Silence, Stone, and Story

A concise and impartial dictionary of absence, promises, quarrels, ordinary objects, and the troublesome instability of words.

The temple we inherit is a building from which almost all necessity has been removed. Nothing must be brought for it to continue being what we call a temple. The sanctuary asks nothing of us. Stone is good at this kind of independence.
A living temple was otherwise.
Water had to come in. So did grain, cloth, oil, aromatic substances, fuel. The things required for worship arrived because someone carried them across a threshold.

Some of Angkor’s most intimate ruins do not rise above the ground at all. They are postholes, low mounds, hearths and ponds: durable traces of a domestic city built largely from things that decay. To restore that city is to see Angkor not only as stone, but as wood, smoke, water, repair, and people living within calling distance.

The gods came to Thebes for Harmonia’s wedding.
The Muses sang in the house Cadmus had built, and Cadmus fastened around her neck a necklace wrought by Hephaestus. They feasted with the gods.
The day had been beautiful.
Nothing that came later took that day from them.
In the years that followed, the house filled with children, grandchildren, ordinary voices—and losses for which no beginning could finally provide an answer.