> The Met Cloisters has these wooden altarpieces from the 1400s that draw your attention immediately, I think because the mind can subconsciously calculate the time it must have taken to carve them, and it sends a signal back to the eyes: important. You know that you are not just seeing a work of art, but the expenditure of a life.
Reminds me of one part of Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky".
The lake?
No, the very first meeting with the Emergents, where ... I forget the character's name (Trixia?), but she's a linguist and she figures out that there's something odd about the painting-carvings in the Emergent habitat. She can't put her finger on it until she spends more time studying their language, and figures out that they... well, we're getting into spoiler territory, so rot13: Fur svtherf bhg gung gurl gnyx nobhg crbcyr nf bowrpgf gb or bjarq.
Well that's a new experience, I naively googled for "Fur svtherf bhg gung gurl gnyx nobhg crbcyr nf bowrpgf gb or bjarq" and gemini responded to the text without rot13ing it, so I had no idea why it was telling me what it told me, I had to decode it to make sense of it's answer
TIL Gemini can respond to rot13
I pasted it into Kagi and the smart response just showed the clear text. Usually the smart responses are much more verbose.
Just read "a deepness in the sky" last month, surprised to see a reference here.
I had forgotten that section. Time to reread, I guess!