On what outlasts us

Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations at night, on campaign along the Danube, for no reader but himself. He never intended them to survive. The emperor who governed a world spent his private hours reminding himself that the value of an act lies in the act, not in what it earns or whether anyone remembers it. He worked at his own character the way a craftsman works at a wall: patiently, and without an audience.

This week in Chillán, Chile, restorers described their painstaking recovery of a mural by Julio Escámez, a work long thought destroyed. The project involves millimeter-by-millimeter removal of twelve layers of decades-old paint; Escámez spent more than two years on the murals, completing them in 1972. The artist died in 2015 in Costa Rica, convinced his work no longer existed. He made it well, then let it go. What he could not control was whether it would last. What he could control was whether it deserved to.