{"id":32349,"date":"2025-10-30T21:13:50","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T21:13:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/the-beginning-and-the-end-of-war-in-a-stunning-watercolor-reckoning-with-humanity\/"},"modified":"2025-10-30T21:13:50","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T21:13:50","slug":"the-beginning-and-the-end-of-war-in-a-stunning-watercolor-reckoning-with-humanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/the-beginning-and-the-end-of-war-in-a-stunning-watercolor-reckoning-with-humanity\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beginning and the End of War, in a Stunning Watercolor Reckoning with Humanity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

We bear the heavy burden of a complex consciousness<\/a> that makes us creatures capable of the Benedictus<\/em> and the bomb, apes who came down from the trees to kiss the ground with our prayers and scar it with our tranches, to discover mitochondria and mathematics, to invent love and war. Our dual capacity for creation and destruction is the price we pay for our own complexity. We live with it and die by it and make poems and paintings and psalms to transform the constant tension between the two into meaning, into something of beauty and substance that outlasts the dust of power \u2014 these are the shoreless seeds and stardust that survive us<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a world teetering on the event horizon of its third global war, Italian artist Alessandro Sanna<\/a> set out to paint to life his favorite poems from the time of the first. It all began with a single poem \u2014 a splendid addition to the small, surprising canon of stone poems for trusting time<\/a> \u2014 written in the sweltering trenches of the third summer of WWI:<\/p>\n

\n

I AM A CREATURE<\/strong>
\nby Giuseppe Ungaretti<\/em>
\ntranslated from Italian by Geoffrey Brock<\/em><\/p>\n

Like this stone
\non San Michele
\nthis cold
\nthis hard
\nthis arid
\nthis impervious
\nthis utterly
\nspiritless
\nlike this stone
\nis my
\nunseen grief<\/p>\n

We pay down
\ndeath
\nby living<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But as Sanna tried to paint the work of his favorite wartime poets, he found himself unable to shake off the mental images of all that ruin, the emotional atmosphere of all that grief. In the author\u2019s note to what became Old as Stone, Hard as Rock: of Humans and War<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 his extraordinary wordless reckoning with humanity and war \u2014 he echoes artist Ann Hamilton\u2019s moving manifesto \u201cMaking Not Knowing\u201d<\/a> and writes:<\/p>\n

\n

I could already feel my hands thinking along other lines\u2026 I have always put my faith in my hands \u2014 in their manner of working, and in how they seek to capture the best gesture with which to solve the challenge of depicting a sky, a mountain, or a wind-tossed sea. Hands think differently from our minds; hands are more daring and audacious. When hands work, they are strangely farsighted and free of preconceptions, constantly opening scenes, erasing them, starting over from scratch \u2014 as if they never work from a plan.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When his hands parted the mind\u2019s curtain of preconception and dilated the aperture of the present, he began seeing the bigger picture stretching like a tapestry all the way back to the dawn of our species, to the birth of our lust for domination, and all the way forward to a placid universe that survives us. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In consonance with Rachel Carson\u2019s parting insistence<\/a> that humanity has reached a point where it must \u201cprove its maturity and its mastery \u2014 not of nature, but of itself,\u201d Sanna writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Ever since the dawn of time, the stars sparkling in the sky have looked down upon us with indifference, as we strain in the age-old, tormented contest to dominate all things that can be named. For glimpsed from that distance, the Earth is no more than a luminous, watery pearl that appears just as immutable as immovable stone.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There are echoes in these words of Auden\u2019s timeless poem \u201cThe More Loving One,\u201d<\/a> with its \u201cstars that do not give a damn,\u201d with its central antidote to the human impulse for destruction and domination in the simple, immense vow: \u201cLet the more loving one be me.\u201d <\/p>\n

With the feeling-tone of an epic myth and the chill of a mirror held up to reality, the story begins with a single stone that rolls down from the cloud-crowned top of a mountain into a valley where two humans, each wanting to possess it, invent the first weapon: want. The men become clans that become armies that set out to defeat each other, to conquer the elements, to own the other animals, with fists that become sticks that become bows that become guns that become the mushroom cloud.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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All the while, the Sun and the Moon and the stars look on indifferent, watching us forget what Dante called the love that moves them, watching us turn this improbable world, this one and only heaven we will ever know, into a living hell. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What emerges from Sanna\u2019s pages is a bittersweet yet hopeful meditation on the choices that stand between our predilections and our possibilities, intimating that peace is not only possible<\/a>, not only our moral imperative, but our creaturely inheritance from star and stone; that perhaps we are here simply to learn how to be more loving creatures.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Couple Old as Stone, Hard as Rock<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with Einstein and Freud\u2019s little-known correspondence about war and human nature<\/a>, then revisit Sanna\u2019s magnificent alternative origin story of humanity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

donating = loving<\/h3>\n

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian<\/em> (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings<\/em><\/a> for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation<\/a>. Your support makes all the difference.<\/p>\n

\n

newsletter<\/h3>\n

The Marginalian<\/em> has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect<\/a>. Like? Sign up.<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We bear the heavy burden of a complex consciousness that makes us creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb, apes who came down from the trees to kiss the ground with our prayers and scar it with our tranches, to discover mitochondria and mathematics, to invent love and war. Our dual capacity for creation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32350,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-life"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-25 19:53:49","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32349\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}