I don’t know whether it’s because it’s almost Eastern Orthodox Holy Week or the fact that I will turn forty this year, but I am preoccupied by the idea that things, generally, are falling apart, and vastly in need of renewal. I am feeling the press of mortality.

Not long ago I found myself standing in the confessional, listening to a short, Yoda-like priest quote the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno, applying them to the situation I found myself: “In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood/for the straight way was lost.”

I’d read those lines before, I just didn’t think they might someday apply to me.

Yet at the same time, I’ve always been struck by the beauty inherent in images of decay, and how in the very picture of destruction are the seeds of regeneration. Which is why, if you’ve never visited it, you should go check out the web photography installation The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit. (www.detroityes.com; click on “Tour Detroit”)

Put together by Detroit-based painter Lowell Boileau in 1997, the show is a series of stark photographs of the houses and civic monuments built in the city’s golden age of heavy industry and how they had become undone by time, falling apart and sprouting vines and leaves. (It will be especially meaningful for fans of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex, which I’ve mentioned here previously and which is THE novel about the Greek-American immigrant experience.)

From the “About this Site” page on the website, it’s worth quoting in full this paragraph about what initially motivated the project:

Decades of economic decline, social and racial divisions, and loss of population had left tens of thousands of structures in the once fabulously wealthy city abandoned and in ruin. From massive skyscrapers, to its historic automotive plants, elegant schools and churches, richly appointed mansions, even to its humble homes and corner stores, silence and decay had fallen over wide areas of 1997 Detroit. A poignant and disturbing vision emerged, a portrait of extreme beauty, bearded by nature and beaten the elements and man—a vision that begged questions.

How could it happen? How can it be healed? Where is it going? What can it become?

In its nakedly earnest tone, which I can’t help but compare to the glib cynicism of most contemporary blogs, The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit is striking and poignant. And I’m not alone in my affection for it: According to the site, Wired magazine, ever the bellwether, was the first national outlet to cover the project in 1998. The site also was a “Yahoo Pick of the Year” in 1999, which makes me think that Yahoo must once have been something very different from what it is now.

And talk about renewal: ten years after the site’s debut, The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit has morphed into the much larger Detroit Yes project—a real collaborative community resource that maintains online discussions about Detroit topics, has a membership, mounts local forums about development and preservation, and—perhaps most significantly—is now adding photographs of the new Detroit that the site claims is rising.

I have never been to the city, so I can’t confirm. I am thinking that perhaps I might ask my husband to make a Detroit pilgrimage with me over my birthday weekend in October. (I’m told that their Greektown is the best in the nation. Opa!)

But, to rule a line a thousand miles southward, it also seems timely for me to begin reading my fellow Mississippian Walker Percy’s novel Love in the Ruins. Still standing in the checkout line in Border’s at lunchtime, I opened the first page and read echoes of Dante himself:

Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting, Christ-haunted death-dealing Western World I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?

The Iraq War, the incessantly-cited “sub-prime mess,” the failing schools?

Percy wrote these words in 1971.