What Ruins Know About Beauty

Ephesus, Türkiye

Count me among those who will happily travel halfway around the world just to look at things that are falling apart.

It’s one of the stranger and more wonderful things about being a traveler. We stand in line to see cracked columns, broken walls, roofless temples, and stones that have spent thousands of years being worked over by wind, rain, war, and neglect. Then we photograph what remains from every possible angle and try to imagine the people who once moved through those places - what they believed, who they loved, and what kept them awake at night.

And no one looks at these remains and says, “Someone really ought to fix this place up.”

Pompeii, Italy

We don’t complain that an ancient doorway is leaning or suggest that a Roman wall has let itself go. In fact, the very things we might see as flaws in a new building are often what make an old one charming or mysterious. The cracks, stains, missing pieces, and worn edges have become part of its story. Remove them, and you might still have a structure, but much of what is beautiful and interesting would be gone.

Visiting ruins may not be everyone’s idea of a fun day, and I get that. Still, places like Pompeii, Ephesus, the Acropolis, Angkor Wat, and Machu Picchu draw enormous crowds because age has given them something the new and untouched can’t offer. They hold time. That may be difficult to explain, but we can somehow feel it in what remains.

History is certainly part of the appeal, though it isn’t the only thing that draws us to these places. A ruin gives the imagination room to wander. We find ourselves wondering who leaned against a particular wall, waited in a doorway, prayed in a temple, or kissed someone in a courtyard. A worn step tells us that countless feet passed over it, carrying people whose lives mattered to them every bit as much as ours matter to us.

Basilica of Saint John in Selçuk, Türkiye

Perhaps that’s why old places can seem wise. They remind us that our own moment, which naturally feels so large and immediate while we’re living it, is only one small part of a much longer story. People once stood where we stand, caught up in their work, their families, their disappointments, and all the small concerns that filled an ordinary day. Then time moved on, as it always does. What remains has a way of making our worries feel a little smaller and the days we’ve been given more precious.

Taormina, Sicily

We’re generous with ruins in a way we aren’t always generous with ourselves. We allow old places to show their age, admire what they’ve survived, and call the weathering beautiful. Yet when those same signs of time appear on our faces, rather than viewing them with the same romantic curiosity, we often treat them as something to fix or conceal. There is something terribly sad in that, because it means we are often kinder to stone than to ourselves.

Aging isn’t only a private matter between us and our mirrors. It’s shaped by the culture around us, one that worships youth and then acts surprised when older people begin to feel invisible. Experience and wisdom are praised in theory, yet our attention is still drawn toward youth and anything that appears untouched by time. Even the phrase age gracefully can carry an unspoken message: please grow old, but don’t let us see you doing it.

Pompeii, Italy

It isn’t difficult to understand why this frightens us. Most people don’t simply fear wrinkles or gray hair; we fear being dismissed, overlooked, or quietly moved to the edge of things. That fear isn’t imaginary. Older people are often treated as though the useful or interesting part of their lives is behind them, even when they may be carrying more patience, wisdom, and hard-earned understanding than ever before.

I write this as someone in his seventies, which means I’m now entering what we might politely call my ruinous period. I don’t say that with despair. In fact, I kind of like it, although I do hope this ruin remains reasonably sturdy for many years to come.

I want to be healthy, of course, and I hope to keep walking, traveling, taking photographs, climbing stairs, and living as fully as I can. There’s nothing noble about ignoring the body or pretending that strength and mobility don’t matter. They matter a great deal. Taking care of ourselves is one way of honoring life, but health isn’t the same thing as looking young, and we often confuse the two.

Sanctuary of Dionysus, Naxos, Greece

The lines in my face aren’t an illness, and the changes in my skin aren’t a personal defeat. The body I have now has been shaped by years of laughter, worry, grief, recovery, disappointment, friendship, travel, and love. It has carried me through every day I’ve ever lived, on some days more gracefully than on others, but it has always shown up. I can’t imagine why I would want it to look untouched by any of that. A face that has lived should look lived in.

Like many people, I sometimes come across an old photograph of myself on Facebook and think, “Well, look at that fellow.” He had fewer lines, more hair, and probably got out of a chair without making a sound. For a moment, I may wish I still looked like him. But I wouldn’t trade places with him, because although he looked younger, he knew far less about life than I do now.

Herculaneum, Italy

He hadn’t yet loved as long, lost as much, forgiven as often, or learned how little control he had over most things. He didn’t understand that some wounds heal slowly, that a few may never heal completely, and that life can still be good even when parts of it remain broken. He wasn’t a lesser person. He simply hadn’t lived long enough to become who I am now, and there was no way he could have known how much of himself was still waiting to be formed.

Youth is beautiful, and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise. It carries energy, possibility, and the light that belongs to beginnings. Young faces are beautiful partly because so much hasn’t happened yet.

But age has a beauty of its own. It isn’t simply youth with the brightness turned down or a lesser version of what came before. Its beauty comes from having lived long enough for experience, tenderness, and character to become part of the face we show the world.

Basilica of Saint John in Selçuk, Türkiye

You can see it in a face that has grown kinder and in eyes that have seen enough to judge a little less quickly. It appears in hands that have held children, buried parents, prepared thousands of meals, and reached for someone in the dark. None of this makes a person automatically wise, of course. Age can deepen us, but time alone doesn’t do the work; what matters is what we make of all that we’ve lived through.

As we get older, something else can begin to happen. The body, which once drew so much attention to itself, starts to step aside a little. When we’re young, outward beauty can be so striking that it becomes the first thing people notice and, occasionally, the only thing. Later, our outward appearance may no longer command quite as much attention. As its hold begins to loosen, more of the person within - the deeper self, the soul, or whatever name we give it - can come more fully into view through the face, the eyes, and the way that person moves through the world.

The body may not be able to do everything it once did, but it can become a more honest window into who we are. Perhaps that’s part of what we sense when we stand before a ruin. Its perfection is gone, so we begin to notice other things: what endured, what remains, and what time has added as well as taken away. The missing pieces don’t diminish the beauty. Somewhere along the way, they became part of it.

Lindos, Rhodes, Greece

A ruin doesn’t pretend that nothing happened, and neither should we. There is no shame in carrying the evidence of having lived, nor any reason to believe that beauty belongs only to whatever has escaped the touch of time.

Perhaps we could offer ourselves some of the kindness we so freely give the ruins we admire. We might stop treating every mark of age as an enemy and begin seeing at least some of it as evidence that we’ve been here, that life has moved through us, and that we’ve been changed by what we loved and what we survived. We can care for our bodies without apologizing for them and value strength and health without demanding that we appear untouched by time. We can allow ourselves to look the age we are without feeling that we’ve done something wrong.

We aren’t failed versions of our younger selves; we’re what became of them. That younger person is still here, along with everyone we’ve been since - the child, the dreamer, the parent, the traveler, the one who got things wrong, and the one who tried again. They’ve all left their marks, as they were bound to do.

Our bodies aren’t hiding our beauty. They’re telling the truth about it, and perhaps that’s the real beauty of growing older: after all these years, the person we’ve spent a lifetime becoming can finally be seen.

Simcha Weinstein