In 2000, the 88-year-old Louise Bourgeois filled Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with a spider more than nine metres tall, and named it after her mother, who restored tapestries for a living. The line to keep: the spider is a weaver guarding her eggs… not a monster at all.

Agatha Christie’s play opened in London on 25 November 1952, and she guessed it might last eight months. It gave its 30,000th performance in March 2025. The line to keep: every audience is asked to keep the ending secret, and for over seventy years they have.

Edgar Allan Poe’s poem appeared in January 1845 and was everywhere within days, yet he was paid about nine dollars for it. The line to keep: a single word, “Nevermore,” repeated until it becomes grief itself.

In 1688, a medical student named Johannes Hofer invented a word for the illness of homesick Swiss soldiers, from the Greek for “homecoming” and “pain.” The line to keep: nostalgia began as a longing for a place, and became a longing for a time.

In 1919, the poet T.S. Eliot wrote an essay about Hamlet, the very play that gave Christie her title. In it he named an idea that critics still use. The only way to express an emotion in art, he argued, is to find an “objective correlative”… a thing, a scene or a chain of events that makes the reader feel the emotion without being told it. In other words, art does not say “grief.” It shows you a bird on a bust, repeating one word. Now look back at the week. Bourgeois never wrote “I miss my mother.” She built a weaver nine metres tall. Poe never lists the stages of mourning. He sends a raven that answers every hope with “Nevermore.” Homer never paints a soldier crying. He paints two men by a fire, with a band playing far away. Next time a work of art moves you and you cannot say why, look for the object doing the work.