Why We Build Monuments
Long before memory was written in ink, it was carved in stone.
Across centuries and continents, one instinct has endured: the desire to last. Not just to live, but to remain. To outpace time itself.
The pharaohs of Egypt had no illusions about mortality. They knew death was certain—and so they built against it. The pyramids, rising from the desert like frozen prayers, were not homes for the living, but eternal sanctuaries for the dead. Immense, silent, absolute. Built not only to protect bodies, but to project names—Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure—into eternity. Three syllables resisting the winds of 4,000 years.
Centuries later, in a different empire, a different kind of tomb rose. At the heart of Rome, Emperor Hadrian commissioned a monument to house his remains: a fortress of stone and symmetry that would later become Castel Sant’Angelo. What began as a mausoleum evolved with the city itself—at various times a fortress, a prison, a papal refuge. Stones meant to honor one man became part of the collective memory of a civilization.
It is perhaps the greatest irony of Rome: the monuments outlive their meanings, then acquire new ones.
And then there is the Taj Mahal.
Built not out of ambition, but grief. Not for power, but for love. Commissioned by Shah Jahan for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their 14th child, the Taj is marble turned into mourning. Perfectly symmetrical, it reflects both architectural brilliance and emotional devastation. Yet it too speaks the same ancient language: let this be remembered. Let this be felt, centuries from now.
These structures are not alone.
The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus—now lost—was once considered a Wonder of the Ancient World. The Les Invalides in Paris, housing Napoleon’s tomb, was designed to elevate the emperor’s memory into imperial myth. Lenin’s Mausoleum, austere and cold in Red Square, was built to preserve a man—and an ideology—in glass and granite.
And in Rome, obelisks pierce the sky.
Stolen from Egypt, raised by emperors, re-raised by popes. They’re not merely decorative—they’re trophies, statements, claims to continuity. The oldest among them—like the Vatican Obelisk—stood in Egypt before Moses was born, witnessed centuries of Nile dynasties, then watched chariots race through the Circus Maximus. Today, it presides over St. Peter’s Square. Pagan stone atop Christian ground. A vertical axis through time.
To build is to hope. But to build in stone is to demand memory.
It’s no surprise that literature often returns to this idea. In "The Waste Land," T. S. Eliot wrote:
"These fragments I have shored against my ruins"
—a line that captures the urge to preserve meaning even as time erodes everything else.
And in Shelley’s "Ozymandias," the poet imagines a ruined statue in the desert, its pedestal proclaiming:
"Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
while around it, nothing remains.
All monuments eventually crumble.
But while they stand, they tell us something profound: that someone, once, wished not to vanish.
And perhaps that’s the closest thing we have to permanence.
Not in the stone itself, but in the story it dares to carry forward.
Aug 17, 2024
