The Mercy of Ruins

This May, my family and I will travel to Turkey for a week-long guided historical tour with an expert on early Christianity. The tour includes ancient sites like Sardis, Didyma, and Pergamon — all multi-layered landscapes full of art and architecture. Once our tickets were confirmed, I was considering just how many ancient sites I have had the privilege to visit. As I was reflecting on this, I felt a familiar rise in my chest. Today, I can name this feeling — turn it over and look underneath it, hold it up to the light and examine it, even speak and write about it intellectually. But this was not always possible. In the past, the unknowability of this feeling — not just the mystery of its origins, but of its very existence — tangled with other conditions of my mind and surfaced as fear, confusion, bewilderment, and sadness. 

This condition took root in my heart at the Lincoln Memorial when I was about nine years old. I remember walking with my aunt and uncle along the reflecting pool at nighttime, approaching the marble shape of a gigantic seated man, glowing white and gold. We walked and walked until carved lines emerged from the brightness — the long coat draped over the edge of his seat, the carved points of his kneecaps. I felt a sense of grim inevitability — of unavoidable transformation — as if I were to be exposed to something otherworldly, and the encounter would change me forever. 

Up close, the shadows under Lincoln’s angular cheeks and his discerning gaze seemed menacing. I had to turn my eyes away as we lingered at his feet. The view of the still water and the Washington Monument beyond was similarly distressing — I couldn’t bear witness to the perpetual prospect from Lincoln’s massive stone eyes. My stomach turned at the thought of those eyes watching us process towards him and up the stairs only a few moments before, only a temporary fixture in his eternal gaze. Lincoln’s right foot was slightly forward, his fingers gripping the arm of his chair, as if about to stand up. But, of course, Lincoln would never stand up again. 

The uncanniness of my meeting with Lincoln stayed with me. I later came to think of it as a response to the sublime: What registers as awe in an adult can arrive as fear in a child, when scale and power overwhelm the self before it knows how to stand at a distance. Yet this explanation never felt sufficient to account for the despair that commingled with my fear that night. I knew enough to understand the veneration the monument demanded, but I sensed dimly that there was something terribly tragic about the memory we had gathered to honor, immobilized by 175 tons of stone, trapped forever behind twelve columns. Lincoln sat before me in monumental repose, intact in marble reverence, and yet inescapably dead.

About three years ago my family toured the Greek island of Delos while on a cruise in the Aegean Sea. Delos remains one of the most concentrated sites of history and culture I’ve ever encountered. The site is like an open-air cave of wonders: rows and rows of stacked stone wind along the hillsides, enclosing beautiful yet bizarre mosaics, and columns rise from the earth, their architraves long lost or crumbled at their bases. Delos was a major cult center, housing The Sanctuary of Apollo — an ancient complex of temples and monuments that once featured a massive kouros of the god. Apollo’s colossal foot is on display in the British Museum, while pieces of his torso are stacked one on top of the other in situ — endlessly scoured by the sharp winds over the treeless island of priceless rubble. 

I remember feeling complex waves of inexplicable emotion while exploring the nearly empty site with my family. I felt deep sadness, surrounded by this history. I ignored their pangs while resenting their presence, feeling hopeless. This numb wretchedness was not new — it was my constant companion, highlighted most brightly in moments where I should be happy and well. I would think, without truly probing the question: What is wrong with me? What is this barrier between me and the outside world? Why do I feel a dense fog over my mind? I did not know how to begin answering these questions. At this point, I was stuck pulling my same familiar levers — a better body, higher grades, or the perfect wardrobe would bring me happiness and satisfaction. I always insisted the answer was already in my hands: Just try harder — you know what’s broken, so fix it. But my usual vows to reconfigure myself and to begin again rang hopelessly hollow. I sat on a boulder framed by stone lions and allowed myself to cry uncontrollably, bewildered by the senselessness of my own emotions.  

I believe reading fiction is one of the most powerful means of understanding one’s psychological anomalies. A keen and observant author can illuminate aspects of the human condition that otherwise remain undetectable — forces operating invisibly within each of us. At its best, writing gives language to what shapes our minds, our relationships, and our experience of reality. I was able to resolve my condition without resorting to the hedonistic narratives of second sons on their Grand Tours, who wrote rapturously of the “enlightening” effects of ancient ruins before returning north newly invigorated, newly conscious of themselves as the inheritors of a splendid culture and tradition, completely certain of their place in the world. Rather, the pieces came together in a less remarkable place — Gambier, Ohio — through a famously provincial narrative: George Eliot’s story of a fictional English town called Middlemarch.

George Eliot’s heroine, Dorothea, travels to Rome for her honeymoon with the feeble and priggish Edward Casaubon, thirty years her senior. Dorothea, principled and earnest, longs for knowledge; she imagines her marriage as the beginning of a grand intellectual journey. But she soon discovers that her husband’s mind contains no scenic vistas — only labyrinthine staircases leading nowhere. Indeed, this honeymoon turned into a dramatic spiritual ordeal. 

As the “dreamlike strangeness of her bridal life” unfolds amid Rome’s great ceilings and facades, the sheltered Dorothea has no defense against the overwhelming impressions of that “gigantic broken revelation of Imperial and Papal city.” Eliot describes how the dead, pale eyes of marble statues and the carved men in relief, struggling eternally up the walls, would haunt her for years. Dorothea hoped that marriage would set her virtuous ideals in motion — make their execution possible, allow her to leave her mark on the world. The sights of her honeymoon insisted otherwise: ideals decay, and the symbols of once-great virtues are destined to become exhibits of an exoticized pagan past.

Reading this, I was called back to that day on Delos, walking among a similar “vast wreck of ambitious ideals”— a landscape of ruins foregrounded in my own unhappy present. I remembered that same psychic vertigo: the disorienting grief I felt for the men and women who had labored to raise monuments to powerful forces of nature and belief. Their energy and conviction — poured into truths that are now incomprehensible — lay scattered across the desert. Those people were gone, and the serious work of their lives had been transformed into something viewed from afar, with mystical suspicion or academic detachment. Their clarity of purpose and drive to create felt overwhelming next to my own uncertainty and self-consciousness.

Likewise, the Lincoln Memorial presents itself as a vision of the democratic ideal — its neoclassical symmetry meant to convey order, humanism, and moral permanence. Lincoln is offered not as a man but as an emblem: the honest and liberatory unifier. These were the values Daniel Chester French sought to fix in stone in the early twentieth century. Unlike the ruins of Delos, this architecture insists that its ideals are not finished with us — that they still stand, intact and binding, even if only in theory. My nine-year-old self could not have named any fracture in the democratic ideals the monument enshrined. That awareness came later, when I returned to Washington as an adult and felt the distance between the certainty of the architecture projects and the instability of the world unfolding beneath it. 

The two sites are unified by the same horror: Human conviction trapped inside material form. In Delos, the gods had been allowed to die; their temples stood empty of belief. At the Lincoln Memorial, the god is kept alive; his vigilant and immutable ideals watching. Affixed in marble at the height of his moral clarity, his body arranged to suggest action while the medium forbids it, Lincoln’s beliefs cannot fade or fracture. They are preserved inside him with such fidelity that they can no longer breathe. 

What I felt that night at the Lincoln Memorial was not simply fear of scale or death, but an early recognition of what it means to be asked to revere something that can no longer change. At Delos, belief had been relinquished, and the ruins bore the mercy of that release, while Lincoln is eternally answerable to a future he cannot see. Fiction did not dissolve this tension for me, but it gave me a way to live with it — to understand that ideals, like people, must be allowed to age, to falter, and, eventually, to end. Only then can they remain humane. 

I have always searched for answers in the monuments of the past. My family went to the UK last Christmas and travelled to Tintern Abbey, the ruined home of medieval Cistercian monks in Monmouthshire County, Wales. Only the structure’s skeleton remains. Under the open sky, birds perch in the refectory windows, and flock to the chancel if tourists get too close. I ambled through the gardens alongside the River Wye, tumbling down from the mountains above, running fast and cold through the valley. As the icy grass crunched under my boots, I realized I was doing it again — hoping that the ruins would allow me to understand something deeper about my own life. It was more difficult this time — the abbey did not demand reverence or permanence — the stones held no gaze. I felt no demand to inherit its purpose — only the freedom to imagine it, briefly, before letting it go. 

I no longer expect the past to tell me how to live. I once imagined the people of history as certain of their destinies, while I felt endlessly unsure of mine. But they, too, were looking backward for guidance — building monuments in the hope that conviction might be made permanent. I am still learning what my values are, and I do not yet trust them enough to fix them in stone. Perhaps that is not a failure of faith, but an act of care. To refuse to monumentalize what I love is to allow it to breathe, to change, and, when necessary, to end.