Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Hughes

A good critic can consecrate the ordinary, and Hughes does it here by turning a travel terminal into a “secular cathedral.” The phrase is a small act of cultural judo: it borrows the gravitas of religion, then snaps the reader back to modernity with “secular,” reminding us that our deepest communal experiences no longer require God, only infrastructure. The intent isn’t to prettify an airport or a station. It’s to expose how thoroughly modern life has rerouted reverence into systems: schedules, queues, security rituals, the choreography of departure boards and boarding calls.

“Dedicated to the rites of travel” is the blade. “Rites” suggests repetition, obedience, and a shared script - not freedom. Travel sells itself as escape and self-invention, but Hughes points to the opposite: the way mobility produces its own priesthood (airline staff, agents, police), its own liturgy (tickets, passports, announcements), its own architecture of awe (vaulted halls, cavernous concourses) designed to make masses feel small, orderly, and briefly united.

As a critic of art and the built world, Hughes is also nudging us toward an architectural critique: modern public spaces mimic sacred grandeur to legitimize the powers behind them - the state, capital, the myth of progress. The subtext is faintly cynical: we traded the cathedral’s metaphysical promise for the terminal’s procedural one. Salvation is replaced by arrival. Grace becomes “on time.”