| What could possibly be sweeter than aging gracefully? Yet in the personal sense it is almost impossible. Our bodies grow steadily less functional, our senses become dull, our passions give way to the spiritual poison of well-reasoned arguments and compromise. Architecture is impermanent; ideas become antiquated; technology goes obsolete almost overnight. Only art can pull off the miraculous feat of becoming bigger and better and cooler with the passage of time. It doesn’t happen very often; as often as not, what sounded good last year seems ho-hum this year and seriously boring five years down the line. A very few things, though, gather power and strength as years go by, like a clay jar of kim chee buried in the cold ground waiting for spring. |