Since it’s Good Friday, let’s look at one of Ireland’s most precious objects: the Monogram Page from the Book of Kells. I no longer believe in a particular religion, but I will never lose faith in beauty.
Note: you should have at least ten minutes available to spend looking at this work. It’s important. It may also be hard to do if you’re reading this on a phone.
The reason I say it’s important to have ten minutes available is because this artifact comes from a time before social media, computers, or even electricity for that matter. In fact, it’s about a thousand years older than electricity!
There are so many things to pick out and discover in this work. Spending just a short period of your day to discover them on your own is an exercise that will reward you much more than the ten minutes you put into it. You’ll learn to see things, and seeing things is what writing is all about. To twist Robert Frost, no sight in the writer, no sight in the reader. No sight of the writer, for that matter, because no one wants to read something that has nothing to say.
One of the other things that draws me to this is on a more macro level. In a way, I imagine this is what a good story would look like from far above if you could give forms and shapes to scenes and characters. I love how this piece moves and intersects, but also has a twisty subplot in the bottom right quadrant. Even the subplot has an adjoining subplot. This work has both intricacy and scale, like the best stories do.
Next week, we’ll do another ten minute exercise, this one from a New York Times article. Have a good weekend, for those who are celebrating things.
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