Andras covered her hand with his own and looked up again at the bird’s nest shivering in the rose window. He had seen architectural drawings of this church in its unruined state, its Gothic lines graceful but unremarkable, indistinguishable from those of thousands of other Gothic chapels. As a ruin it had taken on something of the extraordinary. The perfect masonry of the far wall had been laid bare; the near wall had weathered into a jagged staircase, the edges of the stones worn to velvet. The rose window was more elegant for its lack of glass, the bones of its corolla scoured by wind and bleached white in the sun. The nest with its streamers was a final unbidden touch: It was what human hands had not brought to the building, and could not remove. It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: It had been complicated, and thereby perfected, by what time had done to it.
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge