December 2025 List

What helped, what quietly mattered

I was staring at a giant eagle feather - or at least the museum label claimed that this feather belonged to an eagle - when I heard a scream.

C’est faux! (“This is wrong!”) a woman yelled.

I slowly turned my head in her direction, genuinely not ready to doubt anything I was seeing. It was too early, and I needed, as ever, to recover my broken trust in the world.

The woman was gone. I didn’t see her after her loud statement; I only heard her marching vigorously and opening the heavy wooden door of the next museum room, filled with 15th-century paintings of saints of all kinds.

I turned my head back to a shrine filled with pigments, binders, brushes—and writing feathers from various bird species that were used at the end of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance to paint the aforementioned saints.

I was the third visitor of the day at the Cardinal’s Palace in the Papal city of Avignon. It was the second day of (what back home we call) Catholic Christmas, and I had chosen the right moment …