What the beautiful thing has survived

Original concept reading

Look at the grain of an old table. The dark ring, the split near the edge, the place where a hand has worn the finish away. We could call those things defects. We could also ask how much of its beauty would remain without them.

Ruin asks us to look at time without the comfort of pretending it leaves us untouched. Beauty asks us to keep looking. Between them is the difficult work of loving something we cannot preserve forever.