Beautiful Ruins

by Jess Walter

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture for wild beasts to fight in. —Voltaire, The Complete Letters

Cleopatra: I will not have love as my master. Marc Antony: Then you will not have love. —from the 1963 disaster film Cleopatra

Weren’t movies his generation’s faith anyway—its true religion? Wasn’t the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral?

But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start.

This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.

Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. These are first-person memories—I memories. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief—like

But aren’t all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos—we know what’s out there. It’s what isn’t that truly compels us.