One rarely turns to ancient Mesopotamian writing for feelings of human warmth. Their writing can seem as arrogant and formal as the statues of the kings of Babylon or Ahurbanipal’s horrid commissions of his own atrocities.

This style is imposing when we read Hammurabi’s monumental preface to his code of laws (some 600 words describing semi-divine deeds and titles), because his work really was monumental and worthy of admiration. Hammurabi may not have “conquered the four quarters of the world” or been commissioned by Anu and Bel to “bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers so that the strong should not harm the weak”, but his granite pillar gave a method to justice, and his meticulous concern for details laid the foundations for everything from due process to way to worker’s compensation. A monumentum aere perrenius indeed.

On lesser lips, this arrogance is quite ridiculous. When Sulgi, “god of manliness, the foremost of the troops”, boasts that he is “a powerful man who enjoys using his thighs”, I cannot keep a straight face. Mesopotamian arrogance trickled down from kings to scribes, all the way to animals. In the Debate between Bird and Fish, we read such lines as:

“I am Fish. I am responsibly charged with providing abundance for the pure shrines. For the great offerings at the lustrous E-kur, I stand proudly with head raised high!”.

Ancient fish apparently possessed not only a sense of religious duty, but also legs (a point in favor of young-earth evolutionism).

Yet, while researching the Ancient Near East this summer, I found myself strangely moved. What moved me was a small detail about Babylonian legal documents.

For Babylonians, seals served much the same way that signatures, passwords, or even Social Security numbers do today. They were a person’s unique imprint. This mark was affixed not just to legal documents and letters, but even to sealed doors as proof of the last person to enter and exit.

But the poor could not afford the finely made seals of kings and magistrates. They used simpler marks: the hems of garments and their own fingernails. They put a part of themselves in the clay of tablets. The clay, baked by fires, still bears these human marks some three thousand years later.

It is this image of humanity that is so moving. The person who laid their finger in wet clay must have used that same finger to work, to eat, to pray, perhaps to curse. They were not, perhaps, so different from me. The gulf of millennia is bridged by a piece of baked clay.

But there are other ways to leave an image of yourself in clay. The writing stylus, just like the fingernail, leaves the record of a man. The scribes, too, put something of themselves into the tablets that we can still read. Instead of a bodily mark, they impressed their fears, joys, and griefs.

Consider the following passage from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh has lost Enkidu, the only man who was his equal and therefore his only friend. In his grief, he turns to thoughts of his own death and wanders in search of the cure for death:

“Why should I not wander over the pastures in search of the wind? My friend, my younger brother, he who hunted the wild ass of the wilderness and the panther of the plains, my friend, my younger brother who seized and killed the Bull of Heaven and overthrew Humbaba -in the cedar forest, my friend who was very dear to me and who endured dangers beside me, Enkidu my brother, whom I loved, the end of mortality has overtaken him. I wept for him seven days and nights till the worm fastened on him. Because of my brother I am afraid of death, because of my brother I stray through the wilderness and cannot rest”.

This passage is moving, but the modern age has blunted its power. Our world no longer ends at the walls of Uruk. We are transfixed by Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan, and there is only so much room for the grief of a mythic king. I, for one, cannot weep for an imaginary Gilgamesh. Yet when I read this passage, I do not believe we are simply reading about a man who experienced the depths of friendship and feared his own mortality. I believe that they were written by such a man. Could the author have guessed what it was to feel grief? Did he simply imitate fear? Perhaps in this age, he could learn to, as the production and broadcasting of tragedies (real or imagined) make up a lively industry. But not then.

No, he knew. Death was no stranger to this scribe. The words he gave to Gilgamesh did not proceed from mere speculation.

Perhaps this is why this Sumerian epic was preserved, some thousand years later, by the Babylonians. A man from a people they had conquered had written a story a thousand years before in a language totally alien to theirs. And in that man, the Babylonians saw themselves.

It is this man, whoever he was, who moves me. Who was his Enkidu? What struggles did they face together? How did he grieve? I do not know. But that he knew friendship, loss, and fear, I can know.

All of history, properly viewed, is this: marks of persons that reveal, like a barely opened door, a deep and human world, into which we may glimpse but never enter.

Time spent watching cousins at play
Ultrasound photos around the house
“I’m sorry”s followed by “I forgive you”s
Old friends with whom you pick up right where you left off
Toddler’s attempts to mimic the sign of the cross
Emails from former students
Courtesy waves from the driver you let merge
Hours in Adoration
Grace-filled acts of countercultural defiance
Prayers uttered in stressful moments
Rolls of diaper bin trash bags

Drawn forth in bronze blood of dapple-boldened dew-light,
A glance truth forward fierces ‘neath a flash of fire folded, moon-molded
Golden red,
Bright in sun-glint and starren glades, glistering-glazed
In grieving-blissful grey; A gaze
Sorrow-deep and struck in silver as sung spheres
Wrung light with laughter
Proclaims in hush that pause flush forth in flourish
And fling on whirlwind wing a song of sounding
Wound, resounding
As wisps at wondering Western sky bear broad and brief
A piercing tone of precious measure
— As He who comes clear
Follows, hallows, herds homeward after —
Thy visage vivid-traced of tender starlight piered,
In sheer glass gleans
The glare of that most gracious eye.

During my senior year of college, I lived in the Catholic seminary at the edge of the campus of the University of Notre Dame. I had just entered the postulancy program, which meant that I was officially discerning the priesthood, even if I was still finishing my undergraduate degree. What all this meant in practice was that I was often up late at night, sometimes after an evening out with friends, writing papers or doing course readings. (A resident priest once passed my room and, seeing me with a copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter in hand, shook his head and kept walking.) I wasn’t really sure if I belonged in the formation program, though the decent job market relieved some of the pressure of figuring out one’s path in life. These were the years before the Great Recession, the years before the forever wars, the bailouts, the digitalization and commodification of every inch of culture and thought. In those late nights, my imagination had an expanse to roam, a horizon to contemplate, that I now fear no longer exists.

Those late nights were my dreamspace. Strange things can happen in these liminal places. On occasion, usually when I was deciding whether to push onward with my reading or call it a night, I would hear a low rumble coming from the elevator shaft next to my room. Built in the 1950s, the seminary was designed in the kind of optimistic, forward-looking style that quickly becomes dated. The hallways, an eighth-of-a-mile of muted carpet and painted cinder block, follow a slight arc such that lines of sight are always partially obscured. It would be strange, perhaps, to hear such noises in any place, but here one was almost encouraged to be spooked. After the rumble I would hear the elevator start to move. Sometimes, it would stop on my floor. The doors would open. Silence. Then they would close. Silence.

There was certainly some reasonable explanation for these strange occurrences, I assumed. There is always a reasonable explanation. Still, the speed by which I came to reassure myself made me ponder how our abiding faith in science and reason sanitizes experience and domesticates what is strange. “Disenchantment” is the word usually associated with this insight, and I felt the need to protect this bit of mystery, to hold it close while also not to let my mind run wild. In the stillness of those nights, I would sometimes light a candle — an attempt at giving my otherwise institutional living space the sense of a hearth and the warmth of a home, and also to keep the darkness at bay.

One elemental experience calls up another. A home is defined by its four walls and a sense of security. At the same time, the mystery of the unknown sharpens this desire for protection — the two play off each other. “House and space are not merely two juxtaposed elements of space,” writes Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. “In the reign of the imagination, they awaken daydreams in each other, that are opposed.” At that boundary between security and danger, inside and outside, home and not-home, something curious happens to the imagination. Disenchantment loses its hold.

Now that twenty years have passed, and having become a priest and an anthropologist, I teach a class on the anthropology of the house. The multiple dimensions of the house have always fascinated me, but this spiritual aspect — the kind that I’m circling around here — is the hardest to capture and to teach. It doesn’t help that domestic space (if once is to judge trends on HGTV) is increasingly defined by open floor plans and the monotone simplicity of the modern farmhouse style. Like athleisure clothing or protein shakes, our understanding of interior space has merged aesthetics with function, leaving little room for the minor excesses and idiosyncrasies where a sense of poetry and spirit might thrive. Yet despite this trend — or perhaps because of it — the idea of enchanted space has funneled into the darker corners of our psyche.

Hauntings, my students want to know: Are they real or just in the mind? Stories of haunted houses have a tendency of leaving this question unanswered, since the question itself is less interesting than the problem of distinguishing a person from the house he or she inhabits (and with haunted houses, the person experiencing the hauntings is often a woman). Who is really haunted, the house or the person? In our everyday lives, we keep these two subjects apart. Our domestic space, with our appliances and possessions, might reflect our personalities. But we would never confuse person with house — at least until the question of hauntings arises.

If you scale out beyond the world of twenty-first century America, however, you can see how houses don’t just provide shelter but seemingly mirror the thought patterns of those who live in them. In my class, I have students look at examples of houses in Oceania, North Africa, and Amazonia. In each of these places, you might say, the house appears as a reflection of the broader society. Among the Kabyle people in Algeria, to reference a famous study, the house is structured around a central axis whose two parts — a forked pillar in the center and the beam it supports — symbolize the procreative union of husband and wife, a merging of opposites that spirals into a numerous other associations ascribed in the architecture of the house: fire and water, cooked and raw, day and night, culture and nature. In this abode, the function of a household item, be it a storage container or a door, is never detached from this symbolic order. The house, in other words, is pregnant with meaning, with something as simple as the merger of pillar and beam reflecting ideas as fundamental as human procreation and even the meeting of land and sky.

How far back does this kind of symbolic house go in the history of humanity? It is impossible to know for sure, but it does seem like the appearance of the house once introduced profound questions for human societies. As a general rule of thumb, houses appear with the development of agriculture. If you’re not having to move in search of food, then it makes sense to build permanent structures. Yet once these buildings are made, then you are confronted with the question of how to deal with the dead. How does the household the living relate to those who had previously occupied this space? Examining the Neolithic evidence from Çatalhöyük (in modern-day Turkey) and Natufian sites in the Near East, the dead were deposited not far from the living. In Çatalhöyük, for instance, the dead of a particular household were sometimes placed underneath the floor near the hearth, as if to say that this center of domestic space belonged to people on both sides of the grave.

In fact, one could even push the analysis before the dawn of agriculture, back at a time when Europe was much colder, when Neanderthals died off and homo sapiens emerged as the dominant hominid. In these early millennia of human life, caves would have served as natural homes, or at least sites of refuge from the elements, and probably more. Some of these caves must have had ritual significance such that generation upon generation of humans would visit them, sometimes adding their mark. We now know these caves by the art that remains on their walls: the herd of bison in Altamira, the swimming stags of Lascaux, the mysterious shaman of Les Trois Frères. While it is easy to impose our own interpretations onto these paintings (how do we know that figure is a shaman?), it remains the case that these images represent animals that otherwise would not be present in this space. In other words, these painted figures conjure a world that is not immediately present: tableaux of imagined animals and places that could be encountered anew by experiencing these imagines in the candlelit interior of a cave hidden in the depths of the earth.

It would be a stretch to call these ancient spaces haunted. “Enchanted” is probably a better word. These caves and early houses were sites of coexistence and encounter between the living and the dead, the present and the absent, the world that is and the world that once was or shall become. I suspect this enchantment has been a constant theme in human households, at least up until the near present. What makes these distant ways of living and dwelling so foreign to our eyes, I suspect, is that the temporal bandwidths of our homes and possessions has been drastically reduced. Early humans interacted with cave art for thousands of years; only our most cherished possessions will stay with us a lifetime, and even fewer will be passed onto the next generation. Even our relationship to houses has been reduced, as the idea of a family homestead is something one is more likely to encounter in fiction than in real life. As Thomas Pynchon puts it in Gravity’s Rainbow, the text where the concept of “temporal bandwidth” appears, “the more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona.” In our present age, our persona has less depth.

What happens when our living space and persona flatten out? In a way, this is a question that the haunted house stories explore. In some of the early examples of the genre — such as novellas by Charles Dickens and Hillaire Belloc (with illustrations by G.K. Chesterton) — there is surprisingly little that is spooky about the haunted house. The haunting comes from the lingering presence of generations past, less through a bump in the night and more through photographs and heirlooms: the kind of presence that was receding from the experience of the people who were drawn to these stories. It is almost as if the haunted house was not originally intended to scare but rather to serve as a cautionary tale.

As the genre of the haunted house develops, the haunting turns scary, with bodies in the wall and specters in the hallways. Despite this turn toward horror, a curious character emerges, one who is terrorized by the haunting yet is also drawn toward it — a character, again, caught in liminal space. The classic example in this regard is Eleanor, the young woman who stands at the center of Shirley Jackson’s acclaimed 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House. The fact that Eleanor experiences the worst that Hill House has to offer and yet also falls under its trance is the aspect the novel my students puzzle most over. It is a good question, and it is one those of us who enjoy these kinds of stories might ask of ourselves. Why come to such tales only to be frightened?

I suspect that variations of the horror genre, like haunted houses, have the appeal of introducing enchantment in a world that has gone flat. In the same way, I suspect that many people will look back on an earlier time in their lives and long for the time they had to dream and to ponder. For most of us, this space to wonder and to dream is probably not the house. But we still need a place to recover this wonder, which will always carry with it a touch of fear and a desire for protection. What would this space look like in our chaotic, screen-filled lives? What might this enchanted house be? For some, myself included, a church can fill this role. Churches, like haunted houses, are enchanted spaces, albeit filled with a different kind of spirit. Whatever it would be, such a place would still need a human face — a place that shelters but also embraces.

Baz Luhrman’s ELVIS and Sophia Coppola’s Priscilla are the heralds — or perhaps the bookends — of a little Elvis Renaissance. What has struck me about Elvis Presley this year as I’ve worked my way through a truly shocking amount of media produced by and about this man is the degree of influence that he had and continues to have on our culture.

Of course, Elvis is known mainly for his music, but I was shocked to learn that he starred in no fewer than thirty-one feature films over ten years. This is both surprising and impressive for a man whose bread and butter was live musical performance.

But the films themselves are, for lack of a better word, strange. Some might say they’re simply bad. I had too much of a good time watching them to come down on them so hard. But the plots are indeed baffling; the scripts more so. They range from off-the-wall, fever-dream comedies to melodramas, and I would dare to say that some of them are actually good.

At first glance, it is absolutely shocking that more than thirty of these films were made — and that they made money. In the 1960s, Elvis films were competing against the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Psycho, Planet of the Apes, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, and West Side Story. It was a decade of truly incredible cinema that was shaping the cultural landscape surrounding it, and it is almost laughable to see alongside these great works the interchangeably titled Loving You, Love Me Tender, Girls Girls Girls, Girl Happy, and Clambake.

Often titled for a single song off the soundtrack, these movies were essentially vehicles for Elvis to sing and perform. And because of his filming schedule, his availability for live performance was limited. This is why, I think, his films did well despite themselves. People wanted to see Elvis perform, and the most accessible way to do that was to go to the cinema. Elvis — due to his talent; his sometimes controversial music, dancing, and lifestyle; and the discourse surrounding him — was a central part of American culture in the 1960s.

The centrality of this fact became clear to me recently. While making conversation with a new friend, I asked one of the stock small-talk questions: “What kind of music do you like?” I hadn’t heard of the artist she mentioned, and we moved on. This was a small interaction, but it’s a common one, and it is emblematic of our age. It would also have been far less likely to happen in decades past, as the vast majority of people had highly similar experiences with the dominant art forms, be it music, movies, books, etc.

Art is a universal language that unites people to each other. Indeed, there are few things more thrilling than finding in a new friend a shared love of a book or a film. We instinctively ask questions like, “What movies do you enjoy?” and, “What books have you read recently?” because of our own experiences with art. We are deeply moved and formed by the art that we consume, and another person’s take on shared artistic experiences tells us a lot about them. They become, by virtue of shared experiences, more accessible to us. But today, we are often instead casting about for an artistic touchpoint.

In our geographically sprawling nation, our artistic landscape was once something that we shared. In the 1960s, with only three broadcast television stations and the same films playing in every movie theatre in America, a universal experience of art formed a cultural imagination, creating common ground and forming strangers into potential friends. Everyone in 1962 would have had a response to the question “What do you think of Elvis Presley?”

And in the past, the experience of art was a communal one. We went out to the movies, to the theater, to concerts together, and while it isn’t as though these activities are gone, we live in an age that prizes convenience over togetherness. It is easier to stay home and watch Netflix than to go to the movies or the theater; it is easier to stream music on Spotify than to go to a concert.

With the location of the experience of the art moved from the community to the home, there has been a splintering of the broader artistic sphere into niches. I won’t for a moment claim that this is a universal negative; there is something beautiful about the ease of media production and the number of minds in the artistic sphere, and entertainment in this modern space is an intensely personal experience.

I also won’t claim that we have incurred an inherent loss in our inability to universally reference Jailhouse Rock or Tickle Me. These films are not high art, no matter how entertaining I personally find them. What I will say is that it is a major cultural loss for us to no longer experience art together — indeed, we no longer experience life together. There is a lot of discussion about Elvis as a political figure in this little renaissance that we’re having, but I might suggest that the importance of artists for our culture is, at least in part, their ability to provide us a place to have discourse, to find common ground on which to stand through a shared experience.

By setting aside togetherness in favor of individualism, we have lost something of integral importance to society. I see the current Elvis fascination as a casting back toward a perceptibly vanishing past. We have lost hold of something in the years since Elvis Presley’s death; we no longer have a common artistic language. We no longer speak about the same things or have a shared vocabulary. We are formed in a way radically different from our neighbors, and there is a sneaking implication that we are alone in our experience of the world because of this.

Yet our capacity to be moved by art — and our impulse to share it — should gently remind us that we are not, in fact, alone. When we experience beauty, it is a little bit painful, and this in part because it calls us outside of ourselves. It asks us to consider something bigger than ourselves and to admit to something common and human that links us to our neighbor.

It is easy to find yourself overwhelmed in the Royal Castle in Warsaw, with its richly delicate halls and colorful rooms full of neoclassical allusions to old pagan gods and Roman political figures. That is especially true if you’re not used to running on less than six hours of sleep, like I am. And yet, despite my fatigue, I thirstily soaked up everything — every painting, every statue, even every floor tile. Even though each room had something incredible to offer, there was one room in particular that caught my attention.

Pokój Canaletta — the Canaletto Room. Other than a few benches along the walls, the floor is free from all furniture and objects. Visitors are free to traverse across the patterned brown floors without running into anything besides the other guests. But it would be wrong to call the room empty. Soft, oil landscape paintings enclosed in gold frames cover the walls from floor to ceiling, each as detailed a snapshot as if it were taken by an actual camera. Each one bears the mark of the Italian artist, Bernardo Bellotto, who borrowed the surname of his illustrious uncle, Giovanni Canaletto, during his time in Central Europe.

Why does a reconstructed Polish castle so proudly display over a dozen paintings by an Italian artist in a room specifically dedicated to his works alone? The simple answer is that they were created with the walls of the Royal Castle in mind. In this sense, it’s just a matter of accurately representing the historic castle; each painting had an intended home there before it was even made. After all, Bernardo Canaletto spent the last thirteen years as the court artist of the last king of Poland, Stanisław Augustus Poniatowski.

Still, while this answer is definitely true, I believe that there’s a little more to it. The beauty and detail of each picture in this extraordinary room transports the viewer into the past with a snapshot depiction of Varsovian history. Even more incredibly, that same viewer can then leave the palace and find that same level of beauty and detail in the surrounding historic old town — thanks in large part to these paintings. Despite their Italian origins, the works of the Canaletto Room have in fact been an essential key to the preservation and reconstruction of Polish cultural identity.

You might have already noticed that I refer to the Royal Castle in Warsaw as “reconstructed” castle. Well, that’s because the historic architecture is deceiving. The Royal Castle that currently graces Warsaw’s Old Town Square is only about four or five decades old. The original palace was bombarded and looted by the German army in the initial months of World War II. By the end of the war in 1945, it, along with 85% of the surrounding city, was little more than a pile of rubble.

Thankfully, Canaletto’s detailed paintings did not share the fate of their museum castle and most other historic Varsovian landmarks. They were transferred to the National Museum of Warsaw in the early days of the war, as the Royal Castle was a likely bombing target. From there, they were taken to Krakow (the capital of the area of occupied Polish territory, which the Nazis dubbed the “General Government”). As the war continued, the paintings ended up in Germany for “safekeeping”, along with other works considered worthy of preservation by the Nazis (though this collection only consisted of art deemed to have non-Polish origins by Nazi pseudo-scientists and historians). The Canaletto paintings ended up in Callenberg Castle in southeast Germany, where they and other remarkable works of art were discovered by the American Art Protection Service, popularly known as the “Monuments Men”.

The Poles are a resilient people, proud of their history and culture. Soon after the end of the war, the Polish government reclaimed the Canaletto paintings along with other stolen works. A campaign to rebuild the city sprang up, and the palace itself was proclaimed a great monument of Polish history and culture by the senate. Fundraisers were set up within Poland and abroad to raise money for the grand project.

And what did they use for the blueprints to reconstruct the buildings that now grace Warsaw’s Old Town? Bellotto-Caneletto’s large, detailed landscapes (known as vedute) … at least partially. The present old townscape is not a perfect one-for-one reproduction of the paintings, of course; it would have been a nearly impossible feat to reconstruct every single building. But the important cultural icons? They are pretty darn close to their original drawings.

One prime example is the Holy Cross Church, which stands just a mile away from the Royal Castle. Canaletto took no shortcuts in depicting this lively scene. Every single shingle on the rooftop can be distinguished — even on the buildings in the background. Dozens of people flood the streets, each dressed appropriately to reflect their occupation, and each conducting whatever business brought them to this particular street in the first place.

It is the church itself, however, that is the focal point of this painting. The Church of the Holy Cross was first completed in the 1750s, a mere two decades before Canelletto replicated it in all its glorious detail. While most of the dynamic action is confined to the bottom half of the canvas, the church makes use of the entire vertical axis of the painting, reaching its double steeples into the sunlight, in contrast to the sea-like waves of white-gray clouds directly opposite the building.

Again, despite the two-dimensional nature of the painting, the various textures of the church render the piece immersive — as in the copper roof, the bell towers, and the church walls. The columns on the church’s front facade and the intricate window trims show their varying levels of depth. Even the statues on top of the main facade are properly depicted (though their identities cannot be determined due to the scene’s angle).

Like the Royal Castle, the Church of the Holy Cross was badly damaged during World War II and was rebuilt early in the reconstruction project. The main portion of the building was completed by 1953 — a mere eight years after the war — and now stands as a beautiful memorial of Polish historical and cultural identity (as well as the resting place of pianist Frederic Chopin’s heart). The new church is almost identical to the building in Canaletto’s painting, save for the oxidized green color of the current copper roof, which makes the building appear older than it actually is. Perhaps those who remembered it from before the war had the color changed for the sake of nostalgia for their familiar church.

So how did the Italian artist manage to create such beautifully detailed and accurate paintings of the Polish capital? Like his uncle (the more famous Canaletto), Bellotto-Canaletto is believed to have used a method known as camera obscura. The camera obscura, or pinhole camera, works when light passes through a pinhole or small lens into a darkened room or box. It then projects an image of the real world onto a wall, screen, or canvas. From there, an artist like Canaletto can trace the projection with a pencil and use the drawing as the basis of his vedute. This technique may have allowed him to include every detail — every window frame, roof shingle, chimney, column, or step — he desired. Though Canaletto, like every artist, did take some liberties with his work, his detailed paintings thus depicted a fairly accurate picture of Warsaw in his time.

And it was Canaletto’s great attention to detail that saved the Church of the Holy Cross, the Royal Castle of Warsaw, and many other historic elements of Warsaw’s Old Town.

Today, the reconstructed Historic Center of Warsaw is among UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites. As it should be! The beauty of Poland’s historic old towns is only increased by the fact that so many of them were rebuilt almost from scratch in the aftermath of World War II. It is almost a miraculous feat.

Visiting Warsaw now, I love how all the pieces have come together so that I can walk amid the same buildings that old Polish kings and queens once did. I appreciate the detail that Canaletto put into his Polish vedute. I am so grateful that the Canaletto paintings made it through the war unscathed. I love how these richly decorated paintings were used as guides for rebuilding the city. I love how the Polish people leapt headfirst into the historical rebuilding project the minute the war ended, when it would have been so much easier to cover the entire city in communist-style apartment bloks as the Cold War loomed over them. I love how they prioritized and recollected their historical and cultural heritage, which both the Nazis and Soviets had tried so hard to destroy. And I love that I get to walk along Warsaw’s reconstructed streets and come to stand in front of the paintings that made the project possible. I love this city. I can’t wait until my next visit.

Freshman Year: Fall
Block 1: Conscience-building
Block 2: Theodrama
Block 3: Soundscapes
Block 4: Optical Prophecy
Block 5: Reconciliation
Block 6: Living Incarnate
Block 7: Logos

Freshman Year: Spring
Block 1: Rootedness
Block 2: Eucharistic Digestion
Block 3: Cadence
Block 4: Olfactory Geolocation
Block 5: Kenosis
Block 6: Manifesting the Body
Block 7: Divine Simplicity

Sophomore Year: Fall
Block 1: Examen
Block 2: Instruments of Grace
Block 3: Lyricism
Block 4: Carpentry & the Tactile
Block 5: Waters of Welcome
Block 6: Routining into Being
Block 7: The Great “I Am”

Sophomore Year: Spring
Block 1: Examen
Block 2: Prophecy & Emptiness
Block 3: Audible Summoning & Accumulation
Block 4: Mosaics
Block 5: Healings on the Outskirts
Block 6: Durability, Distance, & Drainage
Block 7: The Trinity

Junior Year: Fall
Block 1: Seeing Grace
Block 2: Towards What End?
Block 3: Chant
Block 4: Fruit of the Vine
Block 5: Anamnesis
Block 6: Maleness & Femaleness
Block 7: Weaving the Crown of Thorns

Junior Year: Spring
Block 1: Spiritual Autobiographies
Block 2: Lives of Vocation
Block 3: Choir of Angels
Block 4: Work of Human Hands
Block 5: The Pace of Adoration
Block 6: Bride & Bridegroom
Block 7: Wearing the Crown of Thorns

Senior Year: Fall
Block 1: Communal Pilgrimage
Block 2: Works of Mercy
Block 3: Beyond Expression
Block 4: Frithout: Beyond Propositions
Block 5: Fasting
Block 6: Mentorship in Resurrected Living
Block 7: Spirit Whispers

Senior Year: Spring
Block 1: Radical Hospitality
Block 2: Judgment of Your Choosing
Block 3: Grace-Filled Silence
Block 4: Narration of the Incarnate
Block 5: Almsgiving after Consumerism
Block 6: The Eternal Wounds of Christ
Block 7: A Returning

I’ll stand at that western edge of land, the sun’s day home.
There, waves end their roving eastward trek and break and die
and are absorbed to that old brine-plain, where seagulls roam.

I’ll stay till he makes his lonely pilgrimage, and lies
his burning body down, and burns the sky blood-orange
And red, then silent black, and is extinguished.

I was on Michigan Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona, when I was drawn to the central figures in this composition. They were emerging from the underground into the light of the street at night. As I’ve studied the fine arts, I have found myself drawn to street photography. In my work, I have continually focused on families and put my efforts into showing the beauty they present in their unity across a variety of situations.

To add depth to this composition of this piece, I looked to the reflections of the family on the empty storefront beside them. This combination of interior and exterior space forms a structure based on the repetition of the pillars within the interior of the building — notice, as your eye moves across the piece, that you are put in a position to find geometric shapes throuhgout the image. This sequencing also offers additional light to the composition, which is helpful, because lighting often presents a challenge for street photographers at night.

In both content and structure, the photo reminds me of the ways families everywhere can be surrounded by support and become the focal point of the landscape of our society. In my work, I aim to restore this vision of society that is illuminated by the love between people and the light that each person emanates by virtue of being made in God’s image.

Joseph Pillado is the founder of Restored Vision Media, a photography business based in Phoenix, Arizona, that is focused on restoring a love of humanity within the world through photographs that allow the beauty of the medium to flourish.

It has been a common theme of mine across several different publications to write on the idea of adaptation, particularly of classic works of literature. Recently, I had the pleasure of watching A24’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, featuring Denzel Washington in the titular role. Coming from one of the makers of my favorite adaptation of The Odyssey, I suppose I should not be surprised, but I am delighted to say that this adaptation of the Shakespeare classic is a masterpiece, blending Joel Coen’s grotesque, Flannery O’Connor-esque vision from his previous films with stunning set pieces and traditional cinematography rarely used in bigger pictures. The combination of the two makes for a quite thrilling experience. Everything is shot in 1.37:1 and black and white, as though one were watching a classic film from the silver screen of the 1930’s through 50’s, something of Orson Welles or Akira Kurosawa.

This trend of bringing back the 1.37:1 or the 4:3 ratio has become increasingly popular in recent years, with directors choosing this classic “box ratio” over the widescreen for any number of reasons, from Zach Snyder’sJustice League to Robert Egger’s The Lighthouse. A24 films are, however, the most prominent in this trend, and thus the most likely to be critiqued for notions of “pretension” in their directors’ use of this ratio. Yet it is an art style like any other, with associations both good and bad. In this case, the use of black and white and the 1.37:1 ratio add a special nuance to the film. For one thing, as previously mentioned, it serves as a callback not only to film classics but also specifically to classic adaptations of Shakespeare plays. Indeed, Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth bears a strong resemblance in several of its shots to Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, considered by some Shakespeare critics as one of the best film adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth to date. The way the leaves fall as the end approaches for Macbeth, as well as some of the armor designs, especially bears a significant resemblance to Kurosawa’s version.

However, the use of this ratio is not limited to mere callbacks to film history. The Coen brothers have always been masters of depicting the uncanny, giving the supernatural a facade of natural realism, creating a grotesque world where the supernatural seems to always lurk just around the corner, hidden behind the grinning mask of a human face, never quite fully revealing its true colors. One need look no further than Oh Brother Where Art Thou for an abundance of examples, but here in The Tragedy of Macbeth, this same artful masking is true to form, playing off of the aspect ratio and the black-and-white coloring to give the world a more surreal, supernatural feeling, as though we are looking at a world like our own but not our own, more veiled in the mist and fog of unreality, more subject to the whims of fate and prophecy. A world, in other words, that has entered into fairy-tale. And what better world is there for the playing which Coen makes of the witches?

In a remarkable feat of costuming and acting, the Weird Sisters not only dress like crows with long black cloaks, hooded heads, and bare legs, they also have the mannerisms of crows. This is a point I cannot stress enough. When we first meet one of the sisters at the beginning of the play, she wanders across a bloody battlefield exactly like a crow, hopping from place to place, pecking at anything interesting or valuable among the scraps and heaps of dead, her arm twitching occasionally. It’s uncanny. It’s disturbing. It’s amazing. It also bears a strong resemblance to the possessed woman of another Kurosawa film, a seer who communes with spirits of the dead and acts in a similar manner.

This bird imagery continues throughout the film, and it is not limited only to the Weird Sisters. The ghost of Banquo, who visits Macbeth after his death, also takes on the form of a bird when Lady Macbeth stumbles on her husband shouting at the spirit (Macbeth 3.4). So do the spirits appear to Coen, flitting back and forth, preying like scavengers upon mortal men, perching and watching the play set by their doings unfold beneath their feet. For there are several scenes where we appear to be watching things unfold from above, as though from an upper landing or a perch. The sets of The Tragedy of Macbeth are undetailed but impressive in design, evoking a sense of wide spaces, long shadows, and narrow hallways with many arches — but all barren, all sterile and cold, like looking into an abstract painting. This allows the director to play with shadows in the old filming fashion, rendering some gorgeous shots, but it also adds to the sense of the world, its unreality and closeness to an idea, something less concrete and detailed but abstract. Combined with the aspect ratio ,it also gives a much greater focus on each individual character as they take their turn at the center of the stage; some of the shots bring us uncomfortably close to the faces of characters staring directly into the camera as though addressing us, the audience, again adding to that uncanny feeling.

Most stunning of all, though, is the transformation of the king’s pavilion into a forest full of falling leaves, where we begin with a series of gothic arches, tree-like columns sprouting up all around, that with a twist of the camera become real trees as the leaves begin to fall and the end finally comes for Macbeth. This moment in particular, though in the play having little significance, being but the prelude to Macbeth’s duel with Macduff (Macbeth5.7) in the film takes on much greater prominence and becomes its own scene, showcasing for us just how Joel Coen has merged his own filming techniques and themes with Shakespeare’s own. Macbeth has just completed his famed soliloquy on the slow on-crawling movement of bitter time as it “creeps in this petty pace from day to day / to the last syllable of recorded time” (Macbeth 5.5) and now he sits alone on his throne in resigned despair, contemplating the oncoming of Birnam Wood and his prophesied death. A challenger, the young Siward, approaches and is swiftly dispatched. Yet death is coming for Macbeth, and will soon be upon him. Siward manages to wound Macbeth, and as he does, the abstract palace, the well-proportioned floors and walls, always roofed against nature, begins to crumble, begins to change. Gothic pillars become trees, leaves begin to fall. Nature has broken in to the abstract palace, has brought in the swift rush of natural time, the end of slow, creeping, conscience-wracked time, signaling the approaching end. It is a powerful scene, one almost completely crafted by Coen yet devotedly serving Shakespeare’s themes. Which is precisely what one should hope for and delight in in an adaptation.

Joel Coen combined his mastery of unreality, the O’Connor-esque merging of the natural and the supernatural in grotesque movements of spirits and grace, with something very similarly portrayed in Shakespeare’s works: the hell within the conscience, the creeping uncertainty of time and the world around oneself, and the diabolic in man. Combined, these elements allowed Coen to essentially create a whole new Shakespearean scene: Macbeth 5.7.1, the penultimate scene, in which the death bell tolls and the world begins to crumble and Macbeth, resigned, sits in uneasy immortality upon a bloody throne.

Here is adaptation at its best, where a new artist brings his talents in service of the old art to draw out something new, something which perfectly fits within the original but which had not been made explicit until now. This requires faithfulness to the original, careful heed to the themes and intent of the original author — these are not the characteristics of many modern filmmakers, but they are the characteristics of the Coen brothers. And for that I am very grateful.

O small heaven, broken on the ground,
your gentle blue, shattered, strewn. O round
world, who will make you whole? How long
can precious things withstand and last
brute gravity and cruel winds’ blast?

In 1914, war was looming in Europe. This is a familiar story to many: the governments of Europe’s great powers (particularly their kings) had been itching for a good fight and were looking for any chance to go to war. The assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand provided the perfect opportunity, causing the entire continent to ignite and become embroiled in the Great War due to a complicated web of alliances. This is the story we all know, and while there is certainly truth to the tangle of European alliances, this idea of war mongering monarchs has led to widespread misconception of the great men who ruled during this time — particularly the kings of Britain, Germany, and Russia.

These three monarchs — the King, the Kaiser, and the Tsar — were not only the leaders of the most powerful nations in the world at the time, but they were also cousins and close friends. King George and Kaiser Wilhelm were both grandsons of the late Queen Victoria. The German Kaiser’s British heritage led to an interesting relationship between the two countries. While he dearly loved his English mother, he resented the English doctor who watched over his father in his final years.

The Kaiser initially hoped for what he called an “Anglo-Teuton Hegemony,” an alliance between the German and British Empires. This might have worked, had it not been for the Kaiser’s great “Daily Telegraph Affair.” In 1909, the Kaiser was interviewed by the British newspaper Daily Telegraph. Unfortunately, Wilhelm was notoriously bad with words and allowed himself to make some less than complimentary remarks about the British. To make things worse, he asked his Chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow, to proofread his interview before submitting it. Von Bülow didn’t feel like looking over the Kaiser’s response and sent it in anyway, accidentally painting Wilhelm as a crazy, anti-British tyrant. Sadly, this would sour relations between the two cousins. Once the war was over, George regarded his former friend as “the greatest criminal in history.” Nonetheless, the King opposed the trial of the Kaiser, instead allowing him to live out his exile in peace.

Much fonder than the relationship between King and Kaiser was that between Kaiser and Tsar. Although Wilhelm and Nicholas were more distant cousins (third as opposed to first), they were famously close friends. In 1905, the two monarchs met without permission of their respective governments to discuss a treaty. Although their governments promptly and thoroughly rejected their efforts, this did not hamper their relationship.

Nor did war. In fact, even while Germany and Russia were engaged in brutal conflict, the monarchs maintained regular and friendly contact. The so-called “Willy-Nicky Correspondence” chronicles the war through the eyes of these two cousins. They referred to one another by the endearing nicknames “Willy” (for the Kaiser) and “Nicky” (for the Tsar) as a sign of friendship despite the conflict. The letters and telegrams show both of them desperately trying to avoid escalation.

The men’s friendship lasted up until Nicholas’ violent murder in 1918 during the Bolshevik Revolution. After the war, Wilhelm claimed that he did everything in his power to rescue his cousin, demanding the post-Revolution Russian government immediately deliver the royal family to German territory, safe from harm.

The final, and perhaps closest, relationship of the cousin kings was that between King George and Tsar Nicholas. Not only were they both grandsons of the Danish King Christian IX, but they also looked strikingly similar. They looked so much alike, in fact, that it was not uncommon for the two to secretly sneak off and switch uniforms while at a party, just to see how long they could impersonate each other.

George and Nicholas’s close friendship was reflected in their countries’ foreign policy, as Britain and Russia were close allies leading up to the war. When revolution came to Russia, George extended an invitation to host Nicholas and his family in England. The King’s government even went so far as to have MI1 (British Military Intelligence) plan an elaborate extraction plan to rescue the Romanovs. Alas, the Bolshevik revolutionaries were too powerful for the Tsar to be rescued, and George was unable to help save his cousin.

The stories of the cousin kings mostly ended in tragedy. Nicholas was murdered alongside his family; Wilhelm was shamefully deposed; only George was left on the throne by the time the Great War ended. As for their friendships, the Tsar maintained his relationship with the others until his death, but the King and Kaiser were steadily estranged.

This very tragedy, however, is a testament to the true character and intentions of these men. Instead of warmongers eager to fight each other, we see three cousins who, due to the crumbling world around them, lost their grasp on a once-strong brotherhood. The love between these cousin-kings was not enough to save the world from the most destructive war the world had ever seen. It was, however, strong enough to offer a reprieve from the cutthroat politics of the time — both for each other and for future historians. We could look back at the friendship of these kings and think, “What if they had avoided that war?” But perhaps it would be better to take from this story a warning against neglecting friends and family in favor of private interests. While our personal matters morph and change day by day and year by year, the bonds we share with others can bring strength and peace even in the face of overwhelming difficulties.

Everyone I’ve met in Michigan so far has asked why I chose to move here from Hawaii, where I was born and raised. Though the islands are lovely, I could not resist the transformation and rebirth of the world in each of the four seasons — but most intensely in winter.

With this triptych, I hope to draw your attention to the views that enchanted me for the first time only a few years ago. In the bitterest cold and grayest of overcasts, I still see a wonderland. Even a gas station takes on an abstract beauty when blanketed smoothly in white. Snow can make anything beautiful because it unifies all objects it touches with a soft, white side from a shared direction. Sunlight has the same effect, creating light and dark parts of multiple things, seemingly chaotic, but from a single direction. Atmospheric perspective, too, created by airborne particles like snowflakes, accentuates the depth of far-away trees and hills. Their edges become lost, visible but obscured by otherwise invisible specks of snow.

We served them since we saw the stars descend
And rule as gods upon the gloomy earth.
We learnt their iron courses and their laws,
To glimpse beyond the daylong night the ends
of dying men, and multiply our our mirth
— less powers in the joyless world of men.

All is old, and all that was will be again.
And when you’ve learned this,
then you’ve lost your youth.
The spirits of the air confirm the same:
knowledge is but death, and bitter is the truth.

Or so we thought, until we saw arise
A new thing, new light, turned against the rest.
Up it went in pilgrimage — to attend
Upon a better light not from the skies.
It stopped above the hovel, there kept watch
Till we entered, and our very selves did bend
before the child-sun, hidden in the west.

We laid our gifts, and to the babe we prayed,
And lightened, eastward went, a better way.

For Mikey

With my head draped in the family blanket
You danced around my feet,
Your laughter unspooling in our sweet
Cocoon of evening play.
“Mohr,” you say. “Mohr.”

Mama lays, an observer to the heavenly
Morsel that her love bore.
Though distracting you started as a chore
For her third-trimester relief, it swelled beyond duty,
As live-action grace will do.

You should know that I keep these marbled memories
Secure for inspection on darker days
When interior chaos flays
Certain sight of the Table of Communion.
These moments of superabundance remain.

What is there to say about Zélie that hasn’t already been said? Probably quite a bit, but I’m underqualified at present to say it. All I know is I love seeing how much of Thérèse there is in her eyes.

[dedicated to St. Boniface and Ignatius of Loyola]

I heard the young fanatic say,

Blessed is the man who breaks
Blessed the hammer, hand and heart
Pulverizing into dust the art
Whose maker’s slavery it makes
And smothers in foul soot the day.

No quarter to the tyrants of the soul
The gods of plaster, gold and books,
Rulers from below and not above.
This is the single-hearted love
Which drowns the baals in the brooks
And all the schedules of She’ol.

This is the peace the prophets seek.
This is the violence of the meek.

When I was in middle school, my grandma signed my sister and me up for a sewing class. We got beginners’ sewing machines, needles, and thread, and we got to choose our own fabric for the dresses we’d be making.

Being at the very beginning of my pre-teen exploratory fashion phase (Seventeen had only just convinced me to buy neon coral lipstick and turquoise eyeliner), my fabric doomed me from the start. It was stiff cotton — desaturated gold with crackly decals and a muddy paisley pattern in deep primary colors. There’s no accounting for taste.

In any case, after several weeks of early mornings spent with my sister in a blank white room filled with sewing tables and around ten other girls who all seemed to know exactly what they were doing, I finally managed to wrangle the fabric into something resembling a dress. No sleeves, a basic crew neckline, a straight waist. I might have worn it to school, if the fabric weren’t an abomination. But instead I hung it in the back of my closet and promptly forgot it as well as I could. I realized that summer that I didn’t much care for the feeling of elaborate, repetitive stitches. And don’t get me started on hemming.

Still, despite my lack of interest or talent, I’ve always admired people who can look at fabric, yarn, or thread — or, for that matter, iron, glass, or wood — and see in it some hidden functionality. It’s almost like magic to watch them create out of unformed material any number of the tools and adornments we use every day without a thought.

And they make them beautiful, too. It’s in these little excesses that the transcendent reality of humanity’s creative capacity truly shines. As a species, we seem to have an endless ability to surprise each other with just how far we’ll go for the utterly unnecessary.

I’ve recently begun a small collection of stranded colorwork sweaters, like the fair isle designs from Shetland or the Marius pattern from Norway. They’re the classic wool sweaters, with decorated collars full of geometric patterns and snowflakes and silhouettes of reindeer or birds.

Though I generally go for a more streamlined look in my wardrobe (Seventeen didn’t hold its vice grip over my closet for long, thankfully), I recently sprung for a vintage, white-and-blue button-down that was handmade in Norway. It’s got a striped pattern of alternating diamonds and selburoser (often called “Scandinavian stars”), and you can see the crazy mess of yarn-work used to create the effect all over the inside.

Though likelihood is my own sweater was made through at least a partially industrialized process, the history of stranded colorwork stretches as far back as ancient times. The fair isle iteration was popularized in the 1920s by the Prince of Wales, who famously wore it while golfing; some believe the residents of the Shetland learned it from Spaniards who washed up on the island; others, that they inherited it from Scandinavians. Though styles from nearby regions have also found popularity, they’re often categorized together under the “fair isle” name.

In any case, my Norwegian sweater has already become a staple of my wardrobe. I get compliments on it regularly, and I’ve come to love the unique bit of color and texture it brings to my outfits. But that’s not why I love it — nor why I think the style has become a timeless staple, weathering over a century of trends unscathed despite its striking appearance. No, I think we’re drawn to fair isle sweaters because they vividly contradict what has become a core assumption in Western thought: the distinction between arts and crafts.

When you think about the development of stranded colorwork, it is, strictly speaking, a needless complication. During the long, cold, wet winters on the British Isles and Scandinavia, fishermen and farmers and tradesmen — and their wives and children — would need a lot of clothing to stay warm. Whenever women weren’t cooking or cleaning or taking care of their kids, they were often making yarn and knitting it to keep up with the endless demands of worn-out, outgrown, over-worn clothing. They would spin the wool themselves, expertly removing debris and winding the strands. They would dye it themselves using natural pigments — and later artificial ones. They would develop the patterns, exploring the ways various techniques would create unique designs.

In the middle of such a busy life, why take the extra time to make these sweaters beautiful? Why get excited over new pigments and patterns, only to uphold the Sisyphean task of keeping their families clothed?

In this little bit of extra effort, I’ve found that fair isle knitting is not so different from what I do in my art — or at least, from the development of the Western artistic tradition. Artists have long experimented with different pigments and binding media (just look at da Vinci’s crumbling Last Supper). Over years of practice, we have developed techniques, such as linear perspective and chiaroscuro, to represent more faithfully the world presented to our eyes on paper or canvas. Sculptors have learned how to “paint with light,” honing their understanding of form and tone.

Both pursuits — knitting and visual arts — can take a lifetime to master, with seemingly endless new techniques and materials to explore. You could say that knitting is more practical than painting or sculpting, but, just as one could argue there is no need for fair isle patterns on sweaters, one could equally argue that, in a pre- or post-literate society, there is a great need for the visual arts, be it to adorn a cathedral in stained glass or to notify window shoppers of an upcoming sale. We as a culture admire the artistry of a fair isle sweater, but we deign not to call it art. Where do we draw the line?

We take for granted nowadays that visual art is “fine art.” Countless artists and museums around the world build their reputations (and attract their funding) by attempting to further the conversation around what art is or is not. The nineteenth-century Decadents were perhaps the most extreme, venerating l’Art pour l’Art, or “art for art’s sake.”

But, if you recall the nine classical muses — epic poetry, lyric poetry, comedy, tragedy, light verse and dance, flute, mime, history, and astronomy — you’ll notice that visual art is conspicuously absent. In fact, none of the muses revolve around physical production at all. They are musical, literary, mathematical. It wasn’t until the Renaissance that painters and sculptors, after centuries of protest, managed to fight their way into the artistic fold.

The arts, in the classical sense, were ways of grasping at ephemeral, abstract truths, which were always just out of reach of human understanding. The emotional resonance of music, the complex realities of emotion, the events of our own jointly remembered (and ever-fading) past. The techniques involved were those not of the hands but of the mind. In many cultures, they were seen as the product of divine inspiration — just consider King David’s psalms or Odin’s great efforts to obtain and bestow the Mead of Poetry.

And if you think about it, this is a far easier intuition to grasp. It’s borne out in our experience every day. Certainly, there are pieces of visual art that can bring a person to tears, the Chartres Cathedrals and Apollo and Daphnes and Calling of Saint Matthews of the world. And yet, many people are skeptical of these experiences. Many people do not have a favorite piece of art, cannot recount a time when a beautiful painting rent their heart. But everyone has a favorite song; everyone has a moment when a quote met them exactly where they were and bolstered them for the future.

What I mean to say but am trying to approach gently is that artists are, in many ways, still craftsmen. While great art can touch the soul, it is different from the way great music or poetry touches it. It is a quieter awe, based as much on the skill of the artist’s hand as on the quality of her geometric composition. The creators of the Book of Kells, for instance, were certainly master artists, but they did not see themselves as such. To illuminate the pages of the Gospel was an integrated part of the process of the book’s creation; the illuminators were on par with the scribes who painstakingly wrote out the text. The two worked in tandem; their techniques were different, but the product was one and the same. Great artists must be great craftsmen.

I don’t mean to say that there wasn’t any merit to painting and sculpture’s elevation above some crafts. While visual art bears some resemblance to craft, it is, in general, significantly less practical. It integrates elements of storytelling and mathematics through subject matter and composition. It feeds on the work of the muses, yet it fails to merit its own. This chimeric combination does seem to explain why “art” is so difficult to define — why we know it when we see it, the same way we know the quality of a sturdy table or a well-forged kitchen knife, but we just can’t seem to figure out what it is or what it’s for.

I do not propose to answer that question, either now or, I hope, at any point in the future. Rather, I prefer to sit on my couch in my Norwegian sweater, simply enjoying the fact that, in addition to being clothed, I am clothed beautifully and well. Is my sweater art? I’d like to think so. Or maybe it’s art that’s more of a craft. These questions are interesting to ponder, but they’re ultimately well above my pay grade.

Art or craft, I fail to see how the distinction brings value to the lives of creators. After all, we are all in our own way simply reflecting a much more perfect Creator, one who formed us out of dust and breathed life into us in almost the same moment. Matter and form, form and function — they’re all just ideas in progress. And even though I can’t sew or crochet (or knit, in case that was difficult to extrapolate) to save my life, I’d rather spend my time in a knitting circle swapping patterns to clothe my children than clawing my way to the top of this imagined heap.

What God has cleansed, we won’t call common: That is the motto of Atinlay. Here, we may suggest that art is craft and craft