cathedrals of meaning - starting from nix ꩜
There are new construction sites bursting like weeds across the city. Half built things. Monstrous, wiry, and unfinished. Backbones that might turn into buildings and might have people live and wake up and argue and love each other in them. For now, it’s all scaffolding. It’s no good to measure time by how much tape or timber goes up or down, just as it’s no good to measure time in San Francisco by the weather. Years have passed and I feel the same. The sun on my face, the slight chill. That first stupor I had when I came to the city. A vague yet intense desire, sharp and painful within me.
One day the building across the street will be complete and we’ll forget the ugliness of the structure that once accommodated its assembly. It will always have just existed. We’ll forget the architect’s eyes on the blueprint, the toil of the workers on the roof, banging away at the material, or the cool days that slid into earlier and earlier velvet darkness by November.
This is true of all long projects, all sequences of meaningful relationships. In hindsight it was a foregone conclusion. The actual reality is that at some points the endeavor might’ve been fragile, flawed, lost in translation. We didn’t keep track of the slow accumulation of moments. Then there it was suddenly: this beautiful, self-evident thing.
