Sight and Sacrifice: The Burghers of Calais

The Burghers of Calais stand, immutable and with an air of eternity, on one side of the entrance to the quad at Stanford University. They are wrought with isolation, not only because the university’s students, faculty, and staff have ceased to register their existence, but because they tell the story of six leaders of Calais who in 1347 volunteered to die in order to spare the lives of the towns’ citizens. They trudge steadily onward, turned away from each other in powerful expressions of fear and terror as we walk home from class, eyes fixed on our iPhones or the ground. Even the statues’ shadows didn’t touch as I stood there and allowed my eyes finally to rest on the tension in their muscles, the contortion in their larger than life faces. The sun was so bright I could barely manage to look into their eyes. A question lies in the artfully indented bronze, eyes that have seen more than you or I. What do you know—they seem to ask—about changing the world?

The roughly hewn cobblestones upon which Rodin’s famous sculptures are set are distinct from the idyllic sandstone colonnades that frame so much of the learning that occurs here. Here, under our noses, is a symbol of sacrifice in paradise, a lesson only imparted to those that actively see instead of biking past on the way to better, more heroic things. Ironically it is the frequently disdained tourists that see The Burghers of Calais and are struck with wonder.

I had an urge to place my hand in the hand of one burgher, to recognize my own insufficient strength against the steadfastness and sanctity of bronze. German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who worked as Rodin’s secretary, expressed that “there was a moment in this story when something portentous took place, something independent of time and place, something simple, something great.” These sculptures, even as a recasting of an original heroism, represent something great, both in the artistic sense and in their ability to act as an emotive and didactic reminder of sacrifice and leadership. They are perhaps a prompt for this university and its resident intellectuals to remember that there is art and there is life, and in moments of true sight can the two be intertwined.