Nothing happens to anyone that he is not fitted by nature to bear.

It is an easy idea to resist, especially when the pain is your own. Said carelessly, it can even sound cruel. But Marcus was not claiming that people never break, that every loss is fair, or that suffering is somehow deserved. He meant that life will bring you things you never chose and cannot control, and that there is more strength in you than the pain allows you to see. We almost always underestimate what we are able to survive.

I have been writing this newsletter long enough to know how many of you are carrying something heavy: the loss of someone you loved, an illness, a private grief you have never put into words. It is the most delicate subject there is, and I have never felt it was my place to preach about it, or to offer anyone advice. But pain is the one thing none of us escapes. And perhaps that is exactly why it binds us together more closely than almost anything else can…

The one thing that has ever truly helped me is the last thing you want to do when you are hurting: to turn outward, instead of inward. To be of service. To set down your own ego and give something to someone else. Sorrow, left alone, becomes an echo chamber, a room where your pain keeps circling back to itself. The surest way I have ever found out of that room is to lose myself in helping another person. As Meister Eckhart put it:

Everything would be given to the person who completely renounced himself, even for a single moment.

But wiser people than me have spoken about pain far more beautifully than I ever could. So below I have gathered 5 of the most profound things ever written about it, paired with 5 of the most moving paintings ever made in response to it. I hope that somewhere among them, you find something that helps you carry whatever it is you are carrying…

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1. The Fear No One Warns You About

We begin where grief itself begins: in the body, before the mind has caught up.

In 1960, C.S. Lewis lost his wife, Joy Davidman, to cancer. They had married late, but loved each other fiercely. In the weeks after her death, Lewis kept a journal, scribbling into old notebooks simply to survive the days. He never intended to publish it. When he finally did, he released it under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk. The little book is called A Grief Observed, and it opens with a sentence that has startled the bereaved for sixty years:

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

It is the truest thing anyone has written about the first days of loss. We expect grief to feel like sadness. No one warns us that it arrives as something closer to terror, lodged in the stomach, in the breath, in the hands. Lewis goes on:

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says.

Anyone who has grieved knows that invisible blanket. The strange muffling of the world, the way other people’s voices seem to reach you through water, the sense of being present and absent at once. And then comes the loneliest line of all:

Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

There is no resolution here, no comfort offered, and that is exactly why it helps. Lewis is not trying to fix anything. He is simply telling the truth, and in telling it, he reaches across sixty years and lays a hand on the shoulder of everyone who has ever felt this and believed they were the only one.

To read it in the middle of your own grief is to understand, perhaps for the first time, that the pain is not something gone wrong in you, but simply the shape love takes when it has nowhere left to go.

That same ache lives in Frederic William Burton’s The Meeting on the Turret Stairs, painted in 1864. It illustrates a medieval Danish ballad. Hellelil, a king’s daughter, has fallen in love with Hildebrand, the prince assigned to guard her; when her father discovers it, he orders her seven brothers to kill him. Burton chose to paint not the bloodshed that follows, but the moment just before it: the lovers passing on a narrow turret stair, in their last instant together before Hildebrand goes out to die…

The knight lowers his head to press his lips to the girl’s bare arm. She turns away, unable to look at him. They do not embrace. They barely touch. George Eliot, who stood before this painting and never forgot it, wrote that “the face of the knight is the face of a man to whom the kiss is a sacrament.” The subject, she marveled, “might have been made the most vulgar thing in the world,” and yet Burton “has raised it to the highest pitch of refined emotion.”

Everything unbearable about the image lives in that fraction of space between them: the love that is fully present, and the loss that is already certain.

Burton understood what Lewis understood. That the deepest grief is only ever the price of the deepest love, and that no one who has truly loved is ever spared it.

2. The Slow Inventory of Loss

There is no greater pain than the loss of a child… it reverses the order the world is supposed to follow.

In 1896, while Mark Twain was traveling abroad, his daughter Susy — twenty-four years old, luminous, the one he believed had inherited the most of him — died of meningitis in the family home in Hartford. Twain was an ocean away. He learned of it by cablegram. Years later, writing his autobiography, he described the moment the news reached him, and in doing so left us a precise account of what a great loss does to the mind:

It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock, and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their full import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss — that is all.

A dumb sense of vast loss. Anyone who has received that kind of news knows what he is describing: in the first hours, you do not feel the whole of it, because you cannot. The mind, to keep you alive, refuses to let the full weight land all at once. But then Twain goes further, and gives the truest description of grief’s long aftermath that I have ever read:

A man’s house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And, when he casts about for it, he finds that it was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.

This is the thing no one warns you about. Grief is not a single event but a slow inventory. You do not lose the person all at once. You lose them again and again, in a thousand small discoveries, for years — every time you reach for something that was in that house, and find that it is gone.

The death happens in a single moment. The loss takes the rest of your life…

No artist understood this better than Käthe Kollwitz. In 1914, her younger son Peter was killed in the first weeks of the First World War, at the age of eighteen. She spent her remaining years returning to that wound in her art. Her 1903 piece titled Woman with Dead Child — made even before her own son’s death, as if she had foreseen it — shows a mother curled around the body of her child, not weeping prettily but gripping him with her whole body, her face buried in him, the two figures fused into a single dark mass of grief.

And for eighteen years she carved a memorial for Peter, The Grieving Parents, two figures kneeling in sorrow that still stands today in the war cemetery in Belgium where he is buried.

She spent decades counting what the fire had taken. And out of that long inventory of loss, she built the one thing pain had not destroyed: the proof that he had been loved...

3. Better to Have Loved

When Alfred Tennyson was a young man at Cambridge, he had a friend named Arthur Henry Hallam — brilliant, beloved, engaged to Tennyson’s sister, and, by every account, the person Tennyson loved most in the world. In 1833, with no warning, Hallam died of a sudden brain hemorrhage. He was twenty-two.

The loss broke something in Tennyson so completely that he spent the next seventeen years writing his way through it, in fragments, returning again and again to the same grief, until those fragments became one of the greatest poems of all time: In Memoriam A.H.H.

It is out of those long years that the most famous lines on loss ever written in English emerged:

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

We have heard the last two lines so often that they have nearly worn smooth, like a coin passed through too many hands. But look at the line above them, the one almost no one quotes: I feel it, when I sorrow most. Tennyson is saying that it is precisely in his deepest grief — not in spite of it, but inside it — that he knows the loving was worth the losing.

The pain does not cancel the love. The pain is the proof of it. To grieve this much is simply the receipt for having loved that much, and he would not give the love back to escape the loss.

In 1875, George Frederic Watts painted that same truth in his allegory Love and Death. He had watched a gifted young nobleman waste away despite all the devoted care of his wife, and the image came to him: a great shrouded figure, Death, advancing slowly toward the doorway of a house, and a smaller winged figure, Love, throwing itself against that inevitable approach in a doomed attempt to bar the way.

Watts was careful to explain that Love is not holding Death back, for nothing can. “I wish to suggest,” he said, “the passionate though unavailing struggle to meet the inevitable.”

It is all of us, in the end, standing in that doorway. We love anyway, knowing exactly how the story has to end.

And perhaps that is the bravest thing a human being ever does. Because as Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov:

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

The grief is terrible. But the alternative — a life that never risked loving at all, and so never had anything to lose — is the only thing worse…

4. The Breaking of the Shell

So far we have stayed close to the rawness of loss. But there is another way of looking at pain and it is the one that begins, slowly, to turn grief toward meaning.

There is an old Chinese parable that opens the door to it. A farmer’s only horse runs away, and his neighbors come to say how terrible it is. “Maybe,” the old man replies. The next day the horse returns, bringing several wild horses with it, and the neighbors come to celebrate his good fortune. “Maybe,” he says again. His son tries to tame one of the wild horses, is thrown, and breaks his leg. Terrible luck, the neighbors say. “Maybe.” Then the army comes through the village to conscript every able-bodied young man for a war, and passes the son by, because of his broken leg. The parable could run forever, because that is what life does. We almost never know, in the moment, whether what has happened to us is the end of the story, or the beginning of another one we cannot yet see.

This is not to say that suffering is good, or that loss is secretly a gift in disguise. Only that pain, however unwanted, changes us, and not every change it leaves behind is damage. No one expressed this more beautifully than the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran, in the chapter “On Pain” from his 1923 masterpiece The Prophet:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

The seed cannot grow while it is still sealed inside its hard shell. The shell has to break, and the breaking surely feels to the seed like destruction, like the end of everything. But it is the opposite of an end. It is the only way the green shoot ever reaches the light. Leonard Cohen said the same thing in his song Anthem: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Gibran does not pretend the breaking is painless; he only refuses to call it meaningless. He goes on:

And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Not the absence of winter. The serenity to live through it, trusting that the season will turn, as seasons do. That is what the parable and the poet are both pointing toward: not a denial of pain, but a longer view of it, wide enough to hold the possibility that what feels like ruin today may be, in some way you cannot yet see, the breaking open of something that needed to grow.

No painter captured this better than Ivan Aivazovsky, the great master of the sea. In his storm paintings, a small ship is tossed on enormous black waves beneath a sky torn apart by tempest — and yet, almost always, on the horizon, the artist places a single break in the clouds where the sun is rising, laying a path of gold across the very water that moments ago looked only deadly.

He painted the storm and the dawn in the same frame, because he understood that they are never as separate as they feel from inside the tempest. The light is already coming. You usually just cannot see it yet from the trough of the wave…

5. Life Has Not Forgotten You

The last word belongs to Rainer Maria Rilke, who in Letters to a Young Poet wrote about suffering with more wisdom and compassion than anyone before or since.

In 1904, Rilke was writing to a young cadet who had confided his sadnesses and self-doubt, and he replied with what would become one of the most consoling passages ever written about the hard and frightening things in life:

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

It is a staggering reversal. The thing that frightens us most, the grief that looms over us like a monster, may not be a monster at all, but something waiting to transform, if only we can find the courage to stop running from it and turn to face it. What comes next is, to me, one of the greatest lines he ever wrote:

You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.

Life has not forgotten you. Whatever you are carrying right now, however invisible you feel inside it, you have not been abandoned by the world. You are still being held.

There is a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, Woman before the Rising Sun, that gives me this exact feeling. A lone woman stands in an open field at dawn, her back to us, her arms slightly lifted and opening, as though she is being met by the light rather than merely watching it. The sun has not fully risen. The land around her is still half in shadow. But she faces it, open-armed, the way a person finally turns to face what they have survived.

Friedrich never tells us what she has been through. He does not need to. We recognize the posture. It is the moment after the worst of the night, when you are still standing, and the light is beginning, very slowly, to return…

And so we come to the end, though grief, of course, has no neat ending.

If there is one thing all five of these voices seem to agree on, it is this: there is no way around pain, and no way over it. The only way out is through. As Rilke wrote in The Book of Hours:

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

No feeling is final. Not even this one. The grief that feels permanent today is not the last thing you will ever feel, however much it insists otherwise.

And there is something on the other side of it, something the writers in this piece kept circling back to: that survival alone is not the point. As Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov:

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

Pain hollows us out, but what it carves can be filled again, with purpose, with love, with the slow rediscovery of why we are here at all.

And here, at the very end, I will mention again the only thing I have ever truly known to help. When your own pain becomes too heavy to carry alone, turn it outward. Find someone else who is hurting, and help them. It will not erase what happened to you. But it will remind you, in the only way that ever works, that you are still here, still useful, still capable of love, still part of the long human chain of people holding one another up through the dark.

That is how the light gets back in. Not all at once. But person by person, hand by hand.

So wherever you are reading this, and whatever you are carrying, I will leave you with an old blessing, the kindest words I know:

May the wind always be at your back and the sun upon your face. And may the wings of destiny carry you aloft to dance with the stars.

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The Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini once said:

A different language is a different vision of life.

And how true that is. We tend to treat words as if they were windows, clear and neutral, things we look straight through to reach the world waiting on the other side. But words are not windows. They are closer to images: approximations drawn by fallible hands, rough sketches of experiences too large and too strange to fit through the narrow gate of the lips.

The words we happen to inherit draw the borders of what we are able to notice, even of what we are able to feel. Linguists have a name for this idea: they call it linguistic relativity, and there is real evidence behind it. For example, speakers of languages that carry specific words for certain colors can actually distinguish those shades faster than people whose languages fold them all together.

Your native tongue is not only a way of describing reality. To a degree most of us never realize, it helps determine which parts of reality you notice at all…

And there is something even stranger underneath this. Ask people how they think, and you will get wildly different answers. Some hear a constant inner voice narrating their lives in full sentences; others think almost entirely in pictures, and only translate them into words when they have to speak. A few report almost no inner monologue at all. We assume everyone’s interior life runs on the same machinery as our own, and we are simply wrong. Which means that when a feeling rises up in you that you cannot name, the problem may not be that the feeling is vague, but that your language never built a door to it.

Here is the consolation. Somewhere, in some other tongue, that door very often already exists. Another culture, on the far side of the world, felt the exact thing you could not name, and gave it a single word.

What follows are 6 of those words. None of them translates cleanly into English. All of them describe something you have almost certainly felt. My hope is that by the end, you will not only recognize yourself in them, but carry one or two of them with you, like keys you did not know you were missing…

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1. The Hardest Word to Translate

At the very southern tip of South America, where Chile and Argentina splinter into a maze of cold islands battered by the sea, lies the place the early European sailors called Tierra del Fuego, the Land of Fire. For thousands of years it was home to the Yaghan people, who lived as nomads along those frozen channels. Their language belongs to no family but its own, an isolate, with no known relative anywhere on earth. And it gave the world what the Guinness Book of World Records once called the most succinct word ever recorded.

The word is mamihlapinatapai. It describes a look: the silent look exchanged between two people who both want the same thing to happen, who both sense the other wants it too, and who are each waiting, hoping, that the other will be brave enough to begin...

You know this look. It is the breath before a first kiss, the instant when every thought either person has ever had arrives at once and freezes them both in place, a hundred invisible hands pulling them back from each other, each one wanting it, each one afraid to be the one who moves first.

It is the moment everyone who has ever been truly in love carries with them for the rest of their lives…

And perhaps that is why the word moves us so deeply. Because a shared look is where love begins, but it is not where love lives. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote:

Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.

Mamihlapinatapai is the instant before that turn: the last moment of two separate people, just before they decide to face the world as one.

But what makes the word so remarkable is where it comes from. Cristina Calderón, the last person who spoke Yaghan fluently, died in 2022, and took with her the last living version of a language thousands of years in the making. Out of all of it, the word the world chose to keep is one about hesitation, about the thing left unsaid, about everything we lose by waiting for someone else to go first. There is something to learn in that. A tiny community at the bottom of the world found a word for a feeling every one of us knows, while the great languages of the world, spoken by billions, never managed to name it…

2. The Word for Leaving a Piece of Your Soul Behind

There is a difference you can feel instantly but struggle to name: between a meal made to feed you and a meal made to love you, between work done to finish it and work done to mean something.

One language built a single word for that difference, and it may change how you do everything…

Read more

I have always struggled to make sense of time, and the older I get, the more it seems to me that a photograph is the closest thing we have to a time machine…

A photo does not simply record what something looked like, but instead catches a single instant that will never come again and lets us hold it in our hands decades, sometimes centuries later. As Karl Lagerfeld put it:

What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.

And something strange happens when you set two of those frozen instants beside each other: the same place, the same face, separated by years. The distance between them is where you suddenly feel time itself. It stops being an idea and becomes something you can almost reach out and touch.

Because time is the strangest thing we live inside. We never actually see it move. We only ever see what it leaves behind: the ruin of a great wonder, or a line on your own face that you notice one morning for the first time, though it had been forming for years while you were busy looking at everything else.

What follows are 8 comparisons, and some of them genuinely changed the way I see the world. They’re not much to look at on their own. It is only when you see the two of them together that you realize how much can change, how fast it can happen, and how little of it we notice while we are living through it…

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1. Wounds of the Earth

Across the fields of northern France and Belgium, the Western Front stretched for more than 700 kilometers of mud, wire, and men. Over four years, roughly 1.5 billion artillery shells were fired along it. When the guns finally stopped in November 1918, the landscape had been so completely destroyed that farmers returned to find their villages and fields had vanished.

A century later, the grass has grown back…

The trenches are still there — you can even trace their lines from the air — but nature has drawn a soft green veil over all of it. The craters where shells exploded are now gentle dips in a meadow. The places where men lived and died underground are covered in wildflowers.

There is something in this comparison that is almost impossible to sit with. All that suffering, all that terror, all those lives, and the earth simply absorbed it and moved on. What is left is an ordinary field. And if you did not know what had happened there, you might walk through without a second thought…

2. Hidden in Plain Sight

When this photograph of El Castillo was taken in 1863, the most famous pyramid in the Maya world was barely visible. It was a mass of stone almost entirely swallowed by jungle, indistinguishable from the surrounding vegetation.

The Maya had abandoned Chichen Itza around the 13th century, and for hundreds of years the rainforest had been doing what rainforests do: reclaiming every surface it could reach.

Serious excavation did not begin until 1924, when archaeologist Sylvanus Morley arrived with a Carnegie Institution team and spent years pulling the jungle back, stone by stone.

Today, El Castillo dominates the vast plaza with commanding majesty, drawing more than two million visitors a year. There is something reassuring in knowing that what is buried is not always lost, and that some things can be brought back into the light if someone is willing to do the work.

3. The Lion Beneath the Sand

For most of the thousands of years it has been on this earth, the Great Sphinx of Giza was not the monument we know today. Sometime around 2100 BC, the desert began to swallow it. The wind drove sand up against the stone, year after year, century after century, until the entire body of the lion was buried up to the shoulders and only the great head remained visible above the dunes.

That is how travelers, pilgrims, and photographers saw it for thousands of years: a sad, weatherworn face staring out of an ocean of sand, with no body, no paws, no monument beneath it.

The first serious modern clearing did not happen until 1817, and the full excavation was only completed between 1925 and 1936, under the French engineer Émile Baraize, who spent eleven years pulling the desert back from a creature that had been waiting underneath it the whole time.

To look at the two photographs side by side is to realize that the Sphinx we think we have always known is, in a sense, less than a hundred years old.

4. The Face of War

In June 1941, a young man named Evgeny Stepanovich Kobytev sat for a photograph. He was thirty years old and he had just graduated from art school in Kyiv. A few days later, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and Kobytev set down his brushes and enlisted in the Red Army. He fought. He was wounded. He was captured and held in a German prison camp where prisoners died of starvation. In 1943, he escaped, and rejoined the war. In 1945, he came home.

The day he returned, he sat for another photograph…

The same man, exactly four years older, and the difference isn’t so much something you see as something you feel. The first picture looks at you. The second one looks through you.

The two photographs hang side by side today in the Andrei Pozdeev Museum in Krasnoyarsk, and they say something about what war does to a person that no-one has ever quite managed to put into words…

5. Natural or Man-Made?

In photographs taken in the late nineteenth century, the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán looks like an oddly symmetrical hill. Trees and shrubs cover its slopes. A path winds toward something that might be a summit. There is nothing in the landscape that announces the building underneath, only the suspicion that the slope is just a little too even and the lines a little too straight.

To give you an idea, this is a lithograph from 1870:

The pyramid had been hidden beneath earth and vegetation for nearly a thousand years. In 1905, Mexican archaeologist Leopoldo Batres began the first major excavation of the site under the orders of President Porfirio Díaz, and over the next five years, he pulled an entire civilization back out of the ground.

Today the pyramid rises 66 meters above the Avenue of the Dead. It’s the third-largest pyramid in the world.

And it is impossible not to ask: how does something this enormous become invisible? The answer, it turns out, is slowly, and then completely, the way most things we stop paying attention to eventually disappear.

6. Mount St. Helens

On the morning of 18 May 1980, at 8:32 AM, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake shook the north face of Mount St. Helens, and in the next few seconds the largest landslide ever recorded in history slid 1,300 feet of mountain off itself and into the valley below.

The volcano went from 9,677 feet tall to 8,365 feet in a single morning. Fifty-seven people were killed. The lateral blast that followed traveled at over a thousand kilometers an hour, flattened four billion board feet of timber, and turned 600 square kilometers of forest into ash and bare earth.

Photographs from before the eruption show a perfectly symmetrical, snow-capped peak so beautiful that locals called it the Fujisan of America. Photographs from after show a hollowed-out crater, as though something had taken a bite out of the sky:

The most unsettling thing about looking at the two images is not the destruction, but the speed: a mountain that had been standing there, untouched, for thousands of years, lost an entire summit in less time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee.

7. The Price of Saving a Country

In 1860, the year he was elected president, Abraham Lincoln sat for a photograph. He looks lean, alert, sharply lit, with the precise gaze of a country lawyer who has just won the largest argument of his life. Five years later, in February 1865, the photographer Alexander Gardner asked him to sit again.

By then the Civil War had killed more than 600,000 Americans, his eleven-year-old son Willie had died in the White House, and Lincoln himself had been carrying the weight of the war and the survival of a divided nation for four straight years.

The man in Gardner’s photograph has aged almost beyond belief:

His face is hollow, his eyes deeply set, the lines beneath them carved in. There is even a faint, sad half-smile, as though he was beginning to allow himself to imagine the end of it. The image is from Lincoln’s last posed photo session. Nine weeks later, he was dead.

His secretary John Hay, who saw him every day, wrote that by the end, “in mind, body, and nerves he was a very different man.”

The two photographs make you understand exactly what Hay meant…

8. Fifty Summers Later

On August 15, 1969, a young woman named Judy was driving to a music festival in upstate New York when her car broke down on the Tappan Zee Bridge. A Volkswagen pulled over, full of young men heading to the same place, and offered her and her friends a ride. One of them was named Jerry. By the time they reached the festival grounds and set up camp, something had already happened between them. As Judy later put it, “we basically were together from that point on.”

They had known each other less than 48 hours when, soaking wet, they were photographed huddled under a blanket in the rain — though they would not discover that picture for another fifty years, when they spotted their own 22-year-old faces in a PBS documentary.

By then they had two sons, five grandchildren, and half a century of marriage behind them, and to mark the anniversary, they recreated that rain-soaked photograph, fifty years older, wrapped in a blanket once more. Set the two side by side and you are looking at the entire arc of a life: two strangers in the rain who had no idea what they were starting, and the same two people, fifty years on, who turned a broken-down car on a bridge into everything that followed…

It is a beautiful thing to see. And it is also a reminder that the clock never stops turning. Youth passes in what feels like a single breath, and with every day that goes by, the past grows heavier and the road ahead grows shorter. We spend so much of our lives caught between the ache of what we remember and the fear of what we cannot yet see, that we forget the only place we have ever actually lived is the present. And though they may be among the coldest words Marcus Aurelius ever wrote in his Meditations, after nearly two thousand years they have only grown truer:

Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you.

So what do we do with that? My advice this morning will not be motivational or productive — that word we have somehow turned into a religion. It is simply what I feel to be true as I sit here writing these words. We are all living on borrowed time, and none of us knows how much remains. So put off until tomorrow the things you never wanted to do anyway, and do today, now, the thing you have always wanted to do but were too afraid to begin — the thing that frightens you precisely because some part of you knows it matters.

I will leave you with the words of the late Robin Williams, from a monologue in the film Jack that I have carried with me ever since I first heard it:

As we come to the end of this phase of our life, we find ourselves trying to remember the good times, and trying to forget the bad times. And we find ourselves thinking about the future. We start to worry, thinking, what am I going to do? Where am I going to be in ten years? But I say to you, ‘Hey, look at me, please, don’t worry so much.’ Because in the end, none of us have very long on this earth. Life is fleeting. And if you’re ever distressed, cast your eyes to the summer sky, when the stars are strung across the velvety night. And when a shooting star streaks through the blackness, turning night into day, make a wish. Think of me. Make your life spectacular.

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The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

I think he was right. The wonders are still here. We are the ones who have gotten busy, distracted, and a little numb. We scroll past photographs of places that should stop us in our tracks and feel almost nothing, because a screen flattens everything it touches into the same small rectangle of light. And lately there is something else that bothers me even more. Call it the AI problem: we have started to mistrust anything that looks too astonishing to be real. The sad part is that, more often than not, we are right to…

But every now and then a place breaks through anyway. You see it, and you immediately ask the same two questions: how is that real, and how did people make it?

Because there are places on this earth that had no business existing where they do. Every reason in the world said not to attempt them. Someone tried anyway, and in some cases, the difficulty seems to have been the point. The challenge itself was what gave the work its meaning. As Albert Camus once wrote:

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

What follows are 5 of those places. Some took a lifetime to complete. Some took longer than a lifetime, which means the people who began them knew, with total certainty, that they would die before the work was done. As Frank Lloyd Wright once said, architecture at its greatest is “the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men.” These 5 wonders are what that triumph looks like…

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1. Closer to Heaven Than to Earth

In the plains of Thessaly, in central Greece, enormous pillars of sandstone rise straight out of the earth, some of them climbing more than 400 meters above the plain. They look less like rock formations than like a forest of stone, shaped over roughly sixty million years from the sediments of an ancient river delta, later split and sculpted by earthquakes and erosion into shapes that should not be able to support anything at all. On top of six of them, against every imaginable instinct, humans built monasteries that are still there today…

They are called Meteora — from the Greek meteoros, “suspended in the air” — and the name is almost literal. Monks first settled on these pinnacles from the 11th century onward, living as hermits in the caves and fissures of the rock. By the 14th century, they began building on the summits themselves, seeking solitude and refuge during the turbulent decline of the Byzantine world and the rise of Ottoman power in the region.

Between the 13th and 16th centuries, twenty-four monasteries were built on peaks that, at the time, had no stairways, no roads, and in many cases no obvious way up at all. The first and greatest, the Great Meteoron, was founded around 1356 by a monk known as Athanasios the Meteorite, and it remains the largest of them all. In 1988, UNESCO inscribed Meteora as a World Heritage Site, noting that the monasteries were built “despite incredible difficulties.”

The phrase is an understatement. Until the early twentieth century, the only way to reach most of the monasteries was to be hoisted up the sheer cliff face in a net, pulled by hand on a rope wound around a wooden winch by the monks above. Building materials, food, supplies, and people all arrived the same way, swinging in the open air, hundreds of meters above the ground. The monks themselves climbed by long, removable wooden ladders that they drew up behind them.

A visiting traveler once asked how often they replaced the ropes that hoisted people up. The reply, as the story goes, was that they replaced them only when they broke.

Today, narrow staircases carved into the stone in the 1920s make the six surviving monasteries accessible to visitors. But standing at the foot of one of those pillars and looking up — at a small church balanced on a peak the wind has been polishing for sixty million years — the wonder is no longer about how. It is about what kind of soul looks at the impossible and decides that is where home should be…

2. Cut as Cleanly as a Laser

This is not AI. You are looking at something in northern Ethiopia. The question is not what it is. The question is: how could anyone have made this?

The answer, more than eight hundred years old, is stranger than anything you might imagine…

Read more

Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen. These two arts, you may call them both either poetry or painting, have here interchanged the senses by which they penetrate to the intellect.

There may be no better words to prepare you for what you are about to see.

We live in an age of almost unimaginable achievement. We have split the atom, sequenced the genome, built telescopes that can see light from the first galaxies that ever formed. And yet a person can still walk into a gallery, stand in front of a panel painted five or six centuries ago, and feel something the modern world rarely produces: the sensation of looking at a piece of art that should not be possible. There are paintings that test not only what we see, but what we believe we are seeing…

That is the strange power of this art form. At its best, painting is an act of beautiful deception: an invitation to accept a few lines and shapes, made with color and a brush, as a living world. Instead of imitating reality, the greatest painters set out to challenge it. And in a handful of extraordinary cases, they produced things that still baffle us today: a trick of perspective, an illusion stretched across a ceiling, a reflection in an eye, rendered with a precision that even now, with everything we know, is difficult to fully explain.

To see it, though, you have to slow down. These works do not give themselves away at a glance. The longer you look, the more they reveal, and the stranger they become. As Nietzsche once put it:

The voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls.

What follows are 6 artworks that have been haunting people for centuries. Very few things made by humans can do what they do: they ask you to reconsider what you ever believed a single pair of hands could achieve…

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1. The Painting That Was Never Painted

In December of 1531, ten years after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, an indigenous man named Juan Diego was walking near the hill of Tepeyac, outside Mexico City. According to the account written down in the Nahuatl-language Nican Mopohua, he encountered a young woman, radiant as the sun, who spoke to him in his own language and identified herself as the mother of God. She asked that a church be built on the hill. The local archbishop, Juan de Zumárraga, asked for a sign.

Days later, Juan Diego opened his tilma — a cloak woven from coarse cactus fiber — to let a cascade of out-of-season roses fall to the floor. On the cloth itself, the witnesses saw an image: a dark-haired, olive-skinned woman, head bowed, hands joined in prayer.

That cloak still exists. It hangs today above the altar of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City — the most-visited Catholic shrine on earth.

And for nearly five centuries, it has resisted a simple question: who painted it?

The image has been examined again and again. In 1666, as part of a formal Church inquiry, seven professional painters studied it and testified that it seemed impossible for any human artist to have produced something so refined on fabric so rough.

In 1979, the biophysicist Philip Callahan photographed it under infrared light and reported that, in the original portions of the figure, he could detect no preparatory sketch and no visible brushstrokes. He documented numerous later additions and touch-ups, much of which had cracked or deteriorated over the centuries — but concluded that the original image, in his words, could not be explained and that after more than four hundred years it showed no fading or cracking of any kind.

The strangest aspect, however, concerns the eyes:

Beginning in 1956, ophthalmologists examining the Virgin’s eyes with magnification reported what they described as tiny human figures reflected in the corneas — and claimed these silhouettes behaved like Purkinje–Sanson images, the reflections that light naturally produces on the curved surfaces of a living human eye.

Decades later, the engineer José Aste Tonsmann, using digital image enhancement, claimed to have identified as many as thirteen figures in the eyes, which he interpreted as the scene in the bishop’s room at the moment the cloak was first opened in 1531.

It is important to be honest about all of this. Not every examination has reached the same conclusion. A 1982 study by José Sol Rosales, for instance, found that the image had been painted with ordinary sixteenth-century materials and techniques. And there is an older complication still: in 1556, just twenty-five years after the apparition, a senior Franciscan friar named Francisco de Bustamante delivered a furious public sermon in Mexico City, in which he stated plainly that it had been painted — “the work of an Indian painter,” he said, naming a native artist called Marcos.

The image has, in other words, been contested almost since the moment it first appeared.

But that is exactly what makes the tilma so extraordinary. It has survived nearly five centuries of candle smoke, incense, humidity, and a nitric acid spill in the late 1700s. It also endured a bomb detonated directly beneath it in 1921, which bent a brass crucifix and shattered marble, yet left the cloth itself completely untouched. It is one of the most examined images in human history — and after five hundred years, the examinations still do not agree. Whatever you believe about how it came to exist, the tilma remains a masterpiece that has never fully surrendered its secrets…

2. The Skull That Hides in Plain Sight

In 1533, the German painter Hans Holbein the Younger completed a double portrait of two young Frenchmen: Jean de Dinteville, the French ambassador to the court of Henry VIII, and Georges de Selve, the Bishop of Lavaur. The painting, known simply as The Ambassadors, now hangs in the National Gallery in London.

At first glance, it is a triumph of pure technical realism. The longer you look, the harder that triumph becomes to comprehend…

Holbein renders fabric the way a modern camera renders it. The black satin, the pink silk, the white fur lining, the soft individual hairs of the two men’s beards — each surface has its own distinct weight and sheen.

But the two ambassadors are not really the heart of the painting. The heart of it is the shelf between them, and Holbein paints every object on it with the precision of a scientific instrument-maker. On the upper level are the tools of the celestial realm: a celestial globe, a sundial, a torquetum and other astronomical instruments. On the lower level are the objects of the earthly one: a terrestrial globe, a lute, a case of flutes, an open hymn book, a book of arithmetic.

Each is rendered so exactly that scholars have been able to identify the arithmetic text as a real published manual by the German astronomer Peter Apian and even locate, on the terrestrial globe, the position of Dinteville’s own château at Polisy. The objects are a portrait in their own right — a display of everything these two men have measured, mastered, and understood.

But Holbein’s cleverness runs deeper than display. Look closely at the lute, and you will see that one of its strings is broken — a symbol of discord, of something fractured. The hymn book beside it is open to a translation by Martin Luther: the painting was made as the Protestant Reformation was tearing Europe in two, and Holbein lets the tension whisper through the objects rather than state it.

And there, half-hidden behind the green curtain in the upper left corner, almost lost, is a small silver crucifix. The placement is deliberate. For all the human power gathered on that shelf — the ability to chart the heavens and map the earth — the painting suggests that true meaning lies outside it, in something the instruments cannot measure.

And then there is the thing that, at first, you cannot see at all.

Stretched diagonally across the floor at the men’s feet is a strange, pale, smeared shape. From directly in front of the artwork, it looks like a flaw, a blur, something gone wrong. It is not. It is a human skull, painted in anamorphic perspective — a distortion so extreme that the image only resolves into its true form when the viewer stands close to the painting and looks at it from a sharp angle to the right.

There is a genius in this beyond the technical feat. We cannot see the skull at first — just as we spend our lives not quite able to see, or accept, the transience of everything we are looking at.

Holbein painted earthly reality so vividly that we refuse to believe it is only pigment, and then hid death inside it, in plain sight, waiting for each viewer to step to the side and find what was there all along…

3. A Painting Full of Other Paintings

Around the year 1620, an unknown Flemish artist painted something astonishing. The work, housed in London’s National Gallery, is called Cognoscenti in a Room hung with Pictures. At first it looks straightforward: eleven elegantly dressed men — connoisseurs, collectors, dealers, the cognoscenti of the title — stand in a vast room, inspecting and discussing art.

But look closer at the walls and zoom in…

The room is crowded, floor to ceiling, with dozens of paintings, sculptures, prints, and astronomical instruments. And nearly every one of them is a meticulous miniature reproduction of a real, identifiable work of art by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masters, most of them active in Antwerp.

The artist painted, by hand, a gallery’s worth of other artists’ paintings in perfect miniature — each with its own composition, its own subject, its own style faithfully copied, all within a single canvas. It is a painting that contains an entire museum.

And on the windowsill, almost hidden, the artist placed a small monkey — a traditional symbol of human folly and a reminder of how foolish it is to spend your life chasing the ownership of expensive things, while missing the bigger picture.

4. This Mirror Reflects the Whole Room

In 1434, the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck completed a small oil painting, barely 80 centimeters tall, that would become one of the most studied works of art ever made. It is known as The Arnolfini Portrait, and it is also part of the collection at the National Gallery. It shows a richly dressed couple — most likely the Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife — standing together in a private room in the city of Bruges.

What makes the painting extraordinary is van Eyck’s command of oil paint, a medium he helped pioneer. Working with translucent layer upon translucent layer, he achieved a level of detail that, in 1434, simply did not exist anywhere else in European art. Every surface in the room is rendered with almost unsettling precision: the soft fur trimming the clothing, the brass of the elaborate chandelier with its single lit candle, the oranges by the window — a luxury import, painted so convincingly you can sense their weight.

Van Eyck signed the work not in a corner, but boldly on the back wall, in elegant script: Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434 — “Jan van Eyck was here. 1434.”

But the heart of the painting — and the detail that has astonished viewers for almost six hundred years — is the convex mirror on the back wall.

It is small, round, and at first easy to overlook…

Its curved glass reflects the entire room in miniature — the backs of the couple, the windows, the ceiling beams, the whole space compressed into a sphere a few centimeters across. And it does not stop there. In the mirror, you can see two more figures, people standing roughly where you, the viewer, are standing, entering the room through a door that is not otherwise visible.

One of them may be van Eyck himself.

The wooden frame around the mirror is studded with ten tiny scenes from the Passion of Christ — and each of those scenes, painted in a space barely a centimeter and a half wide, is still individually recognizable.

Van Eyck painted a mirror, inside a painting, that reflects a world larger than the painting itself, and he did it nearly six centuries ago, with a mastery of oil paint that no-one alive could yet match.

5. A Ceiling That Opens Into the Sky

When the Jesuit Church of Sant’Ignazio in Rome was being completed in the seventeenth century, it was meant to be crowned with a magnificent dome. The money ran out. The dome was never built, leaving a flat, empty ceiling where the grandest feature of the church should have been.

So the Jesuits turned to Andrea Pozzo — a lay brother of the order, a painter, and a master of mathematical perspective. Between 1685 and 1694, Pozzo solved the problem in the most audacious way imaginable. He simply painted the dome. On a flat canvas, using nothing but perspective, light, and shadow, he created the illusion of a soaring ribbed cupola opening into the sky above the church — complete with curving architecture, receding columns, and streaming light.

Stand on the small marble disc set into the floor of the nave, look up, and the dome is there: deep, three-dimensional, utterly convincing.

Then walk forward: as you move away from that one marked spot, the illusion begins to warp, and when you stand directly beneath it, the dome collapses entirely into what it always was — a flat painting on a flat ceiling.mo

Pozzo did the same with the nave ceiling itself, painting the whole vault as though the roof of the church had dissolved and figures were rising endlessly into heaven.

It is one of the greatest optical illusions ever committed to paint: an entire piece of architecture that exists only in two dimensions, and only from the right point of view.

6. This Painting Is Looking at You

In 1656, the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez completed a canvas that would become, in the centuries since, perhaps the most analyzed painting in the entire history of Western art. It is called Las Meninas — Spanish for “the ladies-in-waiting” — and it is displayed at Museo del Prado in Madrid.

It is enormous: 318 by 276 centimeters, which means the figures inside it are nearly life-size and the canvas portrayed within the painting is about the same size as Las Meninas itself. Standing before it feels less like looking at an artwork than like looking through a doorway into a room that happens to exist in 1656.

At the center stands the five-year-old Infanta Margarita Teresa, daughter of King Philip IV. She is surrounded by a small crowd: two meninas attending to her, two court dwarfs, a chaperone, a bodyguard, a large dog dozing in the foreground.

A man pauses on a staircase in a lit doorway at the back, and a delicate brushstroke beside him adds a gentle glow, enriching the depth of the composition.

And on the far left, standing before an enormous canvas turned away from us, is Velázquez himself — brush in one hand, palette in the other — in the act of painting. It was an extraordinarily bold thing to do in the seventeenth century: to insert your own self-portrait, at full height, into a royal commission, mingling your own likeness with that of the king’s family.

The painter's chest bears the red cross of the Order of Santiago, which he received years after this masterpiece was finished. According to Palomino — known as the “Spanish Vasari” — the king ordered this to be added after his death, “and some say that his Majesty himself painted it”.

And then there is the mirror…

On the rear wall, between the figures, hangs a small mirror, glowing softly with reflected light. Look into it, and the entire painting silently reorganizes itself around you. The mirror reflects two people who appear nowhere else in the scene: King Philip IV and Queen Mariana. They are standing precisely where you, the viewer, are standing. Which means the empty space in front of the canvas — your space — is not empty at all. You are occupying the position of the king and queen of Spain. Everyone in that room who is looking out at “you” is in fact looking at the monarchs.

The painting is, by the way, the only known double portrait of the royal couple Velázquez ever made — and they appear in it only as a reflection, a few centimeters wide, on a distant wall.

Velázquez built a picture with no fixed center and no settled meaning — a picture that watches the person watching it, that folds the viewer bodily into its own subject, and that turns a simple court portrait into an endless loop of looking. For nearly four centuries, scholars, philosophers, and painters have stood in front of it and tried to pin down exactly what they are seeing. But they have never fully succeeded…

Salvador Dalí once said:

I’m a very bad painter. To be a good painter you’ve got to be a bit stupid, with the exception of Velázquez, who is a genius, whose talent surpasses the art of painting.

We tend to believe that progress moves in a single direction — that the present always knows more, sees more, can do more than the past. And in so many ways it does. But beauty has never obeyed that rule. These works were made by people with no machines to do the difficult part for them, only pigment, patience, and an unreasonable refusal to accept what a flat surface was supposed to be capable of.

We live quickly now. We glance, and we move on. But these paintings cannot be received that way, and they never could. They ask for the one thing we rarely offer anymore: our stillness. And in that stillness, something extraordinary happens. A stranger who is long gone, and you, who are here, meet for a moment that transcends the centuries between you. Go and stand in front of a painting this weekend, if you can. Wait there, patiently, long enough to be met by the human being who traded their time on earth to leave a little beauty behind…

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On the morning of 21 July 1798, leading his army into battle near the pyramids of Giza, Napoleon Bonaparte turned to his troops and said:

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

Even Napoleon, a man not known for being easily humbled, could not stand in front of the Giza plateau and feel anything but small…

Anyone who has been there knows the feeling. The pyramids overwhelm you. And as you look at them, a question forms in the back of your mind that nobody has ever entirely answered: how did this happen? How did a civilization capable of producing structures so enormous, so geometrically precise, so engineered for permanence, appear in the Nile Valley thousands of years before anything comparable existed anywhere else on earth?

The Great Pyramid alone stood as the tallest man-made structure on earth for millennia, and experts who have studied it across entire careers often admit that what the Egyptians accomplished — without modern machines, without iron, without the wheel as we use it today — remains genuinely difficult to grasp.

And the strangeness does not stop at the pyramids. Across thousands of years, they produced a long catalogue of objects, monuments, and astonishing feats of engineering. Mainstream Egyptology has plausible explanations for most of them: ramps, sledges, copper chisels, dolerite hammers, organized labor, and enormous spans of time. These explanations work for much of what survives. But against the scale and precision of certain works, they still leave us with more questions than full answers.

A civilization working with copper tools and rope produced things that even modern engineers, with diamond saws and industrial cranes, describe as remarkable. You do not need to reach for anything beyond the evidence to be in awe of what they were able to bring into the world.

As the American Egyptologist Mark Lehner — one of the foremost living authorities on Giza — has written:

We think of the pyramids as mysteries, but the stones, hieroglyphs, landscapes, and even layers of sands and debris around them hold stories.

Here are five of those stories. Five things ancient Egypt built that, even after centuries of study, still do not entirely make sense…

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1. The Wonder That Surpassed the Pyramids

While we still wait to see whether the recent claims by Italian researcher Filippo Biondi about massive underground structures beneath the Giza Plateau hold up under scrutiny — most archaeologists remain deeply skeptical, and the work has yet to be peer-reviewed — the debate itself highlights something important.

We know for a fact that the Egyptians built extraordinary underground complexes, and that they impressed the ancients just as much as they impress us today.

In the fifth century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus — often called the father of history — traveled to Egypt and saw something that left him struggling for words…

He had already seen the pyramids of Giza. He had talked about them in detail. And yet, on the same journey, he came across a single building so vast and so confounding that he described it as the greatest architectural achievement of all time:

I have seen it myself, and I found it greater than words can say. For if one should put together all the buildings produced by the Hellenes, they would prove to be inferior in labour and expense to this labyrinth. Though the pyramids beggar description, this maze surpasses even the pyramids. […] The Egyptian caretakers would by no means show us the underground chambers, as they were, they said, the burial vaults of the kings who first built it. The upper we saw for ourselves, and they are creations greater than human.

He was talking about the Labyrinth of Hawara, built south of Amenemhat III’s pyramid. According to Herodotus, the structure contained 3,000 rooms — 1,500 above ground and 1,500 below — arranged across twelve roofed courts, surrounded by a single outer wall, with passageways so confusing that visitors could not move through it without a guide.

Two centuries later, the Greek geographer Strabo visited the same building and described immense colonnades, a “great palace made up of many palaces”, and massive chambers, each one roofed with a single colossal stone — no timber, no smaller blocks, just enormous slabs spanning the entire width of each room.

Other ancient writers all referenced the Labyrinth across the centuries that followed. It is mentioned in at least six classical sources. In the 1st century BC, Diodorus Siculus made the following claim:

They left no room for their successors to surpass them. For, when one had entered the sacred enclosure, one found a temple surrounded by columns, 40 to each side, and this building had a roof made of a single stone.

To understand why this matters, imagine what it would mean to do this today. Moving and lifting a single stone slab large enough to roof an entire room is a very serious undertaking. Doing it hundreds of times, with such precision that the slabs sat perfectly flush against the walls and held their own weight without internal supports, would be a logistical challenge of extraordinary complexity even now.

Yet they did it so many times, in a single building, that ancient Greek visitors — who had seen the great temples of the Mediterranean world — wrote that what they had stood inside at Hawara was a work that surpassed the pyramids themselves, and anything their own civilization had produced.

The labyrinth’s construction has been attributed to Amenemhat III, who ruled in 1800 BC. Yet, in Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder wrote:

There is still in Egypt a labyrinth, which was the first constructed, three thousand six hundred years ago, they say, by King Petesuchis or Tithöes.

What makes this passage almost surreal is the math. Pliny was writing in the first century AD. “Three thousand six hundred years ago” places the original construction of the Labyrinth somewhere around 3,500 BC, in the late Predynastic period — long before Egypt was even a unified state, and nearly a millennium before modern archaeology dates the pyramids of Giza.

And then, slowly, the Labyrinth disappeared from history.

By the time European Egyptology emerged in the 19th century, it had already become a distant memory. Flinders Petrie excavated the site at Hawara in 1888. He uncovered the outline of an enormous rectangular structure — over 300 meters long and 244 meters wide — and concluded he was looking at the foundation slab of the long-vanished Labyrinth, the rest of which had been quarried away in antiquity for use as building material elsewhere. There is now reason to believe he had it the wrong way around. He was not standing on the floor of the Labyrinth. He was standing on its roof…

For more than a century his interpretation remained largely unchallenged. Until 2008.

That year, the Mataha Expedition — an Egyptian–Belgian collaboration between the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics in Cairo and Ghent University — conducted a ground-penetrating radar survey of the area south of the Amenemhat III pyramid. What they detected, several meters below the sand, was a grid of vertical structures, several meters thick, consistent with a network of nearly closed rooms at depths of 8 to 12 meters.

A subsequent 2023 study by Mark Carlotto, using space-based synthetic aperture radar, detected anomalies in the same area that aligned with the Mataha findings. Whether or not part of the structure Herodotus described still survives below the surface, the geophysical evidence has changed what scholars believe may still be recoverable about the Labyrinth.

There is, however, one major obstacle standing in the way of uncovering the site: in the late 1820s, a canal known as the Bahr Selah was cut through the southeast corner of the Labyrinth complex, and water has been seeping into the underground chambers ever since.

The Egyptian government has not authorized further excavation. The data exists. The structure, by every available indication, is still down there. And the most accurate description we have of it remains the one written by a Greek historian 2500 years ago — a man who saw it with his own eyes and described it as the single greatest wonder of the ancient world…

2. The Largest Stone Statue in History

In the ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple lies the foot of a shattered statue carved from a single block of red granite, whose true scale, once reconstructed, goes beyond what we thought this civilization was capable of.

From the size of that foot alone, the implication was unmistakable…

Read more

In a letter dated September 1537, the poet Pietro Aretino wrote:

The world has many kings, but only one Michelangelo.

Many today still consider him the greatest artist of all time. The archetypal Renaissance man — a sculptor, a painter, an architect, a poet — who seemed to operate at a level his contemporaries could not even properly describe.

Already in his lifetime, they called him Il Divino, the divine one. Art historians ever since have used another word, terribilità, to describe what he produced: the particular quality of an artwork so overwhelming that it provokes not admiration but awe, the sense of standing before something that should not be possible.

There is no work in which this quality is more directly experienced than the David.

Anyone who has ever stood in front of it in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence knows exactly what terribilità means. There is no photograph that prepares you for it...

Michelangelo received the commission in August 1501, when he was twenty-six years old. He finished it in three years, working in such secrecy that wooden planks were built around the block to keep anyone from seeing the work in progress.

When the statue was finally unveiled in September 1504, his contemporary Giorgio Vasari, the father of art history, wrote that Michelangelo had “surpassed all ancient and modern statues, whether Greek or Latin, that have ever existed.”

Five centuries later, the Italian art critic Vittorio Sgarbi has spoken about his art in language that few modern critics would dare to use:

If an artist like Michelangelo exists, it means that God exists. In his work, he seems to enter into a direct dialogue with the divine.

That may sound like hyperbole — but the 5 details you are about to see will show you why it isn’t. That a single human being is responsible for all of them is something almost impossible to comprehend. Perhaps the closest thing to an answer was given by Michelangelo himself, when he said this about his own work:

In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.

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1. The Vein That Anticipated Science by a Century

In December 2019, Dr. Daniel Gelfman, a cardiologist and clinical professor at the Marian University College of Osteopathic Medicine, published a short paper in JAMA Cardiology, one of the most respected medical journals in the world. He titled it “The David Sign.” It described a detail he had noticed while visiting the Galleria dell’Accademia — a detail that, in his words, had been “hiding in plain sight for more than 500 years.”

What Gelfman had seen, with the trained eye of a heart specialist, was that the external jugular vein on the right side of David’s neck is clearly distended — visibly raised above the collarbone, exactly as it would appear on a real human being in a state of intense physical excitement.

In ordinary anatomy, this vein is not normally visible. It only stands out under specific physiological conditions: extreme stress, intense exertion, or heightened cardiovascular activity. In other words, exactly the state a young man would be in moments before facing a giant.

This is where the discovery becomes extraordinary. The mechanics of the human circulatory system — how blood actually flows back to the heart through the venous system — were not formally described in medical science until 1628, when the English physician William Harvey published his treatise De Motu Cordis. Michelangelo finished David in 1504. He was depicting, with anatomical precision, a circulatory phenomenon that science would not understand for another 124 years.

“Michelangelo, like some of his artistic contemporaries, had anatomical training,” Gelfman wrote in his paper. “I realized that he must have noticed temporary jugular venous distension in healthy individuals who are excited.”

He had. The marble had been telling us for five centuries before a doctor finally noticed…

2. Manu Fortis

Look at David’s right hand. It is, anatomically speaking, too big for his body. The proportion is wrong. Every casual observer who has stood in front of the statue and looked carefully has noticed it.

There are two reasons for this — and both reveal something about Michelangelo’s mind.

The first is practical. David was originally commissioned in 1501 as one of twelve statues of prophets to be installed along the roofline of the Florence Cathedral, roughly 80 meters above the ground.

Michelangelo sculpted the statue knowing it would be viewed from far below, and he deliberately enlarged the head, the hands, and certain other features to compensate for the foreshortening that distance would create.

When the statue was finally completed, however, a commission of the most prominent artists of the age decided it was simply too beautiful to be hidden 80 meters in the air. They placed it instead in the public square in front of the Palazzo della Signoria, where it was unveiled on 8 September 1504. It stood there for 369 years, until it was finally moved indoors in 1873.

The second reason is symbolic. In the Middle Ages, the biblical David was known by the Latin epithet manu fortis — strong of hand. It was a reference to the divine power that flowed through him when he faced Goliath: the strength of God, made visible in the body of a young shepherd boy. Michelangelo carved that nickname directly into the marble. The hand is large because David’s hand, in the story, was the instrument of the impossible.

But none of this prepares you for what that hand actually looks like up close…

Stand below it and you will see veins that rise beneath the surface of the stone the way veins rise beneath skin under tension. It is the hand of a real man, in a real moment, captured with such precision that you find yourself looking — almost involuntarily — for a pulse.

And then you remember that what made all this possible was a damaged block of marble that two other sculptors had given up on. Agostino di Duccio in 1464, Antonio Rossellino in 1475 — both abandoned it because it was too flawed to be worked with. The block sat outside in the cathedral yard for over thirty years before Michelangelo arrived. The slim figure of the David, the slightly sideways gaze, the narrow stance — all of these were dictated by the limitations of a stone no one else thought could be saved.

And then Michelangelo freed David from a piece of rock the rest of the world had given up on…

3. Two Hearts, Hidden in Plain Sight

Look closely at David’s eyes — closely enough to forget for a moment the image you already know. Look only at the pupils.

They are not circles. They are hearts.

Most statues use a simple vertical slit in the pupil to give the eye depth and catch the light. David’s pupils are unmistakably heart-shaped.

Some have suggested it was a play on the letter D, often written as a heart shape in Renaissance Italy. A more technical reading holds that it was a sculptural device designed to catch light from below and create the illusion of a moist, living eye — since the statue was originally meant to be viewed from far beneath.

There is something else hidden in those eyes that no one noticed for a very long time. In 2005, an article published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, based on data from Stanford University’s Digital Michelangelo Project, revealed that David is slightly cross-eyed. His right eye gazes straight ahead. His left eye is focused on a different, more distant point.

The reason this had escaped notice for half a millennium is simple: most viewers are physically unable to examine the David at eye level, since he stands more than five meters above the floor. From below, the asymmetry is invisible. Only the high-resolution 3D scans of Stanford’s project finally exposed it.

Why Michelangelo did this is something scholars are still debating.

What is no longer in doubt is that the eyes are not just open... They are watching.

4. The One Imperfection He Could Not Hide

Walk around to the back of the David and look at the right side of his back, between the shoulder blade and the spine. There, where the right infraspinatus muscle should be — one of the four muscles that make up the rotator cuff — there is nothing. The muscle is missing.

The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons has noted this anomaly, and modern shoulder specialists who study the statue all see it immediately.

But Michelangelo knew...

In one of his own letters, he wrote that there was a defect in the block of marble that prevented him from reproducing the muscle. He could not have hidden it. He could only acknowledge it.

The reason this matters is that Michelangelo, alongside Leonardo da Vinci, was one of the most rigorous students of human anatomy of his age. He began dissecting corpses at the age of seventeen, when the prior of Santo Spirito in Florence granted him access to bodies awaiting burial. The practice would continue, intensively, for over a decade.

He knew the body better than almost anyone alive. The only thing missing from his David is what the stone would not let him reach.

5. A Soul Trapped in Marble

Forget for a moment the body, the hand, the proportions. Look only at the brow, the eyes, the deep furrow between them.

This does not look like something a man carved out of stone. It looks like something alive. As if Michelangelo had not sculpted David at all, but caught the soul of someone real and let it settle inside the marble, where it has been looking back at us, century after century, ever since.

At 5.17 meters tall — roughly the height of a two-story building — David was not only the first colossal marble statue of the High Renaissance, but the largest since classical antiquity.

When the work was finally finished they had to tear down the archway of Michelangelo’s workshop to get the statue out, as recorded by the Florentine chronicler Luca Landucci. It then took 40 men, 4 days, and 14 greased logs to move it half a mile to the Piazza della Signoria.

The engraving below shows the David being moved again from the Piazza in 1873:

Today, in the Galleria dell’Accademia, the statue is dusted regularly by hand.

The photographs of restorers standing on small platforms next to him, leaning in to clean his hair, are the only images that give you any honest sense of his scale. And it is in those photographs that the impossibility of what Michelangelo did finally lands: the fact that a single human being, alone, produced a sculpture this enormous and this perfect.

Just as Sandro Botticelli’s Venus is regarded as the epitome of female beauty in art, Michelangelo’s David is seen as the ideal representation of the male form — and many scholars today still consider it the most beautiful work of art ever created by man.

There is, perhaps, no better way to close this piece than with the words of Vasari, who stood in the Piazza della Signoria the day the David was unveiled. After everything we have just seen, what he wrote no longer sounds like exaggeration:

It was a miracle that Michelangelo was able to raise up one who had died.

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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.

If you’ve been thinking about supporting my work, becoming a paid subscriber is the most meaningful way to do it:

Upgrade to paid

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…

Read more

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…

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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…

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

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

If you’ve been thinking about supporting my work, becoming a paid subscriber is the most meaningful way to do it:

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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…

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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.

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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…

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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