Broken Pottery Quotes

We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with laquer and flakes of gold, whole as we are, complete unto each other. Complete and worthy and so very loved.

She is a beautiful piece of broken pottery, put back together by her own hands. And a critical world judges her cracks while missing the beauty of how she made herself whole again.

In the east," she says after a time, her gaze still downcast, "there is a tradition known as kintsukuroi. It is the practice of mending broken ceramic pottery using lacquer dusted with gold and silver and other precious metals. It is meant to symbolize that things can be more beautiful for having been broken." "Why are you telling me this?" I ask. At last she looks at me. Her irises are polished obsidian in the moonlight. "Because I want you to know," she says, "that there is life after survival.

We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with lacquer and flakes of gold, whole as we are, complete unto each other. Complete and worthy and so very loved.

We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with lacquer and flakes of gold, whole as we are, complete unto each other. Complete and worthy and so very loved. “May I kiss you?” I ask. “Abso-bloody-lutely you may,” he says. And so I do.

I have a theory that the world is broken up into two kinds of people." "Yeah?" "Yep. On the one side are the people who love the Harry Pottery books and wish that they could attend Hogwarts and have Ron and Hermione for best friends and vanquish Death Eaters and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named." She's smiling at me, and she's just so fucking cute. I have to ask: "And the other side?" Aimee shrugs. "Douchebags.

When the ball that was my heart ws broken,... laughter fell out".

In practicing the Japanese art of Kintsukuroi, one repairs broken pottery by filling in the cracks with gold, silver, or platinum. The choice to highlight the breaks with precious metals not only acknowledges them, but also pays tribute to the vessel that has been torn apart by the mutability of life. The previously broken object is considered more beautiful for its imperfections. In life, too, even greater brilliance can be found after mending.

A kind man once told me that in Japan, broken pottery is pieced back together using gold as the glue, highlighting the cracks, making them beautiful. And maybe that could be my heart—hurt and healed, but filled with gold because I’d known Kyle.

Did you know that pottery can be repaired with gold?" Kami asked. "Then it's meant to be stronger than before, and more beautiful. Which is awesome, though it seems expensive." Her grandmother had nodded. "Makes sense to me," she said. "Why be broken when you can be gold?

That’s what she was, broken pottery, patched up with gold, the gold shimmering through the places where she had been cracked open, and left bleeding.

There is really only one way to restore a world that is dying and in disrepair: to make beauty where ugliness has set in. By beauty, I don’t mean a superficial attractiveness, though the word is commonly used in this way. Beauty is a loveliness admired in its entirety, not just at face value. The beauty I’m referring to is metabolized grief. It includes brokenness and fallibility, and in so doing, conveys for us something deliciously real. Like kintsukuroi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with powdered gold, what is normally seen as a fatal flaw is distinguished with value. When we come into contact with this kind of beauty, it serves as a medicine for the brokenness in ourselves, which then gives us the courage to live in greater intimacy with the world’s wounds.

Alice recalled one of the books Dylan had read to her, a collection of Japanese fairytales. In one, a woman artist practiced kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. There'd been an illustration of a woman bent over a pile of broken pottery pieces, laid out to fit together, with a fine paintbrush in her hand, its bristles dipped in gold. It had enchanted Alice, the idea that breakage and repair were part of the story, not something to be disdained or disguised.

Kintsugi is a Japanese art, that takes broken pottery and delicately places it back together by sealing the cracks with gold lacquer. I found myself admiring the metaphor it represents. It reminded me of you. Maybe you feel like you are broken inside, maybe you’re worried that you will disappoint me. Just like this pottery, life will never be perfect, but it can be beautiful. But we have to choose to see the beauty of it, not despite it’s cracks or imperfections but because of it. I get that you may not want to show me the side of you that’s less than perfect, but don’t you see? I don’t want perfect. Perfect is overrated. All I want is you. All that you are. Exactly as you are. I want you to know that I will wait for you, for as long as it takes. Take your time. (but not too long)

My hands are upon his face, mirror to the spot where I’ll carry red, puckered scars for the rest of my life. In his gaze, they seem to matter less. We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with lacquer and flakes of gold, whole as we are, complete unto each other. Complete and worthy and so very loved.

The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one's throat and nostrils and held it on one's breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals. IV

Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and, above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso -- who subsequently kept African art objects in his studio until his death. Cubism was new only for Europeans, for it was partly inspired by specific pieces of African art, some of them from the Pende and Songye peoples, who live in the basin of the Kasai River, one of the Congo's major tributaries. It was easy to see the distinctive brilliance that so entranced Picasso and his colleagues at their first encounter with this art at an exhibit in Paris in 1907. In these central African sculptures some body parts are exaggerated, some shrunken; eyes project, cheeks sink, mouths disappear, torsos become elongated; eye sockets expand to cover almost the entire face; the human face and figure are broken apart and formed again in new ways and proportions that had previously lain beyond sight of traditional European realism. The art sprang from cultures that had, among other things, a looser sense than Islam or Christianity of the boundaries between our world and the next, as well as those between the world of humans and the world of beasts. Among the Bolia people of the Congo, for example, a king was chosen by a council of elders; by ancestors, who appeared to him in a dream; and finally by wild animals, who signaled their assent by roaring during a night when the royal candidate was left at a particular spot in the rain forest. Perhaps it was the fluidity of these boundaries that granted central Africa's artists a freedom those in Europe had not yet discovered.

One day in March AD 415, Hypatia set out from her home to go for her daily ride through the city. Suddenly, she found her way blocked by a “multitude of believers in God.”32 They ordered her to get down from her chariot. Knowing what had recently happened to her friend Orestes, she must have realized as she climbed down that her situation was a serious one. She cannot possibly have realized quite how serious. As soon as she stood on the street, the parabalani, under the guidance of a Church magistrate called Peter—“a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ”33—surged round and seized “the pagan woman.” They then dragged Alexandria’s greatest living mathematician through the streets to a church. Once inside, they ripped the clothes from her body and, using broken pieces of pottery as blades, flayed her skin from her flesh. Some say that, while she still gasped for breath, they gouged out her eyes. Once she was dead, they tore her body into pieces and threw what was left of the “luminous child of reason” onto a pyre and burned her.34

In Japanese pottery, there’s an artful form of repair called kintsugi. When a piece of ceramic pottery breaks, rather than trying to restore it to its original condition, the artisan accentuates the fault by using gold to fill the crack. This beautifully draws attention to where the work was broken, creating a golden vein. Instead of the flaw diminishing the work, it becomes a focal point, an area of both physical and aesthetic strength. The scar also tells the story of the piece, chronicling its past experience.

The Japanese art form of kintsugi repairs broken and flawed pottery with gold, silver or platinum. It doesn’t hide the cracks, but embraces it, seeing it as integral to the object’s history, and rebuilds something new.

In Japanese culture there is an art of fixing broken pottery with gold or silver lacquer. The lacquer highlights the pottery’s flaw as a celebrated part of its history. Because the piece has been salvaged and repaired, pulled back from the edge of destruction, it is considered even more beautiful for having been broken. We’d been broken. And then we’d been pieced back together. The turmoil had been meaningful because now there was gold where the cracks used to be.

Swirled tight, trussed, manic, most trusted. You love hills, swells, waves of sand, waves of water. You love traffic on bridges that might split in two. You love stairs leading to stairs leading to ice cream stands. Shards of pottery as good as a map. You love fractured control towers and the very broken Alaskan Way Viaduct. You love squat corner stores and barber-pole signs. You love the idea of privacy in a city of windows, the idea of light in a city of shadows.

Champion Ven knelt in the ruins of the village. Sifting through the rubble, he lifted out a broken doll, its pink dress streaked with dirt and its pottery face cracked. There was always a broken doll. Why did there always have to be a damn doll?

Kintsukuroi is the Japanese art of repairing pottery by mending it with gold. Within our imperfections and our flaws lies the potential for beauty and strength. Once the broken pieces are put back together, we are sturdier and more beautiful than we were before the damage was inflicted.

As soon as she stood on the street, the parabalani, under the guidance of a Church magistrate called Peter—“a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ”33—surged round and seized “the pagan woman.” They then dragged Alexandria’s greatest living mathematician through the streets to a church. Once inside, they ripped the clothes from her body and, using broken pieces of pottery as blades, flayed her skin from her flesh. Some say that, while she still gasped for breath, they gouged out her eyes. Once she was dead, they tore her body into pieces and threw what was left of the “luminous child of reason” onto a pyre and burned her.34

One morning during Lent in 415, Hypatia climbed into her chariot, some say outside her residence, some say on a street intending to ride home. Several hundred of Cyril's stooges, Christian monks from a desert monastery, swooped upon her, beat her, and dragged her to a church. Inside the church they stripped her naked and peeled away her flesh with either sharpened tiles or broken bits of pottery.

I had started “hibernating” as best I could in mid-June of 2000. I was twenty-six years old. I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds. My muscles withered. The sheets on my bed yellowed, although I usually fell asleep in front of the television on the sofa, which was from Pottery Barn and striped blue and white and sagging and covered in coffee and sweat stains.

No rape victims should ever be shamed and silenced! This is critical for those investigating violations in Christian communities. The victims should always receive full support, not stigmatization, blaming, guilt-trips or pressure to ‘forgive and forget,’ because the perpetrator (who was caught) apologizes. There should be transparency and accountability. Any suggestion of suppressing a legal investigation to protect the institution only reinforces the notions of hypocrisy that exists from those outside the church.

His face goes shy, eyes flitting down, then back up to mine. "Yes, Monty," he says, and he smiles on my name. "I love you. And I want to be with you." "And you, Percy," I return, touching my nose to his, "are the great love of my life. Whatever happens from here, I hope that's the one thing that never changes." My hands are upon his face, mirror to the spot where I'll carry red, puckered scars for the rest of my life. In his gaze, they seem to matter less. We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with lacquer and flakes of gold, whole as we are, complete unto each other. Complete and worthy and so very loved. "May I kiss you?" I ask. "Abso-bloody-lutely you may," he says. And so I do.

My family is a classic American-dream story. My great-grandparents fled Russia to avoid being murdered for their religion. Just two generations later, my parents fled New York City weekends for their country house. I never felt guilty about this. I was raised to believe America rewards hard work. But I was also raised to understand that luck plays a role in even the bootstrappiest success story. The cost of living the dream, I was taught, is the responsibility to expand it for others. It’s a more than fair price. Yet the people running the country didn’t see it that way. With George W. Bush in the White House, millionaires and billionaires were showered with tax cuts. Meanwhile, schools went underfunded. Roads and bridges deteriorated. Household incomes languished. Deficits ballooned. And America went to war. President Bush invaded Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, a campaign which hit a snag when it turned out those weapons didn’t exist. But by then it was too late. We had broken a country and owned the resulting mess. Colin Powell called this “the Pottery Barn rule,” which, admittedly, was cute. Still, it’s hard to imagine a visit to Pottery Barn that costs trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives. Our leaders, in other words, had made bad choices. They would therefore be replaced with better ones. That’s how AP Government told me the system worked. In the real world, however, the invasion of Iraq became an excuse for a dark and antidemocratic turn. Those who questioned the war, the torture of prisoners—or even just the tax cuts—found themselves accused of something barely short of treason. No longer was a distinction made between supporting the president’s policies and America’s troops. As an electoral strategy, this was dangerous and cynical. Also, it worked. So no, I didn’t grow up with a high opinion of politicians. But I did grow up in the kind of environment where people constantly told me I could change the world. In 2004, eager to prove them right, I volunteered for John Kerry’s presidential campaign.

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Oh, what a pleasure that was! Mollie Katzen's handwritten and illustrated recipes that recalled some glorious time in upstate New York when a girl with an appetite could work at a funky vegetarian restaurant and jot down some tasty favorites between shifts. That one had the Pumpkin Tureen soup that Margo had made so many times when she first got the book. She loved the cheesy onion soup served from a pumpkin with a hot dash of horseradish and rye croutons. And the Cardamom Coffee Cake, full of butter, real vanilla, and rich brown sugar, said to be a favorite at the restaurant, where Margo loved to imagine the patrons picking up extras to take back to their green, grassy, shady farmhouses dotted along winding country roads. Linda's Kitchen by Linda McCartney, Paul's first wife, the vegetarian cookbook that had initially spurred her yearlong attempt at vegetarianism (with cheese and eggs, thank you very much) right after college. Margo used to have to drag Calvin into such phases and had finally lured him in by saying that surely anything Paul would eat was good enough for them. Because of Linda's Kitchen, Margo had dived into the world of textured vegetable protein instead of meat, and tons of soups, including a very good watercress, which she never would have tried without Linda's inspiration. It had also inspired her to get a gorgeous, long marble-topped island for prep work. Sometimes she only cooked for the aesthetic pleasure of the gleaming marble topped with rustic pottery containing bright fresh veggies, chopped to perfection. Then Bistro Cooking by Patricia Wells caught her eye, and she took it down. Some pages were stuck together from previous cooking nights, but the one she turned to, the most splattered of all, was the one for Onion Soup au Gratin, the recipe that had taught her the importance of cheese quality. No mozzarella or broken string cheeses with- maybe- a little lacy Swiss thrown on. And definitely none of the "fat-free" cheese that she'd tried in order to give Calvin a rich dish without the cholesterol. No, for this to be great, you needed a good, aged, nutty Gruyère from what you couldn't help but imagine as the green grassy Alps of Switzerland, where the cows grazed lazily under a cheerful children's-book blue sky with puffy white clouds. Good Gruyère was blocked into rind-covered rounds and aged in caves before being shipped fresh to the USA with a whisper of fairy-tale clouds still lingering over it. There was a cheese shop downtown that sold the best she'd ever had. She'd tried it one afternoon when she was avoiding returning home. A spunky girl in a visor and an apron had perked up as she walked by the counter, saying, "Cheese can change your life!" The charm of her youthful innocence would have been enough to be cheered by, but the sample she handed out really did it. The taste was beyond delicious. It was good alone, but it cried out for ham or turkey or a rich beefy broth with deep caramelized onions for soup.

Numerous gifted objects; black granite Etchings, carved statues, broken goddesses, Inscriptions, pottery, jewelry, rough-hewn Garnets, flowers, consecrated herbs, skulls, Gold ornaments, weapons, prized artifacts; Sacrifices, ancestors’ ageless prayers Left with olden Father Thames. For them, The sinuous streams were alive, full worlds Of votive offerings inside murky depths, Lifeblood pleas, observances thereafter Troubles now vanished, solemn promises, Treasures carefully bestowed upon Spirits, watchful deities; faithfully Invoking his ancient name Tamesas.

I’d broken up with someone I’d met at my pottery studio. It had been quite a major love affair. He was older and single, and I’d gotten caught up in it to the point that I’d even thought about marrying him. In the end we’d gone our separate ways, but I was still hung up on him.

I'd heard on a podcast once about a Japanese technique for fixing broken pottery, where the artist would mix gold with glue, binding the cracks together and making them glow. I wasn't the distraction, Ellie was saying. The book was, and all the burdens that came with it.

The pa system has broken down. Society has broken down.

February 17 Broken Pieces I am forgotten by them as though I were dead; I have become like broken pottery. But I trust in You, O lord; I say, “You are my God.” My times are in your hands.—Psalm 31:12, 14-15a I have a friend who does beautiful work with pieces of broken china and pottery. She gave me a lovely blue and white frame as a gift. She took the china and broke it into small enough pieces to fit the frame. She covered a plain frame with a white mortar and fit the broken pieces of blue and white china around the frame in a way that covered most of the area and filled in the spaces in between with more of the mortar. What a work of art! Not only is it beautiful, but it is custom made to fit my taste and home. But even more beautiful is the note that came with the gift. She wrote: my life has been full of broken pieces. Some of them are a result of my own manipulation and control and some are through no one’s fault, but a result of living in a fallen world. Regardless of what I give the Lord, He takes those pieces and adds them to a beautiful work of art. I hope this constantly reminds you of the Great Planner and Master Creator. We surely can make a mess of our lives, can’t we? But regardless of the mess we’ve made, no matter how fragmented we become, if we offer ourselves to God and trust in Him, He can take all the broken pieces of our life and make them into his work of art. And His work is so beautiful! His plan is custom made for each individual. Our times are in His Hands.

Be merciful to me, LORD, for I am in distress; my eyes grow weak with sorrow, my soul and body with grief. My life is consumed by anguish and my years by groaning; my strength fails because of my affliction,4 and my bones grow weak. Because of all my enemies, I am the utter contempt of my neighbors and an object of dread to my closest friends— those who see me on the street flee from me. I am forgotten as though I were dead; I have become like broken pottery. For I hear many whispering, “Terror on every side!” They conspire against me and plot to take my life. But I trust in you, LORD; I say, “You are my God.” My times are in your hands; deliver me from the hands of my enemies, from those who pursue me. Let your face shine on your servant; save me in your unfailing love. Let me not be put to shame, LORD, for I have cried out to you; but let the wicked be put to shame and be silent in the realm of the dead. Let their lying lips be silenced, for with pride and contempt they speak arrogantly against the righteous.

kintsukuroi, or the “golden repair” of something treasured or important that has become cracked or broken. When applied to the repair of ancient and valuable pieces of pottery, the practice becomes kintsugi, or “golden joinery.” The key to this imaginative art appears when the glue used to fill the cracks and join the broken pieces becomes blended with actual gold. After the repairs have been made, the broken vessel becomes more valuable than ever. Metaphorically, kintsugi suggests that

In practicing the Japanese art of Kintsukuroi, one repairs broken pottery by filling in the cracks with gold, silver, or platinum. The choice to highlight the breaks with precious metals not only acknowledges them, but also pays tribute to the vessel that has been torn apart by the mutability of life. The previously broken object is considered more beautiful for its imperfections. In life, too, even greater brilliance can be found after the mending.

The gold veins on the cover represent the Japanese art of kintsugi, “golden repair,” in which pieces of broken pottery are mended with powdered gold and lacquer, rather than treating the breaks as blemishes to conceal. The technique shows us that although an object cannot be returned to its original state, fragments can be made whole again.

We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with lacquer and flakes of gold, while as we are, compete unto each other. Compete and worthy and so very loved.

Everywhere around the forts shell craters had broken up the ground, and at the Dardanos, a little further downstream on the Asiatic shore, the hillsides were pitted and scarred like the surface of the moon. Coins and pieces of pottery which had lain in the earth since classical times had been flung up into the air.

Mother! Ripped apart. Reaped stones of poverty, weeds that sprouted. Grown to fast, crowned young mother. HIV reaped the harvest of my parents left me with nothing but toddler to take care of. Robbed my youth and my hey days, left naked among a thousand suns. The splendor, the splendor of pain. My face is beautiful broken pottery, a poetry art scene. The screams inside ravage and rammer the very child born along thorns of anguish.

They passed the Confluence sometime that afternoon, where the Little Colorado River emerged from its own canyon on the left and bent around its delta to join the Colorado. The waves turned choppy and coffee-brown where the two rivers met. Tumbled stones, rounded by water, lay on the delta: azure and mauve, taupe and terracotta, some white and cracked like eggs ready to open, others like blunt black knives. The Confluence is a sacred place to the region’s tribes. Zuni send spiritual offerings down the Little Colorado to the Grand Canyon, the home of their ancestors. Hopis say nearby is the place of emergence, where all humankind climbed into this world, the Fourth World, through the hollow stem of a reed, and spread over the Earth, leaving footprints and broken pottery to mark their journeys. Hopi youth make a sacred pilgrimage to the Confluence to gather the salt that seeps out of the sandstone, pressed from an ancient sea and crystallized into gleaming stalagmites. They bring the salt back to the mesas east of the Grand Canyon, where, they say, their people settled at the center of the earth.

I am broken...I shattered like glass. Like pottery. Smashed. Crashed. Shards of me, scattered on the ground.

The landscape was endless, littered with broken clocks, torn pages with illegible writing, wedding rings, broken bits of pottery and jewelry. Occasionally something fell from the world above, like detritus sinking through the sea. In the distance, dark shapes moved which did not look human or like any animal I’d ever seen. From very far away, I thought I heard ocean waves. It was the loneliest place I had ever been, and every time I returned, that was how I thought of it: the Lonely.

what was left of the head off-screen with it, leaving behind a perfectly framed Jackson Pollock, if the artist had used only reds and added texture with broken pottery and clumps of cauliflower. With no one to cut the feed, it kept going, streaming the same grisly static scene, animated only by the painfully slow sliding of those shards and clumps down the wall as they submitted to gravity. Deaths like it happened every day in America, enabled by the easy availability of firearms and the increasingly pointless search for anything that mattered

He always planted at a new moon and picked when the moon was full. He had a lunar chart in his greenhouse, each day marked in a dozen different inks; brown for potatoes, yellow for parsnips, orange for carrots. Watering too was done to an astrological schedule, as was the pruning and positioning of trees. And the garden thrived on this eccentric treatment, growing strong, luxuriant rows of cabbages and turnips, carrots which were sweet and succulent and mysteriously free of slugs, trees whose branches fairly touched the ground under the weight of apples, pears, plums, cherries. Brightly colored Oriental-looking signs taped to tree branches supposedly kept the birds from eating the fruit. Astrological symbols- painstakingly constructed from pieces of broken pottery and colored glass set into the gravel path- lined the garden beds.

That the Japanese believe broken things are more beautiful for the history they tell. They even go a step further, repairing pottery with gold and silver, turning the damage into something precious. Kintsukuroi, they call it.

before I could speak. “It’s a book on how to do kintsugi. It’s a Japanese method of fixing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold.

I wish I’d fallen softly. Light and graceful like a feather drifting slowly to the earth on a warm and dreamy summer’s day. I wish that I’d landed softly too. But there is nothing soft or graceful about that devastating moment when the worst has come to pass. The unavoidable truth is that it is hard, cold and brutal. All that you know to be true and good in life shatters in an instant. You feel like a delicate pottery bowl violently tossed from your place of rest, watching yourself crash and scatter across the hostile dark earth. The sound is deafening. Time stops. Inside, the quiet ache of shock and heartbreak slowly makes its grip known. They cut deep, these jagged edges of broken sherds. You gasp for air hungrily, yet somehow forget how to breathe.

Here Teo struck out left, as instructed and soon came upon a large ditch. He stared down at its contents. There were several large mounds that had been covered neatly with dirt, but here and there an animal bone, or a shard of broken pottery, protruded through the soil. It seemed rather sad, Teo thought, that the span of a man’s life could be reduced to piles of refuse, some of which would surely last far longer than the man himself. Yet, it was inspiring too, that a man could live alone and endure, day after day, perhaps for years on end.

Now, almost every week, we talk about kintsugi pottery. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing a broken bowl by inlaying gold or other precious metals. The new bowl is stronger than the old one. The scars are the design. Your attention is drawn to the cracks and how they are mended. That is what you’re supposed to see. The beauty is in the brokenness.

shops with woven bags, sandals, pottery,

It was Hypatia’s fault, said the Christians, that the governor was being so stubborn. It was she, they murmured, who was standing between Orestes and Cyril, preventing them from reconciling. Fanned by the parabalani, the rumours started to catch, and flame. Hypatia was not merely a difficult woman, they said. Hadn’t everyone seen her use symbols in her work, and astrolabes? The illiterate parabalani (‘bestial men – truly abominable’ as one philosopher would later call them) knew what these instruments were. They were not the tools of mathematics and philosophy, no: they were the work of the Devil. Hypatia was not a philosopher: she was a creature of Hell. It was she who was turning the entire city against God with her trickery and her spells. She was ‘atheizing’ Alexandria. Naturally, she seemed appealing enough – but that was how the Evil One worked. Hypatia, they said, had ‘beguiled many people through satanic wiles’. Worst of all, she had even beguiled Orestes. Hadn’t he stopped going to church? It was clear: she had ‘beguiled him through her magic’. This could not be allowed to continue. One day in March AD 415, Hypatia set out from her home to go for her daily ride through the city. Suddenly, she found her way blocked by a ‘multitude of believers in God’. They ordered her to get down from her chariot. Knowing what had recently happened to her friend Orestes, she must have realized as she climbed down that her situation was a serious one. She cannot possibly have realized quite how serious. As soon as she stood on the street, the parabalani, under the guidance of a Church magistrate called Peter – ‘a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ’ – surged round and seized ‘the pagan woman’. They then dragged Alexandria’s greatest living mathematician through the streets to a church. Once inside, they ripped the clothes from her body then, using broken pieces of pottery as blades, flayed her skin from her flesh. Some say that, while she still gasped for breath, they gouged out her eyes. Once she was dead, they tore her body into pieces and threw what was left of the ‘luminous child of reason’ onto a pyre and burned her.

In his TedX Talk, Gary Lewandowski explains the concept of kintsugi. It refers to a Japanese art form in which broken pottery is put back together using precious metals like gold and silver. The repair pottery is often more beautiful than it was before it was damaged. Lewandowski encourages us to see heartbreak as art break. It’s also a philosophy which treats damage and its repairs as an opportunity - something to take advantage of, not to conceal.