Why Ancient Ruins Make You Feel Better

Something happens to people in front of very old stones, and almost nobody can explain it while it is happening. They go quiet. They stay longer than they meant to. Days later they are still thinking about it, and the best most of us can manage afterwards is that it was moving, or humbling, or that you had to be there.

In Tunisia, one of our travellers stood in front of the Temple of the Waters at Zaghouan, the spring sanctuary that fed Carthage’s aqueduct, and said nothing at all for a long time. Visibly happy. Just standing there. He was so quiet that I walked over to be sure everything was all right and just stood next to him. Afterwards he shared with me that nothing does it justice. That you can read about this all day, and our travellers genuinely do read about it, seriously and for years before they ever go. But that reading is not the same as being there and seeing it in real life, in real time.

What an insane privilege it was to be able to see it in person.

That is the shape of it, I think. The conversations are the guide. They point your perspective in a direction.

The shifts happen in silence.

I have stopped treating that as a nice mystery. I think the explanation matters, and for a practical reason. If you know what is actually happening to you in front of an old thing, you can arrange to have it happen. If you do not know, you can stand in front of the most significant ruin in the world, feel very little, and go home quietly wondering what is wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with you. Something was missing, and it was almost certainly not the site.

What an old place is actually doing to you

The first is scale. Someone stood where you are standing and worried about their harvest, their children, their king. Every one of those worries was enormous and every one of them is gone, and the stones are still here. Your own list does not get dismissed by that. It gets put at its correct size, which is a different and much kinder thing. Psychologists who study awe describe this as the small self. Attention stops circling you.

The second is proof. You are looking at evidence that people have already come through plague, collapse, war, exile, and starting over with nothing. That evidence quietly converts the present from an unprecedented crisis into another chapter. People who see their own lives as part of a longer story consistently report more meaning in them.

The third is the clock. Modern life runs on a twenty-four hour cycle. A temple runs on a different one, and being physically in its presence puts your nervous system on that clock whether you agreed to it or not. This is the part that does not survive a photograph. It is why the in-person version is the product.

The fourth is the one archaeology does better than anything else, and it answers a question most people carry around without ever finding words for it. Am I a part of something? Archaeology is rarely curated grandeur. It is ordinary human residue. A hearth. A broken pot. A child’s toy. It says: people like you were here, entirely alive, and it mattered that they were here even though they are gone. That is grounding in close to the literal sense.

The part nobody tells you

None of that is automatic.

A ruin does not do it to you. The mechanism is real, but it needs something from you before it will run, and the something is smaller than people assume. Standing in front of something you have a question about is categorically different from standing in front of something you’ve been told is important.

When you have been told it is important, you are doing something rather lonely. You are performing reverence and privately checking whether any has arrived. That is the empty feeling, and it is not a failure of sensitivity. Nothing has been asked of you except appreciation. When you brought a question, the same stones are the other half of a conversation.

The useful question is not which sites are the most significant. It’s where does the question begin to form in a person in the first place.

Where Ideas Begin: An Insider’s Guide to Eastern India

It is not a brochure with a nice cover on it. It is the argument itself, handed to you early.

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Three things that make it happen

The first is residue over grandeur. It is rarely the monument. It is the bathhouse, or the small mosaic off in a corner that two people set one afternoon and probably argued about.

In Tunisia, early in the trip, we were at Gigthis, a Punic and then Roman site a long way down the coast, on the Gulf of Bou Grara. There were flamingos out on the still water behind the ruins, standing about in the background while we walked. We later stopped to see a huge flock along a waterway. Yazid could see I was thrilled, because I did say so, and it was clear I love flamingos.

On one of the last days, at Carthage, which is not one site but a scatter of them across the city, he took me up to where the old houses are. Well, let me show you this, he said. It had been somebody’s home. Not a temple and not a monument. A house. And on the floor was a Roman flamingo mosaic. Somebody made that. It is still here. It lives on, and so do we.

The second is whose voice you hear. A scholar travelling with a group knows the material, and there is no substitute for that. But when local guides speak about their own heritage, rather than someone speaking about it on their behalf, the place stops being a display. Allowing people to tell their own stories is really valuable, and it is valuable in a way you feel rather than agree with. In Khiva, in Uzbekistan, I sat in a woman’s home while she made her family’s pasta. What I remember is the dill. Khiva has a dish built almost entirely on it, shivit oshi, the dough worked through with dill until the noodles come out green, and you find it there and very nearly nowhere else. It is a demonstration she gives visitors, and the dish is traditional. She made it the way she makes it. The residue is not all under the ground. Some of it is still being made, in kitchens, on an ordinary afternoon.

The third is having some skin in it. Everyone who travels with us pays one hundred and fifty dollars on top of the price of the trip, and it goes to a donation project we designate for the preservation of that specific site. Nobody gets a plaque. It was more than just a tour. It was literally carrying on the legacy.

If what moves you about a place is that it endured, then standing there purely as a spectator of endurance is a strange half of the thing. That donation makes you, briefly and in a very small way, part of the reason it goes on enduring. It changes what you are doing while you stand there.

Sometimes you just need an in

None of this is an argument for a particular country.

The in can be Egypt. It can be a castle, or a mine, or whatever you have been circling for years without knowing why. The destination is a door, not the point.

It pulls you into humanity.

Then past it, into how everything fits together. It changes your perspective, and it changes what feels significant.

This is why our trips are built the way they are. Small groups. A scholar with you the whole time rather than appearing after dinner. Local voices telling their own history. Enough time to stay somewhere when staying turns out to matter.

Because sometimes all you need is a ruin. You just have to bring the question with you. The ruin has been holding up its end for nearly two thousand years.

— Mary

P.S. If any of this landed, write to me at mary@farhorizons.com and tell me what your in is. I read these myself, and I am genuinely curious what people say.

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Begin Something This January

This coming January, Dr. Malcolm David Eckel leads a small group through Eastern India: Bodh Gaya, Nalanda, Kolkata, and the Odisha coast. Fifteen days at the place where the whole story began. If this is your threshold, Mary would be glad to tell you everything you need to decide.

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