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For apprentices everywhere – no one told us that love was the hardest craft to master
Those who yearned for completeness would be called ‘the lovers’, and those who aspired to knowledge ‘the learners’.
It’s odd how faces, solid and visible as they are, evaporate, while words, made of breath, stay.
‘Humans are frightened of animals but we are cruel,
not they. A crocodile or a lion … None of them are as wild as we are.’
Majnun Shaykh spoke about love – of God and of fellow human beings, of the universe in its entirety and of the tiniest particle. Prayer should be a declaration of love, and love should be stripped of all fear and expectation, he said. One ought not fear boiling in cauldrons or wish for virgin houris, since both hell and heaven, suffering and joy, were right here and right now. How long were you going to shrink from God, he asked, when you could, instead, start to love Him? His followers – a motley collection of artisans, peasants and soldiers – listened to his oration spellbound. His ideas
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‘God is not a merchant – why should He calculate? God is not a clerk – why should He scribble?’
‘I love the Beloved as the Beloved loves me. Why feel remorse for love? Surely there are other things to rue. Avarice. Ruthlessness. Deception. But love … ought not to be regretted.’
‘Sometimes, for the soul to thrive, the heart needs to be broken, son.’
I wouldn’t want anyone to waste my work.’ ‘In order to gain mastery, you need to dismantle as much as you put together.’
‘When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.’
rage was a ball of flame you could not hold in your hands for too long; it had to be thrown at someone.
‘If you wish to excel at your craft, you have to convince the universe why it should be you rather than someone else.’
‘Resentment is a cage, talent is a captured bird. Break the cage, let the bird take off and soar high. Architecture is a mirror that reflects the harmony and balance present in the universe. If you do not foster these qualities in your heart, you cannot build.’
When putting up a building or sailing in the deep, you learned to watch over one another; an enforced togetherness emerged, a brotherhood of sorts. A tacit understanding ruled across the ranks. You accepted that the task at hand was mightier than yourself, and the only way to forge ahead was by toiling together as one. So you buried the dislikes and the fights, unless a mutiny erupted, in which case the world would be turned upside down.
‘Talent is a favour of the divine. To perfect it one must work hard. This is what we must do.’
‘Beneath every building we raise – it doesn’t matter whether it’s small or large – just imagine that below the foundations lies the centre of the universe. Then you will work with more care and love.’
‘Architecture is a conversation with God. And nowhere does He speak more loudly than at the centre.’
For weeks on end they had been waiting for a consignment of marble from Alexandria.
Busbecq believed there were two blessings in life: books and friends. And that they should be possessed in inverse quantities: many books, but only a handful of friends.
That was the thing about colossal buildings. While they did not change, the people who ordered, designed, built and eventually used them constantly did.
Alone in the mosque, only a dot in this vast expanse, Jahan could think only of the world as an enormous building site. While the master and the apprentices had been raising this mosque, the universe had been constructing their fate. Never before had he thought of God as an architect. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Zoroastrians and people of myriad faiths and creeds lived under the same invisible dome. For the eye that could see, architecture was everywhere.
He who has a library has a thousand teachers.
Ignorant men think we are here to fight and make wars and to couple and have children. Nay, our job is to expand our knowledge. That’s why we’re here.’
You want to become an architect, you have to speak to something bigger than you!’
‘When you master a language, you are given the key to a castle. What you’ll find inside depends on you.’
The innocence of childhood leaves all of us eventually.’
‘Every good craftsman is your teacher, no matter where he may be from. Artists and artisans are people of the same faith.’
Enter the buildings when there are few people inside. Hold the pin at the level of your head and drop it. Does the sound die off right away? Or does it reach the furthest corners? If so, ask yourself how did the architect achieve this? Can one make the sound flow like water, back and forth, in a gentle tide?
He said there were three fountains of
wisdom from which every artisan should drink abundantly: books, work and roads. Reading, practising and travelling.
Rome, the city where memories were chiselled in marble.
Jahan thought that there were two main types of temple built by humankind: those that aspired to reach out to the skies and those that wished to bring the skies closer down to the ground.
On occasion, there was a third: those that did both.
He raised buildings that would remain, while his own transience loomed more heavily in his heart each passing day.
‘Does what we do in life matter so much? Or is it what we don’t do that carries weight?’
‘You build with wood, stone, iron. You also build with absence.
Time became a winding staircase that reached nowhere.
Everything was as he had left it. At the same time nothing was the same. When one underwent a sudden change, one expected the world, too, to somehow have become different.
‘God has built the palace of our body and entrusted to us its key,’
‘Man is made in the image of God. At its centre there’s order, balance. See the circles and the squares. See how proportionately they have been arranged. There are four humours – blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. We work with four elements – wood, marble, glass, metal.’
‘The face is the facade, the eyes are the windows, the mouth is the door that opens into the universe. The legs and the arms are the staircases.’
Jahan could not believe how suddenly the public mood changed from sorrow to rejoicing, how quickly their river of tears ran dry. If they moved between gloom and glee with such ease, did this mean they could pass from love to hatred just as effortlessly?
