Empire of Silence (The Sun Eater #1)

by Christopher Ruocchio

I had loved drawing ever since I was a child. As I grew up, however, I realized there was something singular about the process. A photograph might capture the facts of an object’s appearance, colors and details rendered perfectly at a higher resolution than any human eye could appreciate. By the same token, a recording or RNA memory injection might convey a subject with perfect clarity. But in the same way that close reading allows the reader to absorb, to synthesize the truth of what he reads, drawing allows the artist to capture the soul of a thing. The artist sees things not in terms of what is or might be, but in terms of what must be. Of what our world must become. This is why a portrait will—to the human observer—always defeat the photograph. It is why we turn to religion even when science objects and why the least scholiast might outperform a machine. The photograph captures Creation as it is; it captures fact. Facts bore me in my old age. It is the truth that interests me, and the truth is in charcoal—or in the vermilion by whose properties I record this account. Not in data or laser light. Truth lies not in rote but in the small and subtle imperfections, the mistakes that define art and humanity both. Beauty, the poet wrote, is truth. Truth, beauty. He was wrong. They are not the same. There was no beauty in that arena, but there was a truth. There, while men shouted and died on the killing floor, executed for the diversion of seventy thousand spectators, I saw it...