I didn’t expect the quiet to be so loud.
In March of 2020, my wife moved out of the home we bought together in July 2014—our first and only house, a space we believed would hold the future we imagined. We had lived there nearly six years. Every wall bore the shape of shared life. When she left, it wasn’t just the collapse of a relationship; it was the unraveling of the world I had built around it. And then the pandemic began. As the rest of the world locked down, I was locked in—with silence, with grief, with two cats and the echo of absence. I was 37, and for the first time in my life, I was alone.
In June 2023, my brother and I took a trip to Washington, D.C. We wandered museums, talked late into the night, and gave shape to memory through shared experience. At the National Gallery, I stopped briefly before Thomas Cole’s Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower. I admired it. I took a photo. Then I moved on. But something in it stayed with me, quietly fermenting. Now, I understand why.
The painting depicts a shepherd resting amid the ruins of two past worlds: a Roman temple, now a low scatter of moss-covered stone, and a once-imposing medieval watchtower, crumbling and overtaken by ivy. These structures, once symbols of faith and defense, are no longer active or sacred in the ways they were intended. And yet—they endure. Not through power or piety, but through use. The shepherd rests on the old stones. His flock finds shade in their hollow. The past, though broken, becomes the ground of the present.
And that’s what spoke to me. Ruins, I’ve come to believe, are not evidence of failure. They are raw material.
In post-war Germany, survivors sifted through rubble to salvage bricks from bombed-out buildings. They chipped away mortar, stacked what remained, and began again. Whole cities rose from the ruins of their predecessors. In religion, too, we see this pattern: new faiths laying claim to ancient shrines, building temples over temples, layering belief upon belief. Even in loss, nothing is truly lost. “Nothing is ever wasted,” writes Annie Dillard. “The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.” In the ruins, there are jewels still.
This idea transformed how I saw my own life in those first years alone. I didn’t need to raze the past. I could salvage what was useful. The quiet routines. The resilience forged in heartbreak. The love that remained—not for her, but for life itself. I began to live not in spite of the ruins, but with them. I cooked meals. I read long-forgotten books. I repaired the small places in myself that had cracked under pressure. Like the shepherd, I learned to sit and tend. To watch the horizon without rushing toward it.
Thomas Merton wrote, “There is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.” Cole’s painting offers that silence. It doesn’t instruct or moralize. It simply presents a world where the sacred is no longer enshrined, but inhabited. Where old stone serves new breath.
Even the ships in the distance speak not of rescue, but of continuity. The world moves on. But the shepherd does not chase after it. He remains.
And that, I think, is the deeper lesson. The ruin does not have to be rebuilt to be redeemed. It only has to be received. The stones of my past—what I thought I lost—have become the footing for who I am now. They are imperfect, weathered, but strong. They hold.
When I look at Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower now, I no longer see just a landscape. I see a philosophy. A theology. A way of living that doesn’t erase the past, but reuses it. I see a man—like me—who didn’t get the life he planned, but who made peace with the one he’s living.