Gargoyles: stone watchers of Paris… grotesque beasts, high on cathedral eaves, with eyes on society …
I am re-reading The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and once again Victor Hugo has me at the top of the Notre-Dame Cathedral with a vertiginous viewpoint of 15th century Paris. It is Paris seen by the hunchback Quasimodo. I am inevitably led back to gargoyles: the grotesque, half-imagined creatures that cling to the edges of ancient cathedrals. Hugo writes obsessively about the cathedral’s architecture, symbolism, and erosion by time and neglect. But here’s a small literary surprise: Victor Hugo doesn’t actually focus on gargoyles as such in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. It’s me that is obsessed with them, and every time I walk by the cathedral, I look up to see if they are looking down at me. Hugo famously wrote that “books would kill buildings” and that the printed word would replace stone as humanity’s great record. Notre-Dame, according to Hugo, is a vast text written in arches, towers, and scars. When Quasimodo looks out of the cathedral, over Paris, the reader sees the city through his expansive view, like a gargoyle on the cathedrals roof tops. The iconic gargoyles that I see on the Notre-Dame Cathedral were added during Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s 19th century restoration. They are mostly chimeras, the decorative figures added in the 1800s. They are fantasies, not medieval originals. But here’s the delicious irony: Hugo’s novel, published in 1831, inspired that restoration. First, a clarification: true gargoyles (gargouilles) are waterspouts designed to channel rainwater away from stone walls. They absorb the rain so that the walls don’t erode. They are made of stone in the form of beasts or scary faces. Gargoyles act like facial expressions representing a city’s “body.” They externalize a city’s anxieties, its historical guilt, and its suppressed or actual violence; they are witnesses, unable to intervene, but essential to a city’s meaning. In medieval France, gargoyles served several roles. They were functional, diverting water away from the building. They were also psychological, moral, and apotropaic, giving form to fear and warding it off by embodying it, and reminding citizens not to sin, because the gargoyles will see everything. Hugo understands the duality of gargoyles: both fear and fascination. Gargoyles remain on ancient Parisian cathedrals, crouched at the edges of their roof tops, as the stone watchers of Paris. In literary terms, gargoyles are on the edge of society as symbols of marginal observers. They don’t move, don’t speak, don’t change; they are watching what happens in the city, wherever that may be. As metaphors, gargoyles function as the eyes to society, morality, and power. Gargoyles live above the crowd, outside the sanctuary of the cathedral, and exposed to weather and time. In this sense, they mirror characters who are socially marginalized, morally ambiguous, and physically or emotionally “different” from society’s norms. The fictional character, Quasimodo, is an obvious example of gargoyles in literary form. He occupies the same vantage point as the gargoyles: elevated yet isolated, essential yet unloved. Like gargoyles, he belongs to the structure of the cathedral, but not the society it serves. Both Quasimodo and the gargoyles watch history unfold but cannot descend the cathedral to change society. Medieval cathedrals placed their gargoyles outside for a reason. Inside the cathedral represented theology, order, and light. Outside the cathedral represented sin, chaos, and fear. Re-reading The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in a time of cultural fracture and historical reckoning, gargoyles feel relevant today. In today’s times, order is fragile, society requiresguardians, and someone needs to observe history, even if that someone is weathered, misunderstood, and never invited inside.
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Sunday, 1 February 2026
Gargoyles: stone watchers of Paris
Thursday, 29 January 2026
INSTAs vs. INSPOs: curated inspiration vs. lived inspiration
INSTAs vs. INSPOs: curated inspiration vs. lived inspiration… the difference between looking and living ...
Instagram has become one of the great idea engines of contemporary creativity. But is it also becoming one of its great replacements for contemporary creativity? Lately, I’ve been thinking about the INSTAs vs. INSPOs – curated inspiration versus lived inspiration – and how it affects creativity. Instagrams (curated inspiration) are fast, visual, algorithmic, and endless. INSTAs are seductive because they offer immediate stimulation, clear aesthetics, constant novelty, and the feeling of BEING in the creative world. They can educate, connect, showcase, and motivate. INSTAs also reshape the creative process. They reward visibility more than depth. They focus on instant recognizable styles over originality that takes time. They privilege output over incubation. When ideas arrive pre-packaged as images, trends, palettes, and formats, we risk being someone who responds, rather than someone who creates. The risk is not that Instagram kills creativity; it’s that it can crowd out the conditions where creativity is born. We start making work that looks like ideas instead of work that grows from experience. INSPOs (lived inspiration) are slower and often invisible. They aren’t ready-made aesthetics. They are feelings, sensations, contradictions, memories. They don’t say “make this” – they say “what can you create from this?” INSPOs require participation, presence, and time. They include reading without harvesting, walking without documenting, conversations that go nowhere useful, staring into space, noticing how light moves across a wall, remembering something someone said, mulling over a question, being bored, being moved, being confused, and the feeling of LIVING in the creative world. The core difference is that INSTAs are external stimulants, whereas INSPOs are internal musings that ferment over time. INSTAs show us what is being made, whereas INSPOs ask us what is becoming and who are we becoming. INSTAs fill the eye, whereas INSPOs feed our inner selves. Both can coexist, but they do not nourish the same layer of our creative self. A diet of INSTAs can make us visually sophisticated but existentially undernourished. INSPOs, by contrast, often feel unproductive. They don’t photograph well but they are where our personal voice comes from. There is a hidden cost to being in a near-permanent state of aesthetic consumption. When we are always looking at INSTAs, we borrow moods instead of discovering them, we learn trends instead of creating them, we collect styles instead of stories, and we are refining what we see instead of questioning what we see. INSPOs, on the other hand, often lead us somewhere unfashionable, inconvenient, or unoptimized. They might lead us back to our childhood, to a place, to loss and grief, to a long-held fascination or obsession, or to a form no one is posting. Isn’t that exactly where the most interesting work begins? Where did your last real idea come from: a scrolled image or a moment that changed the way you felt? This isn’t an argument for abandoning INSTAs. It’s an argument for rebalancing the ecosystem of “being” versus “living.” It’s an argument for treating Instagram as a gallery but treating Inspiration as the studio. If we cultivated our INSPOs with the same devotion we give to our feeds, we would take more walks that lead nowhere, read more books for enjoyment, talk more about living than content planning, and spend more time where nothing is posted but something is forming. Long before ideas become images, they are atmospheres. And atmospheres cannot be scrolled.
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Gargoyles: stone watchers of Paris
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