🏜️ Hic Transit Gloria Mundi: Reflections on the Desert Bloom

“What is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

— 2 Corinthians 4:18

Doha shimmers. From the air it looks almost imagined; a set piece of glass and sea, a place written in light and budget. You descend into a mirage that holds. Towers rise as if to refute the desert’s old silence. Water coils in designer marinas. Palms are imported, curated, disciplined.

And yet, the feeling persists: this is beauty with an asterisk.

🌇 The Mirage of Permanence

The skyline of Doha evokes wonder, but not depth. It is dazzling, but not rooted. You feel it instinctively. This is a city assembled quickly and splendidly, like a museum exhibition meant to impress but not endure. There is no patina. Only polish.

The Western canon is clear on such matters. In Ecclesiastes, everything is “vanity and a chasing after wind.” Heraclitus taught that nothing endures but change. Montaigne, walking his own gardens, reminded himself that “we are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.”

Cities, too, can be patchwork. Qatar’s is stitched in ambition. But ambition without narrative becomes spectacle. The glamour has no grave.

✈️ A Nation Known by Its Airline

What is Qatar most known for?

Not its art. Not its thinkers. Not its past.

It is known for movement. For departure. For the sovereign grace of the world’s finest airline. Qatar Airways is not simply an airline. It is a brand of transcendence, a floating flag more enduring than stone.

There is something quietly poetic about that. The country’s greatest symbol is an exit.

⌛ The Philosophy of Transience

The ancients did not romanticise impermanence, but they respected it.

Marcus Aurelius, writing in the night between campaigns, reminded himself, “Alexander the Great and his mule driver both ended up in the same earth.” Boethius, awaiting his death, dictated that “fame and wealth are shadows of a moment.”

Doha, as it stands now, is a kind of desert bloom: extraordinary, fragile, and temporary. A construction made possible by natural gas, by certainty, by wealth that flowed like water through dry rock. But even the deepest wells run dry. Even the brightest cities dim when they lose the story that sustains them.

What story will remain here, when the gas has stilled and the cranes have stopped?

🕌 Beauty, Still

None of this is to say it isn’t beautiful. It is.

The minarets at dusk, the Museum of Islamic Art at sunrise, the stillness between palm trees in the early morning haze, these are moments of quiet transcendence. They do not pretend to be eternal. That may be their grace.

The philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote that we inhabit time as we inhabit space: not always consciously, but deeply. Walking the corniche, watching the dhows sway in dusk light, I felt not permanence but presence. Not legacy, but atmosphere.

It is not everything. But it is something.

🔚 Final Reflection: The Glitter and the Grave

Hic transit gloria mundi.

Thus passes the glory of the world.

It is not a warning. It is a reminder. A calibration of vision. A refusal to let sparkle blind us to silence.

Qatar may be temporary. But then again, so are we.

And perhaps that is where the real poetry lies.