We did not always love ruins. For most of history a fallen temple was simply a quarry, its cut stone too useful to waste on nostalgia; medieval builders raided the Colosseum for centuries without a pang. The taste for ruins as ruins—for the picturesque crack, the ivy-choked arch—is a modern invention, roughly the age of the pocket watch. It arrived, tellingly, alongside the machine. As the factory promised a future scrubbed of decay, the educated began to prize its opposite: the slow, the crumbling, the visibly mortal. A ruin let them feel time as texture rather than schedule. There is something a little dishonest in the pleasure, of course. We enjoy the ruin precisely because we are not the ones it ruined; the picturesque arch was somebody's roof. But dishonesty is not the same as worthlessness. The ruin-lover was rehearsing a truth the factory denied—that everything built is on loan—and he rehearsed it in the only theater available, which was the wreckage of someone else's certainty.