The Condemned Men of Palo Alto
So here’s the shot. Stanford’s quad, that cathedral to optimism and endowments, and right there in the middle: six bronze figures who understood that sometimes the price of collective survival is individual annihilation. Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. Cast number seven, if anyone’s counting.
Look at them. 1347, their city starved and surrounded, and these six guys, merchants, leaders, bourgeois in the truest sense, volunteer to walk out with ropes around their necks, keys to the gates in their hands, ready to die so everyone else gets to live. That’s the deal. That’s the social contract written in flesh.
And I’m standing there in the quad thinking: one of these guys should be holding a Louis Vuitton trunk. I mean, why not? If you’re going to your execution, might as well carry your existential dread in monogrammed calfskin, right? The absurdity would be perfect. Suffering as accessory, sacrifice as statement piece. We’ve turned everything else into a commodity. Why not martyrdom?
The robber baron who built this place, Leland Stanford, railroad magnate, guy who knew how to move merchandise across a continent, understood monuments. Bronze in a public square says, “This happened. This matters. Remember.” But here’s the thing about Rodin: the French bourgeois who commissioned this piece wanted heroes on a pedestal. Rodin gave them humans at ground level. Terrified. Hesitant. Broken. He wanted people to bump into them. To walk among them. To accidentally brush against a bronze shoulder on their way to class and be forced to reckon with what sacrifice actually looks like.
That’s what great public art does. It refuses to let you off easy. It doesn’t pander. It gets in your way. Stanford’s founder wanted legacy, wanted his name in bronze and marble. He got it. But he also got this: a daily reminder that real courage looks nothing like triumph. It looks like six guys shuffling toward death because it’s the only decent thing left to do. And they’re not above you. They’re with you. In your space. Unavoidable.
The light in this shot is clean, honest. No magic hour, no Instagram bullshit. Just Rodin’s vision against Stanford stone, old world sacrifice meeting new world ambition.
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely, Rodin said.
So look at them. Really look.
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
Auguste Rodin
quoted in Heads and Tales (1936) by Malvina Hoffman, p. 47
Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais
Stanford University