterns that felt almost unreal. This spectacle was made even more magical by the setting itself: the castle overlooks Lake Como and is surrounded by mysterious ghost sculptures — which I’ll tell you about in just a moment.

Some places on this Earth blur the line between reality and dream. The moment you recognize something familiar in a new way — like realizing the sunlight dancing through leaves has a name — your world expands. Travel offers the same gift on a grander scale: it challenges assumptions, broadens perspectives, and awakens the mind. Today, I want to take you to 6 of the most enchanting — and sometimes Kafkaesque — corners of the globe, because, as Mark Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad:

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

So let’s wander beyond the familiar, and step into the extraordinary…

REMINDER: this is a teaser for my subscriber-only articles.

Beauty is Truth is a reader-funded publication, supported entirely by you. There are no ads here, only independent writing devoted to celebrating beauty.

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1. Crypt of San Magno

They call it the “Sistine Chapel of the Middle Ages,” and stepping inside you’ll understand why…

Located in Anagni, in the province of Frosinone, Lazio, Italy, the crypt of Anagni Cathedral is dedicated to St. Magnus, the patron saint of the city. During the episcopate of Pandulf, from 1237 to 1256, the walls were adorned with frescoes illustrating the history of humanity’s salvation, from its beginnings to the Last Judgment.

Across its twenty-one panels, scenes from the Old and New Testaments — such as the story of the Ark of the Covenant and the Apocalypse — appear alongside a rare and significant cycle on the creation of the world.

This cycle illustrates the proportional union of the four elements with humanity, presenting the concept of the microcosm within the macrocosm. The depiction is further enriched by the figures of the physicians Hippocrates and Galen, as well as by the Platonic Theory of the Elements.

It’s one of the most fascinating places I’ve visited lately.

2. Castle of Vezio

This isn’t AI. This place is real, and the legend behind these ghost sculptures has whispered through generations of locals for centuries… Yet its story is far stranger — and more haunting — than you could ever imagine…

Read more

Who doesn’t love wildlife photography? There’s nothing quite like catching a glimpse of nature in all its untamed glory.

But do you know where it all began?

The credit goes to George Shiras III, a U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania born in 1859, who is often regarded as the “father of wildlife photography.”

In the late 1800s, Shiras pioneered tripwire-activated cameras and the use of flash, allowing animals to be photographed at night with minimal human presence or disturbance.

One of his earliest nighttime flash photos, taken in Michigan, shows three white-tailed deer running away:

Shiras was also a passionate conservationist, helping establish national parks and refuges, and contributing regularly to National Geographic, sharing both his images and vivid field stories. This excerpt from an 1892 article for Forest and Stream perfectly captures his philosophy:

Every camera hunter must admit that more immediate and lasting pleasure is afforded in raking a running deer from stem to stern, at twenty yards, with his 5 x 7 bore camera than driving an ounce ball through its heart at 100 yards.

Shiras worked in a way that feels worlds apart from modern wildlife photography, where the goal is to disappear into the landscape and catch animals in their natural state. But even the best camouflage can be rendered futile — sometimes leading to encounters so breathtaking they almost defy belief. Here are 10 unforgettable times animals stole the spotlight from those trying to capture them…

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1. A Friendly Seal

Photographer Art Wolfe encounters a southern elephant seal while filming Travels to the Edge on South Georgia Island, located 1,400 kilometres (870 mi) east of the Falkland Islands.

2. Baby Deer and Baby Wolf

Wildlife photographer and caretaker Liba Radova had a rare, heartwarming moment in the field when a baby deer and a baby wolf — two animals that would normally be natural rivals in the wild — approached her and even climbed onto her.

Both were orphans she had been nurturing, and their trust made the scene truly special…

3. A Curious Fox

On his way to the snowy St. Anne’s Mountain for a winter adventure, Romanian photographer Dan Dinu was treated to a delightful surprise: he had the rare opportunity to meet — and photograph up close — a wild fox.

Clearly, this little rascal was born for the camera.

4. Cheetah Assistant

While shooting in Kruger National Park, South Africa, Chris Du Plessis had a remarkable encounter. This cheetah was wild, yet it knew Chris well enough to feel safe wandering into the camp. The collar around its neck is a tracking device, commonly used in wildlife research to monitor movement, survival, and behaviour.

After days of waiting for the perfect shot, sometimes your subject decides to check if you’re doing it right…

5. The Squirrel and the Bird

Russian nature photographer Vadim Trunov is no stranger to getting up close with wildlife, but this time he captured a truly enchanting moment. In a forest in Russia’s Voronezh region, a red squirrel jumped behind his tripod, resting both paws on the camera as if ready to snap the perfect shot of a passing blue tit. Then, in a whimsical twist, the two animals switched places, creating a playful scene straight out of a storybook:

The photographer explained:

When winter begins, food becomes scarce in the forest. Animals and birds gather where there is food. So I created such a place in the woods — I installed feeders on trees: one for squirrels, another for birds. I fed them for days in preparation. A flock of birds arrived for the seeds. They sat on a wooden stump and pecked seeds, and if I put sunflower seeds on the camera, they sat on it. Many birds increased the chance of a good shot. The squirrel searched for nuts near the camera. I photographed animals and birds in the desired moment and position, but it took long waits over several days to capture interesting shots.

6. Close up

This deer clearly had a “model” attitude, making sure Ionel Onofraș got her close-up.

7. An Expensive Toy

In July 2018, photographer Barbara Jensen Vorster was photographing a lion pride in Botswana when a lioness snatched her Canon after she accidentally dropped it:

The lioness picked up the camera and carried it over to her cubs to play with, as the photographer recalled:

The camera fell with the lens looking up. She gently flipped the camera on its side and picked it up by the barrel of the lens. The lioness then brought it to her cubs who started to playfully pounce on it. They dragged it through the dirt, chewed on the lens hood and then, fortunately, like most kids, soon grew tired with their new toy.

8. Meerkats

Photographer Will Burrard-Lucas described what it was like to be around these extremely curious animals:

These meerkats are completely wild but over time they have become habituated to humans. This means it is possible to gain their trust and get really close to them. When people are around, these clever little creatures take full advantage of the situation and will sometimes climb on top of the nearest person for a better view out over the long grass.

Trying to photograph animals that jumped on me whenever I got too close was certainly a challenge that I wasn’t used to facing… not that I was complaining!

9. An Inquisitive Cheetah

A curious cub surprised photographer Stu Porter while he was capturing images of cheetahs in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area.

10. Red Squirrels in Winter

This is Dalia Kvedaraite’s account of her trip to the Yorkshire Dales:

One of our cameras stopped working because of high humidity. Without a doubt it was very frustrating. Luckily we found another way of using it...

We placed couple of peanuts inside the lens hood. We were amazed by one squirrel which was not shy at all and showed a lot of interest in the camera. A couple of minutes later, the squirrel managed to get inside the lens hood.

While researching this topic and admiring these stunning images, I was reminded of a quote by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, that I believe perfectly reflects this phenomenon. In Scenes of Clerical Life, she wrote:

Animals are such agreeable friends — they ask no questions, they pass no criticism.

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Umberto Eco once said:

By the age of 70, he who doesn’t read will have lived only one life. He who reads will have lived 5000 years. Reading is immortality backwards.

The legendary Italian medievalist, philosopher, and novelist owned a private library of over 50,000 books. When asked why he kept so many, he replied that criticizing someone for acquiring more books than they can read is like insisting one must use every piece of cutlery, every pair of sunglasses, or every screwdriver before buying another.

Eco believed that certain things — books among them — should exist in abundance, even if we only ever use a fraction. He likened them to medicine: it’s best to have many at home so that, when the moment calls, the right one is always at hand.

He also noted that those who buy only a single book often read it once and discard it, approaching literature with a purely consumerist mindset. True book lovers, however, know that books are far more than mere commodities…

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Whenever I read Umberto Eco’s words about books, I think of the great libraries of history that no longer exist — wonders like the Library of Alexandria, Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, and the Library of Pergamum. These were immense repositories, often holding hundreds of thousands of scrolls, preserving the achievements of philosophy, science, literature, and mathematics from across the ancient world.

Yet, despite their once vast collections, the fragility of materials, fires, wars, and neglect have left only a sliver of the original works: researchers believe that a mere 1–2% of all ancient Greek and Latin texts survive today.

Their loss is a reminder of how easily human knowledge can vanish, no matter how monumental its preservation seemed.

The following are 6 legendary ancient libraries that have been lost to the sands of time…

1. Library of Alexandria

The Library of Alexandria was one of the greatest intellectual institutions of the ancient world, emblematic of a city that served as a cultural crossroads linking Africa, Europe, and Asia.

In his book The Library at Night, a meditation on the meaning of libraries, Alberto Manguel wrote:

We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost, but also that much of it can be collected again.

Founded around 331 BC by Alexander the Great, Alexandria later came under the rule of Ptolemy I Soter, who developed it into a major center of Greek culture and learning.

Scholars from across Egypt, Greece, and Persia were drawn to the city, generously supported so they could devote themselves entirely to study and research. The library grew through aggressive acquisition of manuscripts, ultimately becoming the largest collection of written works in the ancient world, with estimates ranging from 40,000 to as many as 400,000 scrolls at its height. These included priceless works by authors such as Aristotle, Homer, Plato, and Herodotus.

Aristotle alone is believed to have written around 200 treatises across philosophy, science, and economics, yet only about 30 survive today.

The library was also a hub of original scholarship. Figures such as Eratosthenes measured the Earth’s circumference with astonishing precision, while scholars like Zenodotus of Ephesus and Aristarchus of Samothrace worked to produce authoritative editions of Homer’s texts. Callimachus compiled the Pinakes, widely regarded as the world’s first library catalog, and according to legend, Archimedes, while studying there, invented the Archimedes screw, a device for raising water.

Despite its immense influence, the library declined gradually over several centuries. Portions of its collection were damaged during Julius Caesar’s campaign in Alexandria in 48 BC, though the extent of the destruction remains uncertain and some form of the library appears to have survived or been rebuilt.

During the Roman period, however, sustained funding and institutional support waned, and by the third century AD the scholarly community associated with the library had largely disappeared. Between 270 and 275 AD, invasions and imperial counterattacks likely destroyed whatever remnants still existed, marking the end of an institution whose lost works represent one of the greatest cultural losses in human history.

2. Library of Celsus

This isn’t just another Roman ruin — it’s one of the few surviving examples of the ancient world’s great libraries, and its secrets are still being uncovered…

Read more

In Auguries of Innocence, William Blake wrote:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

I’ve loved these lines for as long as I can remember. They felt profound the first time I read them, and they’ve only deepened with time — like all great art, they grow with you, taking on new meaning each time you revisit them.

For me, these words are an invitation: to notice the extraordinary in the ordinary. Blake suggests that the vast, ungraspable concepts — “heaven,” “infinity,” “eternity” — are too immense for our human minds to fully comprehend. Yet, in the small, tangible things around us, we can sense them.

The vastness of the universe (“a world”) can be glimpsed in the tiniest details of nature (“a grain of sand”), and heaven can be found in something as simple as a wildflower. Essentially, the microcosm reflects the macrocosm, and in paying attention to the little things of life, we find beauty, wonder, and even divinity. Blake’s lines are a call to open our eyes, slow down, and see the miracles that surround us every day…

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But, of course, this is easier said than done. Advice like “open your eyes, slow down, and see the miracles” can sometimes feel like a cliché, far removed from the practicalities of daily life.

And this is where science and technology come in, allowing us to experience the wonders of nature in ways that our senses alone cannot. They help us realize that what seems simple often conceals vast universes within…

Take the microscope, for example. Its name comes from the Ancient Greek μικρός (mikrós), “small,” and σκοπέω (skopéō), “to look at, examine, inspect.” Under its lens, simplicity vanishes… A single drop of water teems with microbial ecosystems, symbioses, and ceaseless motion.

Shrinking the scale does not simplify the universe; if anything, it reveals a more crowded, dynamic, and interconnected world. What seems still to the naked eye seethes with life under magnification — molecules move, membranes fluctuate, particles collide. It’s poetic, in a way, that stillness, like silence, only exists at the human scale.

And then there’s the quantum world, where even observing changes reality. In the famous double‑slit experiment, electrons or photons form wave-like interference patterns when unmeasured — but the moment we try to detect their path, the pattern vanishes. Simply put, observing alters what is observed.

No matter our understanding — or our beliefs — there is something both revealing and profoundly moving about seeing the world in ways that transcend our senses. As Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

Here are 5 microscopic glimpses of the world — images that reveal the hidden beauty of things we normally overlook, helping us grasp what it truly means to “see a world in a grain of sand”:

1. Human Eye

This stunning photograph by Suren Manvelyan opens a window into the depth of the human eye. Beyond the cornea lies the iris, the colored part of the eye that regulates the size of the pupil.

Up close, the iris is a landscape of folds and radiating fibers shaped by tiny muscles that control light. No two irises are the same… each carries a microscopic fingerprint unique to the individual. Eye color is not simply painted on: it arises from light interacting with the layered structures and pigments within the iris itself. The human eye shows us that even a seemingly simple surface can be an intricate, living mosaic…

2. Grains of Salt

Under a microscope, most common table salt (sodium chloride) forms near-perfect cubes.

Each crystal reflects the regular arrangement of ions in the lattice. What appears as just a grain is actually a geometric masterpiece — proof that order can arise from the smallest building blocks of matter.

3. Cat’s Tongue

I couldn’t wait to show you this…

Under a microscope, a cat’s tongue looks like a forest of tiny little tongues:

This is because it is covered with hundreds of backward-facing spines called papillae. Magnified, these spines resemble hooks or bristles made of keratin, the same material found in hair and nails. These structures allow cats to groom efficiently, detangling fur and removing debris… a perfect example of how even the subtlest structures are designed for survival.

4. Spider Eyes

These are close-up shots of spider eyes captured by Spanish macro photographer Javier Rupérez.

In an interview, he observed:

The eyes of spiders are particularly impressive when viewed from very close. They look like beings from another planet.

5. Snowflakes

These macro photographs of snowflakes by Alexey Kljatov reveal a world at once minuscule and endless…

Every snowflake grows from a six-sided structure, where water molecules bond in symmetry, and each branch mirrors the others like a miniature universe shaped by invisible laws. In these transient forms, the microcosm reflects the macrocosm once more: a reminder that wonder is woven into the smallest details, and that the infinite can be held, if only we take the time to see it…

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In one of the most haunting sonnets ever written, the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley declares:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Shelley’s Ozymandias (1818) tells the story of a traveler who comes across the ruined statue of Ramesses II, with these words inscribed on its pedestal. Through the image of a once-magnificent statue crumbling in the desert, Shelley reflects on the fleeting nature of power and the hollow pursuit of ambition. Even the grandest monuments eventually fade, leaving only fragments behind amid the sands of time…

Ancient history is full of lost wonders, feats of human genius that vanished long ago. But what’s less often remembered are the architectural marvels we’ve lost in more recent years. Our collective memory is short — not just for distant antiquity, but even for treasures built within the last few centuries. You might be surprised by how many extraordinary buildings have disappeared without a trace, forgotten by all — except in the pages of history.

Here are 10 of the most remarkable architectural masterpieces that time erased, leaving us only whispers of their former glory…

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1. Old London Bridge

If you think of London Bridge, you probably picture the concrete-and-steel box girder crossing that opened to traffic in 1973 — the one most of us know today.

But this modern structure replaced a 19th-century stone-arched bridge, which itself succeeded something far more extraordinary: a medieval stone bridge that stood for over 600 years and was once considered a wonder of the world…

Construction of Old London Bridge began in 1176. For centuries, it was the only stone crossing over the River Thames. Stretching roughly 926 feet (282 metres), it was the longest inhabited bridge in Europe.

English cartographer and antiquary John Norden (c. 1547–1625) praised it in these words:

Among the many famous monuments within this realm, none deserves more to be set before the world’s view than London Bridge… for its fame is spread through many nations.

It was crowded with houses, shops, and workshops — as many as 140 buildings rising several storeys high. At its heart stood the Chapel of St Thomas Becket, making the bridge a place of worship as well as trade, and a stage for pilgrimage and royal ceremony.

Amazingly, the bridge survived the Great Fire of 1666. But by the early 18th century it was worn out and outdated. New crossings, especially Westminster Bridge in 1749, exposed its flaws: narrow arches that restricted river traffic, slowed the Thames, and even caused it to freeze in severe winters, while the cramped roadway became a bottleneck for a growing city. In 1824 construction began on a new five-arched stone London Bridge. It opened seven years later, and the medieval bridge was finally taken down…

2. Chicago Federal Building

Constructed between 1898 and 1905, the Chicago Federal Building was a Beaux-Arts masterpiece.

Built on a steel frame and clad in grey granite from Maine, the building was crowned by a vast octagonal dome finished in gilt glass tiles. Classical in style, it featured Corinthian columns, pilasters, and a monumental rotunda inspired by Imperial Roman architecture. At 100 feet in diameter, the rotunda surpassed even that of the U.S. Capitol.

More than $2 million was spent on the interior, richly finished with marble, mahogany, terra cotta, and wrought iron. Courtrooms were adorned with murals depicting the history of law, while mosaic floors, sculpted ceilings, and finely detailed fittings reinforced the building’s status as one of Chicago’s most impressive architectural achievements.

Though celebrated as a civic landmark, the building was demolished in 1965 and replaced by the Kluczynski Federal Building.

3. Crystal Palace

This is not AI. This structure once stood in one of the world’s great cities — and almost no one remembers it today…

Read more

Today, I want to offer these words to you for 2026. Whether you’re a creative, a student, an athlete, a scientist, an artist, or simply someone with a dream; whether you need encouragement, permission to rediscover your true self, or a spark of inspiration, I hope you find in them the same beauty I do. To me, they are the truest expression of how creation — and, by extension, living — demands absolute commitment.

May they reach you at exactly the right moment in your life…

Reminder: Beauty is Truth is a reader-funded publication, supported entirely by you. There are no ads here, only independent writing devoted to celebrating beauty.

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Roll The Dice - Charles Bukowski

If you’re going to try, go all the

way.

Otherwise, don’t even start.

If you’re going to try, go all the

way.

This could mean losing girlfriends,

wives, relatives, jobs and

maybe your mind.

Go all the way.

It could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days.

It could mean freezing on a

park bench.

It could mean jail,

it could mean derision,

mockery,

isolation.

Isolation is the gift,

all the others are a test of your

endurance, of

how much you really want to

do it.

And you’ll do it

despite rejection and the worst odds

and it will be better than

anything else

you can imagine.

If you’re going to try,

go all the way.

There is no other feeling like

that.

You will be alone with the gods

and the nights will flame with

fire.

Do it, do it, do it.

do it.

All the way.

All the way.

You will ride life straight to

perfect laughter, its

the only good fight

there is.

I can’t quite put into words how much I love this poem. The language is so powerful, yet it points toward something even deeper…

Bukowski’s gravestone reads: “Don’t Try”.

He first used this phrase in one of his poems, offering advice to aspiring writers and poets about creativity and inspiration. With this epitaph, Bukowski wasn’t endorsing laziness or contradicting the message of “roll the dice.” Rather, he was emphasizing that genuine creation comes from an innate compulsion, not from forced effort or a hollow desire for fame or fortune. It’s about showing up and letting your work emerge from your true self — without straining to be someone else or producing something merely “good.” You create because not creating is simply impossible. On this, he once said:

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

You know a pursuit is worth it when, no matter what anyone says, you’re willing to go the distance. If the struggle of becoming something feels too hard, or if rejection and ridicule stop you, Bukowski might simply say, “Don’t try.” But if living without it feels unbearable, if the thought of not pursuing it is inconceivable, then perhaps he would say: “Try. And if you’re going to try, go all the way.”

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and Happy New Year!

I’m truly grateful to have you as part of this community. Your support and kind notes/messages brighten my day and mean more than I can express.

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Your help makes this work possible — thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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Scottish-American naturalist John Muir once said:

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.

Yesterday, I opened my front door and was struck by a little moment that made me smile. The air was cold, but the sunlight touched my face in a way that made me pause and just breathe. It reminded me of the word apricity. It’s an archaic English term, borrowed from the Latin apricus, meaning “sunny,” and it describes the pleasant warmth of the sun on a cold winter’s day.

It’s in these moments, when warmth and light break through the chill, that the world feels a little less heavy. Nature becomes not just a refuge, but a mirror, reflecting the poetic beauty of life back into our small, weary selves. With that in mind, I invite you to travel with me today across 6 of the most surreal and breathtaking corners of the Earth, where wonder and serenity intertwine…

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1. Sea of Japan, Where Snow, Beach & Sea Meet

This magnificent photograph was taken by Hisa Matsumura at the Tottori Sand Dunes.

Stretching 9 miles (14 km) in length and less than 1.5 miles (2.4 km) in width, it is the largest sand dune in Japan. In winter, the dune transforms into a beautiful snow-covered landscape, where the white snow contrasts sharply with the golden sand and the deep blue waters of the Sea of Japan… a magical sight typically visible from December to February.

2. Tunnel of Love, Ukraine

It may be hard to believe, but this is a real place…

This surreal green tunnel is part of an industrial railway near Klevan in Rivne Oblast, Ukraine, connecting Klevan with Orzhiv. The tracks are framed by dense, arching greenery, forming a natural tunnel that stretches three to five kilometers.

Over time, it has become a favorite spot for couples, who often wander along the path — though trains still pass through the tunnel three times a day.

In The Wilderness World of John Muir, the famous “Father of the National Parks” is quoted saying:

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

3. The Eye of the Earth

Read more

In December 1920, Tolkien’s three-year-old son, John, received his first Father Christmas letter at the family’s home in Oxford, marking the beginning of a tradition that would continue for more than two decades…

It all began as a response to a child’s curiosity.

When John asked where Father Christmas lived, Tolkien replied in character, with a letter which carried a North Pole stamp priced at “2 kisses”:

The card from Father Christmas read:

I heard you ask daddy what I was like and where I lived. I have drawn me and my house for you. Take care of the picture. I am just off now for Oxford with my bundle of toys - some for you. Hope I shall arrive in time: the snow is very thick at the North Pole tonight. Your loving Father Christmas.

Each Christmas Eve, Tolkien would write to his children — John, Michael, Christopher, and Priscilla — as if from Father Christmas himself, sending messages brimming with stories, illustrations, and lovable characters.

Over the years, the letters grew longer and more intricate, matching the children’s growing imaginations. Delivered either by a cooperative postman or mysteriously appearing on the hearth, this correspondence became a cherished part of the Tolkien family’s Christmas celebrations.

These letters not only brought joy to his family but also foreshadowed the imaginative richness that would later define Middle-earth…

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Adventures at the North Pole: Characters and Stories

Tolkien’s letters transformed the North Pole into an enchanting world.

Father Christmas chronicled daily life at his frozen home, while the clumsy North Polar Bear frequently caused delightful chaos, often leaving notes such as, “Excuse thick writing. I have a fat paw.” In a 1926 letter, Tolkien wrote:

Isn’t the North Polar Bear silly? He turned on all the Northern Lights for two years in one go. You have never heard or seen anything like it. I have tried to draw a picture of it: but I am too shaky to do it properly, and you can’t paint fizzing light, can you?

Two years later, he recounted how a forgotten stair bar sent the North Polar Bear tumbling from top to bottom, landing squarely on his nose and sending Christmas decorations flying in every direction.

Red Gnomes — also called Red Elves — helped in the workshop, occasionally defending it from mischievous goblins. Even languages were carefully crafted by the philologist: Father Christmas’s secretary sent messages in a script reminiscent of Tolkien’s Elvish Tengwar, while Polar Bear’s Arctic dialect drew on Finnish, a major influence on his invented language, Quenya.

As the years passed, the letters grew more complex, weaving in darker undertones that subtly reflected the wider world: stolen presents, perilous cave expeditions, and echoes of the anxieties of wartime.

Letters as Art

These were far more than mere correspondence — they were extraordinary works of art… just look at this:

Bursting with watercolors and whimsical illustrations, they brought Tolkien’s imagination to life: from fireworks that danced across the night sky to the icy, snow‑blanketed landscapes of the North Pole.

Each of these masterpieces reflects Tolkien’s dual gifts as both a storyteller and an artist. While he was known professionally as a scholar and philologist — and later celebrated as one of the most influential authors of all time — his children discovered a different side of him. To them, he was a conjurer of magic, a man who could transform ink and paper into entire worlds.

Some of the letters were written while Tolkien was working on The Hobbit, and their depictions of goblins, caves, and hazardous adventures have been noted to echo — and perhaps even influence — elements of his Middle‑earth legendarium.

Hope, Family, and the Spirit of Christmas

In 1943, Tolkien wrote his final Father Christmas letter to his youngest child, Priscilla, ending on a hopeful note even amid the shadows of World War II:

I am still very much alive, and shall come back again soon, as merry as ever.

These handwritten treasures also reveal a side of Tolkien often overshadowed by his academic and literary fame: the devoted, tender-hearted father. Despite the pressures of his university work and his writing, he took the time each year to craft these intricate letters, painting scenes, inventing adventures, and delighting in the small joys of his children’s wonder.

They testify to the centrality of family in his life — a life that had begun with early loss, after his mother died when he was just 12, and years of living in boarding houses. It was in this context that he met Edith, his future wife, and together they built a home and family that became his true anchor.

After Tolkien’s death, the letters were collected and published as a book, edited by Baillie Tolkien, the second wife of his son Christopher. Today, the originals are preserved at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford and have been showcased in exhibitions celebrating Tolkien’s creative genius.

Nearly a century later, the Father Christmas letters remain a lesser-known but profoundly delightful part of Tolkien’s legacy. They are a bridge between imagination and love, between father and child, and between story and reader — a gift to his children, and to all who seek beauty…

I chose this topic this week because, to me, it perfectly embodies the true spirit of Christmas — generosity, connection, and a sense of wonder. I am deeply grateful for your support and for having you as part of this community; it is a genuine privilege to share these pieces with you. From the bottom of my heart, I wish you a joyful, peaceful, and very Merry Christmas, filled with warmth, laughter, and moments that truly matter.

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