“Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away: O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe, Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!”

Marcus Aurelius once wrote about “cutting free of impressions that cling to the mind, free of the future and the past,” to become the “sphere rejoicing in its perfect stillness.”

object. A photograph turns a living person into a static mediated subject, anticipating his or her death. But a photograph, according to Barthes, does not always depict a dead subject or something that “is no longer” but rather something that “has been.”39 It represents the past without distinguishing between a living subject and a dead one.

People once made glass sculptures of decay, and they put these sculptures in museums. How strange and beautiful human beings are. And how fragile.