Ruins

Every twenty years the holiest building in Shinto is taken down and built again on the lot next door. The lot it leaves is the part I keep thinking about.

At Ise, each of the two main sanctuaries has a twin plot beside it. One holds the shrine. The other is a field of large white pebbles, empty except for a small wooden hut. Inside the hut is a post a little over two metres tall, the shin-no-mihashira, which stood beneath the floor of the previous shrine and is not meant to be seen. When the next shrine goes up on the empty side, the side it left gets a hut of its own. The vacancy is tended for twenty years, then built on.

Ise usually gets told as a riddle about identity — the ship of Theseus in cypress, the buildings of 2013 the sixty-second since the seventh century. I think the riddle misses what the place is doing. It is not trying to be new. It is trying never to become a ruin, and the way it manages that is by keeping one: a ruin with the building subtracted, raked white, holding its place.

It has failed once. Through the civil wars no one could pay, and from 1462 to 1585 the Inner Shrine went more than a century without a rebuilding. For that stretch it was simply allowed to get old.

The old wood does not disappear, either. The great pillars come down and become the torii at either end of the Uji Bridge, where they stand another twenty years. Then they move again, to gates at Seki-no-Oiwake and Shichiri-no-Watashi on the old roads pilgrims walked to get here.

So the oldest wood at Ise is at the edges, weathering at crossroads. At the center there is a hut on a field of stones, a post inside it, and a place being kept for 2033.

In a vault outside Paris, under three nested bell jars, behind a door that takes three keys held by three different people, sits a platinum-iridium cylinder the size of a golf ball. From 1889 to 2019 it was the kilogram. Not a kilogram — the kilogram. Every scale on earth, every drug dose, every bag of flour traced its meaning through a chain of copies of copies back to this one object.

Which made it the only object in the universe that could not be weighed. Weighing means comparing a thing against the standard. It was the standard. Whatever it did, it did at exactly one kilogram, by definition, forever.

Then it started losing weight. Against its own official sister copies, Le Grand K came up some fifty micrograms short over a century — a fingerprint's worth of metal, gone, and nobody is sure how. But the definition didn't permit the sentence "the kilogram lost mass." So metrologists were stuck with the other formulation, the correct one, the insane one: the cylinder was fine, and everything else in the universe had gotten heavier.

In 2019 the unit was rebuilt on Planck's constant and the cylinder was retired. Retirement demoted it into reality. For 130 years it was exempt from its own concept. Now, for the first time since it was cast, it has a weight — measurable, uncertain, capable of being wrong. It became an ordinary object the way the rest of us are ordinary: by not being the definition of anything.

Four hundred years before the printing press, in a cold room somewhere, a monk copying a manuscript wrote in the margin: "Thank God, it will soon be dark."

He wasn't supposed to be there. The text was Scripture, or law, or Aristotle — not him. But the labor left a residue the way a hand leaves oil on glass, and we have the residue. "New parchment, bad ink, I say nothing more." "Oh, my hand." "St. Patrick of Armagh, deliver me from writing." "Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides."

A copyist could spend months, sometimes years, on a single book. At the end, the small triumph: "Now I've written the whole thing. For Christ's sake, give me a drink."

My favorite isn't a complaint. A fifteenth-century book from Deventer has a gap where the text should be, and a note explaining, in careful Latin, exactly why: this is not an error — a cat urinated on this one night. Confusion to that worst of cats.

The monk is gone. The monastery is gone. The Latin he prayed in is gone. Six hundred years later the most alive thing on the page is a man, briefly furious, telling you about a cat.