(Value Inquiry Book Series 159) Robert Ginsberg - The Aesthetics of Ruins - Illustrated by The Author (2004, Rodopi) PDF

THE AESTH ETICS OF R U IN S
Robert Ginsberg
illustrated by the author
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004

Cover Design: Studio Pollmann
Cover Image: Robert Ginsberg
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence’'.
ISBN: 90-420-1672-8
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004
Printed in the Netherlands
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations xi
1. Photographic Plates xi
2. Figures xiii
Foreword by Claire Richter Sherman XV
Preface xvii
Acknowledgments xxi
ONE The Ruin as Matter 1
TWO The Ruin as Form 15
THREE The Ruin as Function 33
FOUR The Ruin as Incongruity 51
FIVE The Ruin as Site 11
SIX The Ruin as Symbol 102
SEVEN The Ruin as Aesthetic Experience 155
EIGHT Visit to a Ruin: St. Andrews 173
NINF. Building with Ruin 135
TEN Nature as Ruin 201
ELEVEN Sculpture and Other Visual Arts as Ruin 221
TWELVE Cinema and Television as Ruin 232
THIRTEEN Literature as Ruin 253
FOURTEEN Philosophy as Ruin 251
FIFTEEN The Terminology of Ruin 285

THE AESTHETICS OF RUINS
Theories of Ruin 115
The Ruining Eye—and Other Senses 335
Fragments of a Chapter on Ruin 355

1. Religion 355
2. Civilization 355
3. Ruinations 356
4. Battlefields 358
5. Caesarean Section 358
6. Archaeology 358
2. Psychology of Ruins 359
8. Nostalgia 362
9. Time 363
10. Ruins Put to Use 364
11. People in the Ruins 369
12. Ruinscape and the Picturesque 369
13. Domestic Ruins 320
14. A Ruin No Longer a Ruin? 322
15. Disaster 322
325
17. Funereal 325
18. Minimalism 325
19. Chance Ruins 326
20. On-Site 328
21. Walls 329
22. Sun-Burst 381
23. Ruining 381
24. Sound and Light 382
25. Ephemera 382
26. Ruin Sound 382
22. Ruin Music 383
28. Pro-Verbial 383
29. Language 384
30. Enrichment 384
31. Anecdotage 384
32. Grin and Bear It 385
33. Added Verses Versus Adversity 385
34. Museum of Ruins 386
35. Ruinitis 386
36. Obsession/Optsection 386
Contents ix
NINFTFFN Meditations on Humanity, Self, and the

World as Ruins 387
1. The Fall 387
2. The Redemption 396
3. Death 405
4. The Self 415
5. The Meaning of Existence 425
6. World Destruction 432
7. Fond Farewell 440
Works Cited 449
Chronology of Ruin 453

1. Before Common Era (BCE) 453
2. Common Era (CE) 454
3. Uncommon Error (UE) 460
Appendix Bibliographical Essay on the Literature and

Imagery of Ruin 461
1. Aesthetic Theory 461
2. Art History 465
3. Individual Artists 469
4. Literary History 470
5. History of Culture 472
6. Archaeology 423
7. Individual Ruins 476
8. Travel Literature 478
9. Imaginative Literature 479
10. Guidebooks and Souvenir Books 481
11. Art of Photography 482
12. Architecture 485
13. Preservation 485
14. History of Gardens 487
15. Disaster Books 482
16. War Ruins 488
17. Ruin-Art Creations 489
18. Philosophy 490
19. Miscellaneous 492
About the Author 493
Index 495
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
There is no more ironical and yet more soothing comment on human fate
than the sight of ruins,...
Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics and History (Garden City, N.Y.: Dou-
bleday & Company, Inc., "Doubleday Anchor Books," 1954 [orig. pub.
1948]), p. 133.
1. Photographic Plates
1. Ellen S. Ginsberg and Robert Ginsberg, Altar, Sparta, Greece, 1985 vi

2. Roman Brickwork, Pompeii, Italy, 1961 5
3. Wall, Ggantija Temple, Gozo, Malta, 1996 12
4. Window, Dryburgh Abbey, Scotland, UK, 1967 16
5. Fallen Pillars, Delos, Greece, 1974 24
6. Manasija Monastery, Serbia, SM, 1986 27
7. Coastal Fortress, Croatia, 1986 28
8. Façade, St. Paul's Church, Macao, SAR, China, 1995 29
9. Windowed-Wall, Heidelberg Castle, Germany, 1961 31
10. Shipwreck, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, USA, 1969 37
11. The House of Columns, Chichén-Itzá, Mexico, 2003 39
12. The Gymnasium, Pompeii, Italy, 1961 41
13. Stairs, Roman Odeon, Gortyn, Crete, Greece, 1974 43
14. Roman Toilets, Ostia, Italy, 1981 49
15. The Hill of Tara, Ireland, 1999 53
16. Sweeper of Desert, Pyramid of Cheops, Giza, Egypt, 1990 59
17. Sweetheart Abbey, Scotland, UK, 1982 61
18. Cathedral, Elgin, Scotland, UK, 1967 66
19. Temple Wall, Abydos, Egypt, 1990 ' 69
20. Sunken Bridge, Podgorica, Montenegro, SM, 1986 72
21. Minoan Settlement, Gournia, Crete, Greece, 1984 74
22. Ghost Town of Tamerza, Tunisia, 1996 75
23. Roman Site, Augst, Switzerland, 1971 82
24. Urquhart Castle, Loch Ness, Scotland, UK, 1967 84
25. Vianden Castle, Luxembourg, 1961 85
26. Palace of Hisham, Jericho, West Bank, Palestine, 1981 87
27. Refugee Camp, Jericho, West Bank, Palestine, 1981 90
28. Temple of the Oracle, Delphi, Greece, 1965 92
29. Anasazi Pueblo, Near Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, 1969 98
30. Templo Mayor and the Cathedral, Mexico City, Mexico, 1985 101
31. Threave Castle, Scotland, UK, 1982 103
32. Roman Aqueduct and Clotheslines, Mérida, Spain, 1960 104
33. Arch of Roman Aqueduct, Mérida, Spain, 1997 106
34. St. Alban's Church, Cologne, Germany, 1961 111
xii THE AESTHETICS OF RUINS
35. St. Peter's Church, Louvain, Belgium, 1971 112

36. Exterior, The Colosseum, Rome, Italy, 1981 115
37. Interior, The Colosseum, Rome, Italy, 1981 118
38. Café and Acropolis, Athens, Greece, 1965 125
39. Pergamon, Turkey, 1965 130
40. Masada, Israel, 1981 133
41. The Western (Wailing) Wall, East Jerusalem, Israel, 1981 139
42. Schoolchildren, Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacán, Mexico, 1964 149
43. Base of Columns, Temple of Luxor, Egypt, 1990 160
44. Children at Contra-Aquincum, Budapest, Hungary, 1984 168
45. Temple of Aphaia, Aegina, Greece, 1965 170
46. Twin Towers, St. Andrews Cathedral, Scotland, UK, 1982 176
47. The Castle, St. Andrews, Scotland, UK, 1982 179
48. St. Andrews Cathedral from Above, Scotland, UK, 1982 181
49. Sundown, St. Andrews Cathedral, Scotland, UK, 1982 183
50. City Wall, Istanbul, Turkey, 1965 186
51. Roman Wall, Lluhljana, Slovenia, 1986 188
52. Church, New and Ruined, San Germán, Puerto Rico, 1985 191
53. Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin, Germany, 1985 192
54. Roman Wall and the Rail Terminal, Rome, Italy, 1981 196
55. Arch, Synagogue, East Jerusalem, Israel, 1981 199
56. Dead Trees, Florida, USA, 2002 202
57. Remains of Elephant, Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania, 1991 206
58. Cliff, M0ns, Denmark, 1991 210
59. Rock Formations, Yehliu, Taiwan, Republic of China, 1995 212
60. Gothic Heads, Cathedral Storeroom, Senlis, France, 1960 226
61. Archaeological Discovery, Stavanger, Norway, 1968 280
62. Stairs and Trees, Copan, Honduras, 2003 309
63. Restored Pyramid, Yaxhá, Guatemala, 2003 310
64. Workers at Altun Ha, Belize, 2003 312
65. Gedi National Park, Swahili Coast, Kenya, 1991 316
66. Temple of Augustus and Rome, Ankara, Turkey, 1965 320
67. Gallo-Roman Settlement, Alésia, France, 1989 323
68. Mansion, Barboursville, Virginia, USA, 1969 331
69. Fragments in the Desert, Egypt, 1990 333
70. Stairs of the Knights of St. John, Rhodes, Greece, 1974 336
71. Roman Amphitheater, Carnuntum, Austria, 1963 340
72. Pyramid of Tenayuca, Mexico, 1964 343
73. Roman Columns, Dougga, Tunisia, 1996 345
74. Gun Emplacement, Golan Heights, Syria (Israeli Occupation), 1981 357
75. Archaeological Site, Novgorod, Russia, 1993 360
76. Archaeological Site, Stavanger, Norway, 1968 361
Illustrations xiii
77. Roman Amphitheater, Nîmes, France, 1961 365

78. Roman Amphitheater, Pula, Croatia, 1986 367
79. Roman Baths, Trier, Germany, 1961 368
80. Abandoned House, Val-Jalbert, Québec, Canada, 1983 371
81. Stonehenge, England, UK, 1967 373
82. Church of Carmo, Lisbon, Portugal, 1960 374
83. Unidentified Castle, Scotland, UK, 1967 377
84. Herculaneum, Italy, 1961 378
85. Pyramid, Edzná, Mexico, 2003 379
86. Wall, Forbidden City, Beijing, China, 1995 380
87. Walls, Qumran, West Bank, Palestine, 1981 380
88. Silhouette, Rock of Cashel, Ireland, 1999 381
89. Apartments after Earthquake, Mexico City, Mexico, 1985 411
90. Ash Box, Concentration Camp, Dachau, Germany, 1985 423
91. The Dome, Hiroshima, Japan, 1987 443
92. Colonial Ruin, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 1991 455
93. Monuments of Delos, Greece, 1974 458
94. Robert Ginsberg, Lavabo, Mellifont Abbey, Ireland, 1999 (Photo by
Ellen S. Ginsberg) 493
2. Figures
1. Bécan, Mexico, 2003 xviii

2. Arbroath Abbey, Scotland, UK, 1967 30
3. Crane and Façade of Church, Ávila, Spain, 1997 64
4. Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, Arizona, USA, 1959 96
5. The Crazy Tower, St. Andrews Cathedral, Scotland, UK, 1982 174
6. Silhouette, Memorial Church, Berlin, Germany, 1985 194
7. Seashell, Assateague Island National Seashore, USA, 2001 208
8. Norman Castle, Clonmacnoise, Ireland, 1999 334
9. Vulture, Edzná, Mexico, 2003 413
FOREWORD
Oh the beautiful, the sublime ruins!
From French: Denis Diderot, "Salon de 1761," Œuvres esthétiques,
ed. Paul Vernière (Paris: Éditions Gamier Frères, "Classiques Garnier,"
1959), p. 642.
Robert Ginsberg, in The Aesthetics of Ruins, provides entirely fresh perspec-

tives on this vast subject. His direct and provocative style immediately per-
suades the reader to lay aside any existing preconceptions based on travel or
past writings. The intriguing table of contents frames the exploration of ruins in
much wider contexts, including the literary and philosophical traditions. Gins-
berg goes beyond the verbal representations of his subject to embrace the visual
implications of ruins in the traditional genres of architecture and sculpture and
in contemporary media such as video and cinema. From yet another novel van-
tage point, he considers ruins as more than passive and static forms: as crea-
tions of active historical forces, human design, or natural processes. Building
on these varied perspectives, in a moving climactic section, Ginsberg meditates
on ruins as metaphors of individual and universal human experience.
Ginsberg's analyses of the visual aspects of ruins leads to a new apprecia-
tion of their formal unity and structures. He cogently examines the new roles of
individual elements of buildings and places in forging renewed aesthetic identi-
ties. His sensitivity, based on many years of travel and reflection, brings to his
discussions of varied groups of ruins an immediacy and richness of perception.
Ranging from a wide array of monuments of ancient Greece and Rome to Me-
dieval ruins of northern Europe and contemporary sites in the Middle East and
the United States, a consistent vision ties together the abundant illustrations.
Ginsberg transcends methods identified with one or another humanistic disci-
pline to illuminate in a cogent and forceful manner essential aspects of human
experience embodied in The Aesthetics of Ruins.
Claire Richter Sherman

Washington
PREFACE
There's a fascination frantic
In a ruin that's romantic
W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado, or The Town ofTitipu, first performed
1885, The Complete Operas (no city: Dorset Press, no date [orig. pub.
1932]), Act 2, p. 397.
This book is a comprehensive study of the aesthetic experience of ruins.

Aesthetics has been dedicated to understanding unity in works of art and
in aesthetic experience. Wholeness has been the central concern of aesthetics
and of most of the disciplines of our intellectual and practical life.
Since something is missing in a ruin, then something appears to be amiss
with ruins. By definition, a ruin is the irreparable remains of a human construc-
tion that, by a destructive act or process, no longer dwells in the unity of the
original, but may have its own unities that we can enjoy. This is a working defi-
nition. It works for this book.
Whereas ruin has been a marginal subject in discussion of the arts, and in
our general experience of life, as something deficient or lacking in original uni-
ty, I bring ruin onto center stage in this book. Make way for ruins! My thesis is
that ruins, though old, broken, and saddening, may have new unity that is fresh,
invigorating, and joyful. The ruin can spring forth as an unanticipated aesthetic
whole. The whole book makes that case.
I analyze how the ruin does such things for us in successive chapters on its
matter (One), form (Two), function (Three), incongruity (Four), site (Five), and
symbol (Six). These are the slices that analysis makes into the pie of experi-
ence. They are the kinds of consideration that would apply to many a theoreti-
cal treatment of works of art.
In Chapter Seven, I put the pieces back together in experience, so that we
can have our pie and eat it too. I then compare the core of ruin theory to general
theory of artworks. In Chapter Eight, I apply what we have learned to the field-
experience of one extensive set of ruins in St. Andrews, Scotland.
Ruin challenges modern creativity to make something of it which respects
yet innovates. In Chapter Nine, I discuss the art of "building-with."
We may find ruins in nature, and nature enters most ruins. But we may
also find nature itself in ruin (Ten). In analyzing the relationship between ruin
and nature, we are led, naturally, to consider our relationship to nature.
Ruin plays varying, yet revealing, roles in the arts. I open the aesthetic ex-
ploration of ruin in sculpture (Eleven), cinema and television (Twelve), and lit-
erature (Thirteen). While I mention instances of the portrayal of ruins in some
of the arts, my focus in this book is on the experience of ruins as such.
Thanks to art historians and literary scholars, more scholarship has been
devoted to portrayals and accounts of ruins than to the ruins (on art history as a
discipline, see pp. 347-348). Having been so often relegated to the history of
xviii THE AESTHETICS OF RUINS
taste, ruin has too often been kept from us. I will bring ruin to you! The insight
we are pursuing is not how people once felt about ruins or portrayed them. It is
how ruins may generate our appreciative responses, engaging us in valuable ex-
perience. This is the aesthetic quest.
I regard aesthetics as disciplined reflection upon the formal and pleasur-
able qualities of experiences, events, and objects, including artworks, and ex-
tending into many activities of life. Aesthetics is persistent exploration that
opens us to deeper experience. It helps us gain more of ourselves, as we move
through the world. No superfluous ornament, elite specialty, or useless musing,
aesthetics, in the long run, contributes to our better life, our fuller Being.
Ruin is a touchstone to understanding the traditional humanistic disci-
plines, including philosophy, to which I dedicate Chapter Fourteen, but which
sticks its nose into the business of all the other chapters.
I analyze the terminology and theories of ruin in Chapters Fifteen and Six-
teen. Theories set the terms of a field, and our terms are laden with theoretical
preconceptions. Values underlie thought and discourse.
I discuss imaginative ruining in Chapter Seventeen, "The Ruining Eye,"
which explains how you too can become a miner at the blink of an eye.
Any problems, proposals, or witticisms that I could not fit into a regular
chapter, I leave for the chapter of fragments, or fragments of a chapter
(Eighteen). Loose ends can suggest fresh beginnings.
I expand the final chapter (Nineteen) into an old-fashioned meditation on
humanity as fallen, the self as fragmented and doomed, and the world as a ruin
heading for incineration. Thus, the journey of this book moves from aesthetic
analysis in the narrow sense to cultural analysis in the broad sense, and it cul-
minates in the metaphysical analysis of human existence in its deepest sense. I
hope this makes sense to you.
Fig. 1. Bécan, Mexico, 2003
Some things that go beyond rhyme or reason yet may be seen in images.
Preface xix
In this book, I illustrate ruins in forty countries hy more than a hundred of my

photographs reproduced as Plates or as Figures, which are graphic images
based on photographs. I intend these pictures, prepared during forty-four years
of wandering around the world, to arrest your eye as you test the text.
Photography is a mode of documentation and an art of form. I discuss it as
a method of the Ruining Eye in Chapter Seventeen. Photography-philosophy
aims to do more than illustrate philosophizing by pictures. The photographizing
provokes the philosophy. Not afterthought, hut withthought. I believe that the
Aesthetics of Ruins remains to be seen.
The theoretical conceptions presented in each chapter are given substance
with concrete applications. Theory must get down to earth, if it is to be real-
iable. Some chapters circle around specific ruins to draw the most out of the in-
terplay between experience and theory. Pompeii serves in this fashion in the
opening chapter on matter, and Dryburgh Abbey, Scotland, serves in the suc-
ceeding chapter on form.
The ruins I describe and picture changed the moment my hack was turned.
Yet I have tried to date everything that I have experienced and photographed,
as if that could save things. Countries I identify for the ruins are their locations
at the present moment, not at the time of the photographs, the ruining, or the
original construction. Sic transit gloria ruinae!
I have allowed word-play free reign to make its leaps and hounds. Play
on, words! Sometimes, the words, when put on the page, split/splice them-
selves. You see what I mean. Aphorisms are arrows meant to break into your
thoughts with their sharp points. I strike while the irony is hot to snap the iron
bonds of preconceptions.
When we need to go beyond the theoreticalness of theory, I will turn to
the theatricality of anecdote and poetry. As words flail me, I may break out into
verse, or what is worse, doggerel. Ruins have often inspired poetry. Poetry has
often interpreted ruins. Poetry will get us into the spirit of ruins.
I may be blamed for translating the passages quoted from other languages,
except for the three instances otherwise credited: Sergei M. Eisenstein on p.
237, Marcus Aurelius on p. 387, and Unmon on p. 429. As translator, and trans-
literator, I have enjoyed the prerogative of twisting the text to support my inter-
pretation. In all cases, emphases in passages quoted are in the original.
I have nailed epigraphs to each chapter, and every other part of the book,
to follow your mind as you read. I have made up the unidentified epigraphs.
The in-text references are keyed to Works Cited. Because the epigraphs
are fully identified, they are not included in Works Cited.
The Chronology lists significant discoveries, destructions, and discourses
in the developing global consciousness of ruins. It may serve as a timely unify-
ing tool.
For the convenience of the reader who wishes to go beyond the narrow
XX THE AESTHETICS OF RUINS
limitations of this book, I discuss the literature and imagery of the wide-ranging
field in the Bibliographical Essay, presented as the Appendix. The Bibliograph-
ical Essay, which provides full references, is independent of Works Cited.
The comprehensive Index covers the main text and the front and end mat-
ters. In includes the titles, authors, and editors of all works cited in the book.
The features gathered together in the end matters may be used as a refer-
ence guide to terms, ideas, topics, authors, texts, events, plates, and . . . ruins.
The ruin is an invitation to an adventure in aesthetics. And life. Though
this book has been my ruin, I thank you for joining me in the adventure!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Working alone, I understood little;
from others, I leamed much.
I thank the following publishers: (1 )»BuCkneir Uniyersity.Press:for;use:of;matev

rial published in my article, "The Aesthetics of Rums,";BücknelURéviewf edited
by Harry R. Garvin, 18:3 (Winter,.1970),:pp.-,89-102-(2);Editions:'Rodopiv:B^
V., of Amsterdam, and Königshausen & Neumann of Würzburg, for use of ma-
terial published in my chapter, "Aesthetic Qualities in the Experience of the
Ruin," Aesthetic Quality and Aesthetic Experience, edited by Michael H. Mitias
("Elementa," 1988), pp. 165-176. (3) Punch Cartoon Library for reprinting the
cartoon by Handelsman from Punch (3 Febmary 1982), p. 203, © Punch, Ltd.
The Pennsylvania State University generously provided grants for the pur-
suit of meditation, the conduct of fieldwork, and the development of photogra-
phy. Jude P. Dougherty, Dean of the School of Philosophy, The Catholic Uni-
versity of America, Washington, graciously extended the research resources of
his institution to me. The Intemational Center for the Arts, Humanities, and
Value Inquiry genially supported the project at its extensive facilities adjacent
to Washington.
Sam Brawand studied the entire text and then scanned and corrected it for
my revision. Peter A. Redpath, Executive Editor of the Value Inquiry Book
Series, judiciously assessed every page and generously assisted me in following
the high standards of style and format that characterize VIBS. I could not have
had a more understanding, leamed, and helpful editor. Eric van Broekhuizen,
my mentor in publishing, reviewed the text and illustrations, gave invaluable
professional advice about the preparation of this complex book, and then skill-
fully supervised its production.
Michael Keller of Community Printing Service, Washington, and Daniel
Meijer of Danco, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA, provided technical assistance.
The following colleagues have given a sympathetic hearing to parts of this
book and have responded with criticism and encouragement: Donald W. Craw-
ford, Artem Droujinenko, Stockwell Everts, William Gerber, Howard B. Gins-
berg, Carl R. Hausman, Florence M. Hetzler, Minnie Kirstein, Helen Luts, Jo-
seph Luts, Christel McDonald, Mara Miller, Michael H. Mitias, Marian Olin,
Gail Kern Paster, Barbara Sandrisser, Claire Richter Sherman, Daniel J. Sher-
man, Stanley M. Sherman, Warren E. Steinkraus, John D. Vairo, Leslie E. Van
Marter, Donald Phillip Verene, Max Wilson.
This book, as most of my life, has been made possible by my dearest col-
league, Ellen S. Ginsberg, the we of me, to whom it, and my life, are dedicated.
One
THE RUIN AS MATTER

Yet a Roman wall in the springtime is for that matter almost as interesting
as anything it conceals. Crumbling grain by grain, coloured and mottled to
a hundred tones by sun and storm, with its rugged structure of brick ex
truding through its coarse complexion of peeling stucco, its creeping lace-
work of wandering ivy starred with miniature violets, and its wild fringe
of stouter flowers against the sky—it is as little as possible a blank parti
tion; it is practically a luxury of landscape.
Henry James, Italian Hours (New York: Horizon Press, 1968 [orig.
pub. 1909]), p. 222.
The ruin liberates matter from its subservience to form. As the chains of form
are smashed, matter emerges in our presence, reformulating itself for our re
freshed experience. Matter, which once had been conquered in the original, re
turns in the ruin to conquer form. Matter flexes its being in the absence of the
formal whole. Yet exultant materiality brings forth form. The creative power of
the material rushes in where form has fled. The destruction of the structure is
rewarded with the resurgence of the substance. Matter builds its own unities
amid ruin.
The matter of the ruin is revealed in its unexpected identity, energetic
presence, and formative unity. The husk of form, once cast aside, bares the
richness of the material core. We face unbidden what had been hidden. We are
brought to the innovative fecundity. We encounter what we would not have
looked for. In the intact building, we appreciate the marble slabs, wood panel
ing, and bronze ornaments when we experience these in their place. The materi
al is carefully fitted and treated, and, if highlighted for enjoyment, thoughtfully
controlled. Brute matter is not present in the original, nor do we seek it else
where in the world. The builder’s storage yard where material units are on hand
in the simplest neutral form is not a place of aesthetic interest. In that setting,
nothing surges with fresh possibilities, unless it is broken.
In the ruin, we greet the material preeminence, matter for its own sake,
having been forsaken by form. Breaking out of form, the materials break into
our presence. Not inert and dead, but moving and vital, the materiality of the
ruin awakens something substantial within us. Elevated and intensified, not de
filed or degraded, the material touches an infrequently exercised sensibility.
The developed world ignores experience of simple substances. As we wander,
we do not pause to wonder before a stone, piece of wood, or pile of earth. Mere
materials. Yet they underlie the world.
Simple substances form us too. The matter in the ruin finds a sympathetic
audience in the sophisticated animal rarely aware of its material make-up. The
2 THE AESTHETICS OF RUINS
ruin bares what is hidden in ourselves. So we take pleasure in the harmless en
counter. The creature who lives by form and control is revivified for a moment
by sensing the matter beneath all form, beyond all control. The durable and
creative stuff (Ger.: der Stoff) of Being shines forth from the transitory and bro
ken patterns applied by human beings.
Matter has its say, its day. It comes into its own, not as the residue but the
resilience of the ruin. It has new shape, color, texture, life. Matter reaches out
with its fingers for existence. It makes form of itself. Matter suggests; it no
longer serves. Matter surges; it declines to subside. Matter is animated. Un
tamed by form, it reclaims the force of its own shaping within the smashed.
The matter in the ruin is not rendered back to nature. It resides between
nature and artifice: artifactual, partifactual, partificial. It has shrugged off the
imprint of the human hand, perhaps due to the workings of nature, yet it takes
its stand against nature. Reborn, not reduced, matter raises its shoulders with
dignity to proclaim itself without crediting a creator or nodding to nature. In
this, the ruin is a triumph of integrity, autonomy, and independent worth.
In baring its matter, the ruin might suggest form’s potentiality, but, as a
matter of fact, it proclaims matter’s potency.
Standing Stones
Still
standing,
Stones
stand.
Standing
still,
Stone
stands,
As still
as stone.
The stones are stonewalling. An energy from within presses outward with the
substance’s dynamism. The building may have been dynamited, but the matter
has its dynamis (Gr.). It packs a punch.
While being in the ruin, we face the forces of Being. This is partly due to
the violent shucking of the original sophistication, so that what remains has
stood the test of destruction. The matter has more than survived; it strikes back.
It takes over dominance of the space voided by form. In a word, it matters.
This affirming, outgoing activation in the ruin startles us. We expect the
ruin to cringe and shudder under a negative space and show its unprotected
frailty in regrettable nakedness. Or we think that it will sit perfectly still, si
The Ruin as Matter 3
lenced by violence, disarmed by destruction, powerless to press forward to

prick consciousness. The ruin, we think, is tamed, perhaps timid, surely timed,
for it has seen its day and has sunk into the night of remnants.
Then the ruin punches its way through these pale expectations, breaking
into consciousness.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in (“Birches,” Frost, 1979, p.
121),
the ruin has learned to become true to its materials. The ruin perforce is a falsi
fying of the original, which is another kind of unity. Yet the ruin allows an au
dience with the authenticity of its material. Bricks pulsate like beating hearts.
Boards beam under the sunlight. Broken glass glistens with imperial glances.
Reclaiming space for itself, the ruin captivates us. Holding us in its space,
it impresses its matter upon our mind. The ruin silences and holds us still, while
it explores us. Entering within, the ruin’s matter probes our receptivity to its
presence, testing us. The ruin opens us to experience by destroying the unities
of theory and expectation. Enjoyment of the matter without arises out of the
ruin within.
Yet to talk about the matter of the ruin is misleading. This is a reductive
or diminutive form of reference, since it suggests inferiority to form. Our for
mal training as thinkers, and thence as experiencers, places the heart of the mat
ter in the form. We may even appreciate form without matter, as in music, but
matter without form is rarely worth our attention.
The form-matter distinction, in which form takes primacy, has been the
central matter in our aesthetic formation. When we appreciate a work of archi
tecture or sculpture, we are encouraged to ask how well the form has used the
matter, though we can ask other value-questions about the form without refer
ence to the matter.
The ruin ruins these distinctions. Something is the matter with our theory!
Experience has a way of liberating us from theory. Let us seek that way, as we
build a new theory of the ruin in this book.
The matter of the ruin is no longer matter in reference to form. It is its
own master. A ruined building, no matter its original excellence, is always a
matterpiece. Another realm of the aesthetic. What we explore, therefore, is no
longer matter. It does not matter what we now call it, if we acknowledge that it
calls to us, and if we open ourselves to it. It opens us to it. Mutual opening, the
disclosure of fundamental innovation inviting free exploration, is concomitant
to the springing forth of the ruin. The ruin sweeps us with a lively innemess
that comes forward, a bounding vitality of unbounded substance.
Only in the ruin does such sweeping by substance occur. We do not feel
this moving substantiality in architecture, the storage yard, or nature. The ruin
is the dictionary of matter’s meaning, theater for unique experience, laboratory

of discovery, temple of joy, studio of creativity,. . .
Perhaps. Let us curtail these flights of fancy and get down to earth. Con
sider the humble brick: a dull squat form, subdued orange-red color, homely
rough texture, solid reticent weightiness. We do not notice bricks. Or, we do
not notice a brick.
Bricks, in due course, make up walls, whose pattern and shape we may
notice. But what is an individual brick to us, or we to it? The individuality of
bricks should be totally devoid of interest. Bricks are mundane. In our houses
and villages, we are bricked-in. The most ordinary thing in the world, the brick
is surely not marvelous.
Now enter the ruin. The brick stands in its selfhood. Broken, it reveals a
new texture, more tangible and exciting, a new color, brighter and more alert, a
new density, more buoyant and lighter.
This broken brick interests us. It is not alone. Its partners exhibit attractive
diversity. They do not make up a wall. The wall makes up their showcase. Our
eyes travel the intriguing edges and dip into the exposed core. Gone is dullness.
The tactility is touching. We encounter these broken bricks as an incident, not
an accident.
A fresh world dissolves the mundane. For the first time, we and bricks are
together, no longer separated by walls. The wall is down between us. We have
broken out of our walled-in experience. One brick may occupy the entire space
of our concentration. Accustomed to the world of walls, we have suddenly been
hit by a brick.
The cracked edges, shattered mortar, scattered fragments, and shaken
alignments offer much to examine. Simplicity of substance explodes into varie
ty of presentation. The unity of the wall dissolves into the plurality of bricks.
The mass of substance replaces the shape of the wall. The bond of pattern gives
way to a course/coarse of particularities. Released from bondage in our world,
the bricks invite us to travel in their world.
And travel we do, not just by eye and mind, for we walk into the wall and
stand within it. The ruin announces itself for hands-on, walk-in experience.
Moving about, we touch the bricks, share their space, participate in their pres
ence. The together-being of bricks and person spells a fresh acquaintanceship
for each. “How do you do?”, we might say with a smile to the exposed brick, as
we step forward to meet it.
So to address a brick in an intact wall of the original would be madness.
Such sociability is not engendered where bricks are servile elements of an un
ruined whole. Only the ruin encourages this intimacy of substance and visitor.
Then and there, we can exchange greetings as fellow beings.
Let us roam among Roman bricks. Most were meant to serve silently, not
to be seen. The elements of an empire, their number is legion. They march
PL 2. Roman Brickwork, Pompeii, Italy, 1961

in uniform across Europe and into Africa and Asia, the defining lines of a
world-class civilization. Each speaks: Here is Rome.
At Pompeii, in 1961, matter emerges in its material intensity, insisting on
being what it wishes, despite the plans of form and the projections of purpose
(PI. 2). Matter dissolves this wall into itself: clay, not bricks; pebbles and sand,
not mortar. We are absorbed by the orange color of the exposed Pompeiian
bricks, expressive of an animate earth. The remaining walls are living, having
survived the destruction by falling debris. The organic orange responds to the
warmth and brightness of the southern sun. // Mezzogiomo.
The bricks befriend us. We come closer. Their uniform is off. They sun
themselves in their bare skin. Visible are the particularities of their formation
and fortunes. They show the traces of the straw in which they were born, the
wooden forms of their manger, and the subsequent scars of their career. Some
bare the brand of their master. These bricks are personable, the loyal population
of an empire of ruins. They served together. A comradeship exists among them.
Forms have fled, but patterns appear. The bricks march together in lines and
arches. They perform their maneuvers as they wish, without obeying com
mands, free at last.
The bricks of Pompeii are creative. Out of themselves, they shape pat
terns, which have abstract attractiveness and poignant content. They contribute
at once texture and form. Different kinds of brick offer variety to the pattern,
since they have worn differently. The hollows of some parts balance the ro
tundity of others. Horizontality plays with bricks arching their back and those
diamond shapes suspended between movement. The lively bricks enjoy a soci
able intercourse.
The variety of texture, the subtle or stark range of color, the change of di
rection, movement, and design, the interrelationship and differentiation of the
simple material add up to an aesthetic field for us to explore. Pompeii is a treas
ure house for the enjoyment of bricks. Each brick, every two or three bricks,
might repay investment of our attention. The closer we come, the more we dis
cover. Eye and hand are drawn magnetically into the wall.
Matter invites our touch and draws us into its depth. A flourishing interi-
ority replaces the wall’s superficiality/superfaciality. Matter reforms. An en
riched world of form appears from the liberated matter following its own pro
cesses. These include a honeycomb network, a series of deep horizontal inden
tations, and the exciting thin elements that float or dash across clay, as more
than lines or surfaces: directions and implications/imprecations. The intact edg
ing of long bricks rises archly on the left in a sad incongruity, for it has missed
out on being liberated. Rejoice in the ruin where intactness is out of place and
what has been broken rises with lyrical vitality!
The bricks of Pompeii pull us to, and along, the wall. We are activated in
two directions. We travel forward, but stop and sojourn. We step back, and turn
back, and we turn the other way. We take the long, and the short, view. And we
get lost in-between. We are without orientation in the wandering. Time has for
gotten us. The bricks and their walls dwell outside time. Intact buildings dictate
a timing to our presence by their forms and functions such that we can only
devote so much time to appreciation of material.
Pompeii has ruined time. Its walls are timeless wells. We dip into their ab
soluteness of being, beyond categories of time and purpose. The innate brick
ness of the bricks has all the time in the world to educate our sensibility to it.
Roman civilization recedes in consciousness, as we give ourselves over fully to
this civilization of bricks.
Walls walk about Pompeii. They wall about, not in or out. They stroll the
city of which they are the principal inhabitants. We accompany them, once we
have put aside the walls of our obligations and expectations as visitors. Bricks
become walls. Walls overcome bricks. Walls come to life as flexed muscles of
matter. The wall is the substance, the whole, not the part or the aggregate. The
whole wall is all.
The walls wander through our experience as strange creatures with unique
identities that tax our habitual taxonomies. Impressive in strength, size, and
scope, they are pleasing in shape, style, and substance. The walls well up from
the earth, and well we might wander among them. The walls find companions
in our presence.
As test of this theory, we select a brick at random and gaze upon it, intent
on having happen the wonderful things so pompously proposed here.
Nothing happens. We protest. We give our all to the bricks, yet we are up
against a wall. The bricks do not respond. The theory is fantasy. We have just
thrown a brick at it and knocked it down. The theory has raised a wall where
none was in experience. Experience now razes that wall. Walls and bricks come
tumbling down. An intellectual ruin is left.
The ruin is a field of chance and the invitation to discovery. Unlike
famous buildings whose aesthetic excellences are labeled or described in the
guidebook for the visitor, the ruin’s beauties are unmarked. The descriptions af
fixed to ruins are proposed for didactic purposes: “Here was a storeroom, there
a chapel.’’
We are not told, “Here is a wall worth following, though it leads nowhere;
there is a set of broken bricks that may uplift your soul, if you but linger atten
tively.’’ Such signs would go against the purpose of planned visits to most ru
ins, which is to move us through in an order that reveals the unity of the origi
nal. The appreciation of the ruin as a ruin has not received its due recognition.
Facilitation of our aesthetic visit by designation of the ruin’s approved beauties
is not official policy.
So much the better. We are free, then, to experience. As the official tour
goes through, listening blindly to the guide, and as the private tourists stumble
about, their eyes lost in the pages of the guidebook, we can slip off to the side
and take refuge by a wall. Not every wall. Not every brick. Only some are cap
able of moving us. Not every part of Pompeii carries us away within the mean
dering of its materials. Much is still bound to form or is experienced in other
ways. Many things are not bound to appeal to us aesthetically in any way. They
fall short, do not come alive, and fail to express themselves well. Just a pile of
broken building material!
Set us down in any comer of Pompeii, and we are likely to face the inert
neutrality of broken walls. We wonder what this was and what were the miss
ing forms. Or else we wander away from drabness, until we chance upon
something stimulating. The joy of substance is in chance encounter. You take
your chances. The exception is the experience of excellence in the substance.
Pompeii is a field of possibilities. It is not all and at once the realization.
Opening our eyes, we are guided by the question: What is available for us
to experience? The answer is not immediately evident. We must go about see
ing. The bricks of Pompeii give generously of their riches. We must be a pa
tient seeker. Substance is discoverable, not baldly displayed. The aesthetic en
joyment is not available at every turn. It turns up unexpectedly. The vitality of
matter is not open evidence. It discloses itself to alert sensibility. Adding to the
intensity of the enjoyment is its context of neutrality and ordinariness, a general
neglect in favor of grasping at invisible originals, and the requirement that we
enter actively into its experience, bringing ourselves to the broken bricks.
In the ruin, we are reborn as experiences. We are not the receivers of
what has been planned and neatly packaged for us, including our deliberate
movements. Intact architecture often habituates us to passivity, though we may
be obliged to enter it and move around inside. Architecture takes us in, in more
ways than one. It has been crafted to guide us, even when we are inattentive.
No sure guide exists in the ruin. Craft has given ground to the force of chance.
The packaging is shattered, the planning blown away.
Matter manifests itself in multifarious emergence. The resurgence of our
positive experiential powers greets the matter at hand. The ruin is a breaker of
habits. Something in ourselves takes fresh delight, as we find those bricks
worth seeing. The bricks matter, because we matter. We and they have been
freed. We exist together and may take unthought-of form, unintended force, un
designed direction. But the ruin gives no guarantee for any of this.
No necessary relationship exists between the probability of aesthetic ex
perience of the substances in the ruin and the size of the remains, their age,
their provenance, or the artistic value of their original. The ruin of a great work
of art may in substance be dull, while the ruin of a shabby tenement may pro
duce the most splendid substances for our delectation. The ruin of an entire an
cient city may by chance have no valuable experiences to offer of unleashed
matter, while a single brick wall might lead us to endless worthy unities.
Therein lies the challenge, and fun, of the ruin. Without guarantees, the
ruin is an adventure. We venture our experience upon the possibility of unity
among fractured matter and fragmented form. We, then, are the matter of the
ruin, reshaped by creative interaction. The ruin builds unities upon the sub
stance of our response. It brings to light resources for responding that we have
left buried.
The ruin opens the dialogue of materials in which we are invited to partic
ipate. While we have been listening to brick walls at Pompeii, stone walls break
in. Cut from volcanic substance, the resilient blocks stand guard about the abs
ent city whose life was taken by volcanic eruption in 79 CE (Common Era).
The stone walls are touching and touchable. Their softness clings to the fingers
with toughness and abrasion. They are light but stolid, timeworn and eternal.
Whereas the brick evokes grasping with the hand, the size and weight of stone
causes a different muscular sense to come into play that involves the arms and
shoulders, the torso as a whole, and thereby the breathing.
As we walk about, the ruin’s substance stimulates bodily response. The
ruin takes the measure of our physique. Since things have fallen on it, and it has
fallen, it addresses our feeling for lifting. We ponder the ruin. Moving in it, our
body contributes to the appreciation of gravity. The Pompeiian walls are mus
cular evocations. Between the stone and the brick is the living body.
The stone walls do not march. They have taken up their formations and
stand by them. They have depth. They stand in front of space. We stand in front
of their space. We have depth. Face-to-face, stone wall and visitor dominate
space. The walls no longer enclose. What lies behind them no longer counts.
No longer walls, they are long faces, lined and pored, roughened by weather.
They ponder. The bricks drew us along in some direction or right up to them.
The stones hold us still and oblige a respectful distance.
We are aware of the solemn interiority of stone. Individual stones are of
little interest, unless lying alone and smashed. We attend to the substance of
conjoined stone, neither made up of parts nor making up a part. We confront
the stoniness of the wall and move away slowly, changing partners. From wall
to wall, we move, not advancing, not following a path, but meeting new presen
ces, passing many by, only stopping to make the acquaintance of a few.
The stone is a faced mass, a massed space, a spaced face. Its details are
interior lines, texture, and color. For accent, it bears holes and vegetation. For
context, it has noticeable relationship to the ground. For framing, it has the line
of its top and broken edges. These features come together, every once in a wall,
to make a striking unity. Though the substance continues and is attached to oth
er walls and structures, it may stop us with its silent integrity.
While in the ruin, we too are an integrity, distinct from the continuity of
our visit, freed from those duties that immure us, and relieved from the threats
of aging, illness, and accident. The stone has taken the time to contemplate us,
IO THE AESTHETICS OF RUINS
we who are mass in space with a face. In the fading hour of day, when the bus
tours are gone, Pompeii becomes the still city sparsely populated by solitary
standing presences. Some are stone, some are human.
We walk through the walls. We enter into the substance. Much of the joy
ful experience of the ruin comes from this unaccustomed mobility which gives
us unprecedented intimacy with the personableness of materials and agreeable
participation with the innemess of forms. Intact walls are to be entered only by
doors and are never to be walked upon. In the ruin, we stand within the wall
and on top of it. Because we can visit both sides of the wall outdoors with equal
ease, the wall has been dewalled, serving no protective function. It has entered
a demurrer against function.
Instead of being the outer edge of a building or town, the detached wall is
the center of a space open on all sides. The flat two-dimensional wall expands
into three-dimensional space and is vitalized by the four-dimensional move
ment in time of our clambering about it. The planar is overcome by a full-
bodied presence. Not the visage alone but the torso of the wall spreads about
us. The former wall bears/bares its being in a space that we too occupy.
It extends in such a way that the visitor’s movement is required, in turn
communicating animation to the stone. We and the ruin move about each other,
we go in and out of one another, and one finds the other circling it. With intact
buildings, a stately waltz occasionally occurs of visitor and facades, when walls
of stone were introduced as standing with their backs to something else. But
when walls detach themselves from that duty in the ruin, and we greet the body
behind the face, the dance is more intricate and reciprocal. The ruin raises its
arms for us to pass through. We must be light of step to keep pace with the
turnings and to avoid stumbling.
We stumble. The street of the ruin is a ruin, the floor of paving is frag
mented, scattered, missing. Discovery replaces authenticity. The street we roam
is not quite Roman. It has gone back to stone. So it stops us, even stubs our toe,
and we are made to know its smooth-worn surface, bumps and hollows, cracks
and ragged edges, and companionship with vegetation and powdery soil. Pat
tern appears, unrelated to sidewalk purpose, independent of stonecutter inten
tion, indifferent to walls and former walls that we were in the process of visit
ing. We are made aware of weightiness that holds stone to the ground, just as
we are held in that recognition.
The street’s substance has strolled all about us unawares. We stand staring
at its unity. Perhaps we are the center of it. Our perspective, engendered by our
stance, may place everything in unity, so that we feel ourselves participating in
the patterning. In the making of the ruin aesthetically, we have had a hand. Or,
in this case, a foot. We are steeped in what we have stepped in. The sidewalk
energizes us, even as we are obliged by it to stop walking. We discover that
what has been beneath our attention is worthy of elevation to intense considera
tion. So, too, the ruined sidewalks of intact cities can prove aesthetically inter
esting, though we might complain, “Why don’t they get that fixed!”
The streets of Pompeii turn our attention upside-down, just as its walls
turn it inside-out. This shift touches unsounded chords. We have gone down a
million city streets, but how often has the sidewalk so noticed us that we stop
for it? We have neglected awareness of what we walk upon, so busy have we
been to get somewhere. Yes, sometimes the walkway is supposed to attract us
by its intact pattern and ordered material. We are meant to read the sidewalk
studded with stars of Hollywood Boulevard in California. We usually are not
interested in what is broken, yet we have within us what is worn and broken.
Life has traveled the streets of our lives.
In 1961, standing in Pompeii, that dead city, we contemplate the living
force of a smashed street, and feel that something of ourselves has been saved.
We step into a house. But the house is no longer there. It has left itself. We
have entered what no longer has entrances. We come in from a sidewall, not a
sidewalk, from a hole, not a doorway. Wandering the roofless spaces, our feet
are stopped by the ground of a former interior.
The tiny tiles of battered mosaics glisten in the sunlight. Involuntarily, we
listen for a tinkling to the tesseration, but only the breeze and the birds are audi
ble. The carefully cut pieces await dispersal, their fragility intimidated by the
force of nature and the weight/wait of feet. The tiles fly apart like stars without
constellations. A centrifugal force turns them into travelers. They turn up over
the edges of their assigned territory. They have been released from their pat
terns. There are a few that must have wandered into the next room, now nonex
istent. Here are some that are likely to be outside any rooms, for only earth
hosts them. There is a pile of loose ones, swept by the rain. And here is one
caught in my shoe, eager for a long voyage.
The mosaic patterns that are nearly intact suffer from dullness, for they
are not presented under the best conditions. They need cleaning and resetting.
Water or light oil should play on their surface. But the broken ones attract our
attention for the free-form flow of their dispersion. The tile has fled the picture
or the design. From minuscule element, it has grown to entirety. From flat sur
face underfoot, it has grown to solid object, suggesting its presence in the hu
man hand.
The feel of the bit replaces the sense of the Fit. The uniformity of units has
been transformed into the appealing character of particulars. The scattered tiles
are no longer a floor, the bottom surface of a controlled space. They are the ac
tivated solid objects lying loose upon or embedded in a buckled substance.
Dirt and dust, weeds and leaves, stone and brick also take their place on
the ground, as do we. The surfaces of our purpose, the patterns of our habits
bend and buckle, and our thoughts scatter in unplanned patterns like so many
crafted pieces that have been let go on their own. We are part and parcel of the
FI. 3. Wall, Ggantija Temple, Gozo, Malta, 1996
randomness in which we stand, cause and consequence, witness and collabora

tor, matter and mind.
Each step is an exploration of the fineness within the rough ground. Deli
cacy adjoining dirt, design amid dispersion, adamancy despite damage, discov
er themselves to us. The world of rooms and courtyards disappears. The floors
become our world, three-dimensional and flowing. This world moves us on,
step by step, as if we are broken tiles with no fixed place of attachment to an in
comprehensible mosaic. Every once in a tile, the flooring disappears, and we
are left staring at earth or stone. We seek more of the flooring. It checkers the
city. We jump about across the board.
Pompeii is brick, stone, paving, and tile. It introduces us to basics of sub
stance. Each has its interest, yet each runs out of interest. Each resides with the
uninteresting. Sometimes, we are drawn away from the material by other kinds
of aesthetic interest, such as form, which has been patiently awaiting its chapt
er. Following one kind, we chance upon another, then another. Wall, floor,
sidewalk, court, room, and ground thrive with possibilities. Encounter with the
fundamental is only a few steps in any indirection.
From our meeting the purity of distinct, unformed substances, we advance
to their agreeable interaction. The brick and stone come down to greet the tiles
and paving. Stone and brick lean against one another. They open access bet
ween mosaic and sidewalk. The bright white and color of tiles spice the earthi
ness of stone, the pallor of paving, and the pink flush of bricks at evening. The
polish of tesserae and their diamond shape is offset by the stalwart volcanic
blocks and the softer elongated bricks. Massive paving stone abuts broken brick
which sits beside handfuls of chips.
Everywhere are lines, regular in the standing stones, variegated among the
bricks, wild within the smashed pavement, and suggestively vague in the ruined
mosaics. The lines are abstracted from reference to building practice. They are
free to combine. Their patterning is visual, and it is movemental, accessible by
the probing mind of the person in motion. The play of masses in space springs
from unburdened substance. This play goes in and out, up and down, and
’round about. We are masses moving in space, companions to the ruin.
Destruction denotes de-structuring, yet it also donates design. The shat
tered is patterned. Pompeii is not a city but a universe. In it, materials create.
From Italy, a short sail south in the Mediterranean takes us, in 1996, for a
look at another wall, dating from about 3000 BCE (Before Common Era), of
the Ggantija Temple, near Xaghra (Xghara) on the island of Gozo, Malta (PI.
3). A great balancing act, an acrobatic performance in stone, in what is perhaps
the oldest free-standing stone structure in the world. The enormous strength of
the bulky bottom-stone easily sustains ten more stones, each with independent
character. At the top, agile members rest on tiptoe, taking in the air, as if they
had forgotten that they are stones. Here and there, a fist-sized chunk has been
inserted to give a helping hand. What a team effort! Each player shines as star.
Ruin opens walls to us. (For more on the aesthetics of walls, see Section 21 of
the “Fragments of a Chapter on Ruin” [Eighteen], below.)
We have seen matter free of form, but form follows substance. Then form
follows form. Let us follow this formation in the next chapter.
Two
THE RUIN AS FORM

Ruins bore me. And when they interest me, it is not in their being ruins,
but in their being interesting forms or figures, even if ruined.
From French: Paul Valery (1937), in M. Claude de Montclos, La
Memoire des ruines: Anthologie des monuments disparus en France
(Paris: Menges, 1992), p. 8.
The ruin liberates form from its subservience to function. Forms, such as
arched windows, remain, but they regain their selfhood as forms, while their
former functions are cast out the window. The death of function in the ruin
spells the life of form. Forms, when freed, spring forth in attention. Windows
soar as shapes in former walls. They no longer take panes to demarcate the in
terior from the exterior. Indifferent to purpose, the window pursues its arch
ness, accentuated by absence of glazing and frame. The sky fulfills its shape.
Sky and free space are the new context for the form that has won its way
free from a building. The fresh form may not have had a noticeable existence in
its previous incarnation as a function or as part of a pattern in a facade. Then, it
was a use or an element, not truly a form.
The ruin allows its forms to speak their truth, the script having been
ripped away. The form is articulation irrespective of intention. Liberated from
the architectural, the form is purely formal. The ruin is a purifier of form.
While a valuable unity may have been lost, a field of fulfilling forms springs up
from its seeds. The original whole is destroyed, but this originates wholes.
Form flourishes amid destruction. A shaping up comes from the tearing down.
Formerly a building; formally a ruin: an aesthetic formula.
Destruction is a test of form. Smashing a building carries off the original,
most functions, and much material. Yet it allows forms to survive. They have
stood up under the falling down. They are partly shaped by what has beaten
them apart. The forms that result can be simply smashing.
The forms, having arisen through wearing down, are understood as having
withstood. They may be accidents, but of an active power. Forces have shaped
the forms, though not by the usual building-up. In the ruin, the creative process
is a building-down and cutting-away. The collapse is into forms that spring
from interiority. Forms were held to an extrinsic existence only in the intact
building. The edifice is dead; long live the ruin!
What the ruin has undergone undergirds what the ruin gives. The power
of enduring takes material shape under the hammer of destruction. We find un
expected strength in the delicate fragility of the ruin’s finer forms. The forms
have not been imposed upon the material. The material has not been assembled
from building yards and filled into the preestablished forms. Instead, the forms
16 THE AESTHETICS OE RLJ/NS
PI. 4. Window, Dryburgh Abbey, Scotland, UK, 1967

The Ruin as Form 17
are sustained from within the material. In the face of the desertion of intention
and unity, the ruin is an energetic exertion in which unities appear with their
own intentionality. The stones mean to keep these windowed spaces afloat,
these angled walls aloft.
The vital innerness of forms, indifferent to their former life, breathes in
multiple dimensions. The shape has been tom out of the planar and set free in
space. The forms have been unfixed from the timelessness of flat surface.
When the design is dispatched, the form surfaces. Form breaks through the su
perficial to fullness, welling up into our space. We see a whole in the wall.
We discover many forms for the first time in the ruin. The window that
we have been gazing at high up in the rear wall of Dryburgh Abbey, a border
abbey in Scotland, we have also been gazing through (PI. 4). Standing in the
chill wind outdoors, in 1967, we have been looking through the window to the
outdoors. Inner and outer no longer matter. The window does not keep the wind
out nor the warmth in. Nothing is in the window, save a luminous sky, stained
with clouds. The window is no longer a window.
Something else holds our attention in its place: the shape of peaked arches
contributed by thin arms of stone rising in elevated space and sustained in the
face of countervailing natural sentiments. The stone is an exertion against the
vivid sky.
The embodied form is evidently subject to the gravity and limitations of
its materials. Not a linear design, but a substantial entity. We empathize with its
rise and arching. Our muscular uplift is experienced in the form, as our neck
bends back and our eyes follow upward. We are drawn further upward and in
ward to grasp the purity of the shapes in the sky, now obscured by intervening
masses of stone, now counterpointed by screening foliage.
The form obliges our movement. We and it move about one another,
backing off, moving in too close, occasionally losing sight of one another. We
must watch our step while gazing upward, or we may fall in the moat. The ruin
does not have clearly prepared paths to follow for enjoyment of its forms. Any
paths are meant didactically to aid appreciation of the intentions of the invisible
original. So we are always in danger of stumbling and bumbling. We are disori
ented visitors greeted by forms who invite us to follow them.
Moving in and around through the ruin of Dryburgh and its grounds, we
still seek that former window whose form is so inviting. Since we see it from
different sides and angles, with varying foregrounds and backgrounds, it too
has moved. When we round a corner, it springs back into presence. We keep
discovering the vivacity of the form in this ruin, and that form keeps providing
its framing and content. Good show!
We recognize the foliage as participant in the extension of the window in
space, not as pleasant backing to the form. A dialogue in depth takes space,
where at first we had sensed an ornamental digression. The foliage fulfills the
form. Its presence gives color, movement, and direction. It imparts life to the
thin stone-columns.
The sky is not a neutral, fixed plane, backdrop to the structure that takes
center stage. It animates those columns. The sky insists on getting into the act.
The window’s fingers grasp it. The window is invigorated—not violated—by
the sky that wends and winds through it. At Dryburgh, the window rides on the
wind. The original is broken. Hence, it is invisible. But the beautiful is alive
and well.
Rarely are the forms that remain in a ruin aesthetically valuable. Most are
uninteresting. The disposition of windows, holes, arches, edges, and columns is
so haphazard that dull unclarity greets our entrance into the ruin. We do not
know what to make of a ruin at first sight, because it is, well, a ruin. We do not
know what to look for or where to look, supposing for the moment that we have
put aside the historical guidebook and decided to visit the ruin for its own sake.
But what is its own sake?
Suddenly, the ruin enlightens us in a disclosure of attractive form which
blossoms upon a wall and burgeons into our space. The hole and the columns
reappear as substantiated form. The neutrality of the broken building becomes
the background to the fresh attraction. The form orients us. Our breathing and
attention attune to it. It directs our steps where no walkway exists. The form
finds a way to move us. Standing where it has waited for centuries, it has made
the discovery of our responsive presence. It awakens our senses and rescues us
from loss. The form in the ruin is a saving grace.
Time falls away in the contemplation of the ruin’s forms. We take up the
moment fully in the form. Form and person resonate in a space they share. Each
helps to mark the presence of the other by sharing that space. The space sus
tains a dual presence. This might not occur in an art gallery or a concert hall,
where I have to make myself largely absent, inactive, almost inanimate, to at
tend with the specialized antennae of the aesthetic attitude to the dominating
presence of the artwork. The atmosphere surrounding the ruin becomes an inner
sphere of experienceable substance, a living plenum, so that we occupy the ex
perience with the ruin. We enter a new intemality, thanks to the ruin, as fellow
inhabitants with the citizens of form.
Cordial togetherness, not cold formal relationship. The form converts us
from passivity. Smashing the dullness that envelopes us, it opens us to the free
possibility of form. Form forms for us. Put another way: for us, forms form.
Effulgent configuration stretches stony fingers into sky against gaunt
limbs of trees and the broken bones of building. Form fleshes/flashes out in ex
perience. It gives us significance, while a moment ago our meander had no
meaning. Form flushes us from the unresponsive shelter into the sensitized
field. The ruin is an artist in bringing us out into response.
One good form leads to another. As we and that single form move togeth
The Ruin as Form 19
er, we discover that we are not alone. Form flees function to follow form. That
window at Dryburgh, no longer a window, is a set of shapes created by thin
columns between an upper and lower section of stonework, complemented by
the shapes of those sections that rise in pinnacles, the lower held down by the
feet of the columns, the upper at last open to the air. A tension exists between
these two broad angles, one within the other, and between their angularity and
the competing upward thrust of the window.
What initially we had seen at Dryburgh as the open spaces in the wall
shifts visual paradigm, so that we see the wall as shaped by spaces within and
above it. The window contributes to the shaping of the wall. Awareness of
them switches back and forth. Each alternates as being within the other. Pulsa
tion accompanies the interchange, for each enlivens the other.
The forms in the ruin reward us with further details, as forms usually do
in works of art. The window we have been experiencing at Dryburgh is five
spaces side-by-side and pointed at the top to create four curvilinear forms that
float against the overarching frame accentuated by its tasteful edging. Mean
while, those thin columns that generate all these upward-bound spaces are rest
ing on steps of the lower angled-section of the wall.
The upper section has a small rectangular hole, in contrast to the larger
curved space on which it appears to perch. To top it all off, the upper angle
comes not to a point but to a blunting that echoes the top line of the rectilinear
form beneath it.
While our eye follows these shapes that have been impressing themselves
upon our attention, we become aware of the upper section of wall as one com
plex form for which no simple description suffices. Forms respond to other
forms. They transform themselves into complex forms of staggering scope, sur
prising strength, and delightful interplay.
We try to get closer—or further back—to get clearer about the true extent,
full shape, and final unity of the form. Yet, by moving about in the ruin, we
generate further visions of its formal self. The features seen as all lined up on a
wall lifted into the sky turn out to be standing on the ground. And other walls
connect with the one upon which we have been dwelling.
The movement in time through space breathes life into the ruin and into
us. If we are seen to wander all over the ruin, circle it, stand back, climb upon
it, and crawl within it, this is because the formal life in the ruin invites us to do
so. Another step back, a view from above, a fresh alignment, a glance through a
gap may provide the perspective wherein the forms unify or grow.
Seeking these pleasures drawn by their rewarding sampling, we become
more acquainted with the forms of the ruin. The unappealing field of broken
buildings may have become a living field of forms, clustered under the sky as
the jeweled center of a wooded lawn. No one perfect perspective exists from
which the visitor can seize the formal reunification of the ruin. The visitor sees
it perfectly from many points, just as we do in visiting gardens, cityscapes, and

fine architecture.
The ruin keeps us busy with the inexhaustibility if its forms. Taking mo
mentary rest upon a block of stone, we discover that we are sitting at the center
of another transformation of form that arches over and all around us. The form
is more than visual; it is spatio-temporal. We now find ourselves within the uni
fying form of a ruin. Though this discovery is fortuitous, it requires our atten
tive, goodwilled efforts. The ruin can grow in formal stature, while we are at
work within it. We grow in stature as experiences.
Creative experience must surely be involved, if that means the appreciable
growth of the object of aesthetic enjoyment due to our work. Our appreciation
grows. So does the ruin. We participate in the creative unfolding of form. This
coming into being of creative form is exciting. The forming of form is the free
dom of creativity. We are in at the formation.
A great formal resource of ruins is their unintended self-framing. A hole
in the wall may select a striking feature to be isolated for its formal qualities.
Sometimes, what we may call the Framing Device is a portal that had served as
entrance to the intact original, as at the Portora on the island of Naxos, Greece,
the ruin of the Church of Santa Clara in Antigua, Guatemala, and the Roman
temple at Dougga, Tunisia. The frame, itself jagged, may contribute its shape to
the seen. We stop at the right point for this framing to occur, so you might say
that we are using the ruin for our aesthetic framing. In this case, are the forms
within us or are they out there, in the ruin? Both. The ruin frames itself in our
experience (see Pis. 4, 6, 11, 17, 18, 22, 26, 34, 37, 39, 45, 48, 49, 50, 55, 65,
66, 67, 81, 94). One good ruin discerns another.
We stand up from our rest at Dryburgh Abbey and stagger back to see the
rest of the remains. That window in the rear, our initiating form, comes into site
again. The angled upper section that crowns it has a sibling in another large
section of wall, this time windowless, which stands at a right angle, while the
round arch of the window has distant relatives in the several portals of the
cloister. Arch, space, angle, wall: a dance of abstractions.
The form in the ruin need not be abstract pattern. It may bear/bare sub
stantial content. The stone in the arch has the character of stoic endurance. The
arch in the stone has the character of sprightly exuberance. The arch soars from
the stone. The solemn content adds gravity to the light-hearted shape. The ma
terial is not limited to assisting the leap of shape, as it may do in intact engi
neering and architecture. The leap is made despite the suffering of the material,
which is chipped, cracked, scarred, and crippled. The shapes come out with
vigor from their shaky substance, instead of being encased in material smoothly
fit to sustain them.
The shapes appear not to be built of matter. Not a careful construction, but
a disclosure brought about by a sweeping destruction of matter. Structure re
The Ruin as Form 21
veals itself, couched/crouched on the very edge of matter. It has overcome mat
ter, as much as can be done, and sometimes its freedom is precarious, for the
form may fall just as its fellows have done.
The form in the ruin often has a distinctive lightness, because it exists
with minimum material support. If placed in a building as ornament or element,
the same form would be heavier, because it requires a firm and regular con
struction. Forms in the ruin are not bound by the building code. The ruin win
nows away the inessential. It clarifies structure, just as it simplifies substance.
At Dryburgh, the stones have done their task undisturbed from original to
ruin, while withstanding the removal of the building in which they once stood.
With standing in the open sky, they have become stained by the rain. The drip
pings down their proud face give them a long-lived character that contrasts with
the upward-bound intensity of their endurance. Such markings ennoble the
shape with their suggestion of resistance to contrary natural force.
Visitors are invigorated. We wander about the ruin that works upon us
with its connecting and expanding moments and elements. The ruin makes our
soul a palimpsest wherein are traced the lines and shapes, textures and struc
tures already encountered, and that merge, surge into the most recent enlarged
transformation. We are intrigued by the simplest things in isolation. A brick
may fit our consciousness. Then larger wholes, like window and wall, take their
hold. Reminders, relations, and re-visions carry the single enlarging form
throughout the formerly/formally neutral ground. The ruin’s unity is the synap
tic bridging of discontinuity, the leap beyond incompleteness to wholeness.
When we take our rest from the experience, we take our centrality in it
and are made increasingly aware of the substantiality of our structured temporal
form in motion. Motion is natural to the ruin, encouraged by multiform animate
presence. The ruin invests its time in us. We cannot see the ruin all at once. It
deepens its being, absorbing us in its turning forms, dispersed matter, and star
tling structures. The ruin makes sense of itself in our experience. Patiently, it
guides us to deeper responsiveness, broader awareness, keener perception,
more fruitful recollection. From an initial recognition of parts and pieces that
are the objective state of the ruin, we mature in the recognition of the soulful
unity of the ruin, its subjective identity. This learning from the ruin is possible
because we too are complex objects that dwell in a world of parts and pieces.
Does the ruin visit its unity upon the visitor, or does the visitor impose
this unity upon the ruin? The unity is a matter of give and take, a mutual getting
to know one another, as is the case in the aesthetic enjoyment of nature. Open
ness to discovery draws out our formative powers. We participate creatively in
the ruin, and it brings creative unity to the pieces and parts of our experience.
Insatiable form-seeking beings, we find forms that are present. Those forms
happen to arrange themselves before our eyes.
After a few hours of work, Dryburgh Abbey radiates in an agreeable inter
connectedness of shape and substance. You cannot represent its unity in a

sketch or plan. Its complex unity involves time, motion, and perspective. But
you can sense it. The complex unity of the original Abbey can be indicated in a
plan and described at length, although it no longer exists. Instead of the highly
organized functions of a pious community, the ruin expresses the happily hap
penstance harmony of angles and arches.
The unity that we find in the ruin requires passages of unenriching materi
al and moments of dullness, as does the unity in fine architecture. Unity bridges
the gaps every once in a while, overcoming the plainness and becoming fuller
than before. The ruin is transformative, not accumulative, in experience. It con
tains pauses and refreshment. The pivot of its moving unity is us. We gather the
unity from our presence, but we must move on to detect further identity to that
unity. “Keep going,” says the ruin.
Variation is available through independent attractions which give pleasing
relief. Thus, at Dryburgh, a gatehouse over the stream greets the visitor with its
broken visage. Like a large mask set upon the ground, it invites our playful en
trance. Just the right scale for the human figure to approach it, the gatehouse
has a nicely proportioned alternation of spaces where windows, door, and roof
once existed. Coming near it, we gain a good grasp of its whole, as it sits with
ease upon the bank. We lose for a moment the rest of the Abbey and center our
selves upon the little world of the gatehouse. A beneficial distraction.
As we step back into the lawn, we feel that the angled facade of the gate
house recalls the great walls with triangulated tops that set us spinning about
the ruin. The centrifugal movement of the independent whole reverses into the
centripetal force of the encompassing whole. In this way, the whole is greater
than the whole. The unity repeatedly reunifies itself by incorporating the inde
pendent and the ordinary. The whole grows.
Not every ruin unifies itself in experience. Our wandering might repeated
ly confirm the final disparateness of the pieces. The ruin may not be a unity,
because forms within it refuse to surrender themselves to the evolving whole.
Their unity suffices. They are worthy wholes in aesthetic experience, not parts
and pieces of the ruin. We may admire them for their casual indifference or
stubborn resistance to what lies around them. In that case, the ruin as a whole is
the unappealing context for organic forms. Pieces and parts comprise the ruin,
while this window, wall, or gatehouse is the radiant aesthetic whole.
In place of the one ever-growing whole of the ruin, as at Dryburgh Abbey,
we may be rewarded by an ever-increasing number of independent wholes. As
our soul experiences the endless possibility for unity, we might say, borrowing
another line from Robert Frost, that the ruin fills us to the brim,
. . . even above the brim. (“Birches,” Frost, 1979, p. 122)

The Ruin as Form 23
A ruin, though vast in size, might have but one or two aesthetic
unities—and those hard to find. Visiting such a ruin may be an annoyance. So
much ruin for so little enjoyment! We stagger about, poke in and out, look up
and back, rest and rebegin, yet nothing happens. Nothing unites. No transfor
mation. Not a reverberation. Nary a form. Never a harmony. A waste of time,
good only for outdoor exercise or didactic information. Then, like a jewel set in
rubble, the graceful form arises before us. This discovery makes the ruin worth
it, just as when we go through the junk of a minor museum of art and come
upon an Angelika Kauffmann or a Chaim Soutine of which we had been una
ware. Happy are explorers who find excellence that otherwise would not have
been found if not for their persistence in drudgery.
The single refulgent form discovered in the aesthetic desert of a ruin may
be the secret identity of that ruin, its only animation, surrounded by barrenness.
The challenge in the connoisseurship of ruins is to bring ’em back alive.
In some ruins, of a smaller size or simpler remnants, though no unity of
the whole exists, the unities that we experience may be immediately evident, so
starkly visible as to startle us. In those cases, we do not wait for the arrival of
the unity. It awaits our arrival. Once we are there, it is in site/sight.
This frequently happens in Greek ruins. Columns and lintels, pedestals
and stepped floors may be all that remain, sparse substance frankly exposed
and plainly disposed under open sky. No complexity, little variation of texture,
a single building-material. Yet vigorous formal arrangement and grand structur
al suggestiveness can shake the soul with a glancing blow. The solid white mar
ble springs forward against blue sky in massive elevations of large blocks pol
ished smooth and executed with delicate fluting and careful curving.
A temple on the sacred Greek island of Delos, in the Cyclades, has be
come broken pillars lying upon the ground. The only prayers that enter it are
the hands of weeds (PI. 5). Simplification of substance and form to stone and
grass. The pillars parallel each other, as they did in their working life. They lie
shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow. Elbowing is evident in the break of these
four. The upper part of the left-most one presses tightly upon its neighbor.
The forms are touching. They are within our reach. We step up on one to
give us that height needed to see them lying together. Their bulky materiality is
impressive. We could not budge any of them. They retain a pleasing regularity
of form, not smashed and disfigured. That each has one clean break contributes
to harmonious patterning. Instead of sadly damaged materials, we have an
original abstraction, agreeably smooth and measured. The pillars may be fallen,
but they stand in consciousness with dignity.
The unity of this set is framed for us by a fifth pillar lying off to the right
in unbroken form, and by the block of stone, insistent on its rectilinearity, that
stands watch at the upper end of our ensemble. The thick wild growth at upper
right acts as a cushion for seeing our pillars as placed upon it. Then, at the
24 THE AESTHETICS OE RUINS
PL 5. Fallen Pillars, Delos, Greece, 1974

The Ruin as Form 25
top center, the vegetation filters out of view any other works of stone that in
habit the island.
The simple solid forms of the pillars contrast sharply with the lines of the
vegetation that push up with irrepressible life from every space accessible to
the ground. Around the upper parts of the pillars, an explosion of growth al
most conceals the smaller parts. The grass obliges us to consider it seriously in
its total linearity. Unlike the stones, it has no bulk.
At the head of the third and fourth pillar, a flower still stands, a gift of life
sitting in a space open to it, a capital contrast. The lines of grass cut across our
vision like engraving strokes that sketch in the texture to larger forms. On the
second pillar, notably its top part, the lines are cast directly on the stone by
means of shadows. In the blazing sun, which has browned the grass, we are at
tentive to every shadow. The humble grass extends its finery of line in an up
ward curve that rockets from ground level to the sky. This curvature goes well
with that of the pillars, especially when it is implanted on them in shadow.
In the group’s center, the top of the third pillar appears turned from its po
sition by the force of the uplift. The top of the left-most pillar exposes its cen
ter, an appealing texture, a regular shape, and a plain core. Interesting variation
of the surfaces of stone, including a discolored indentation at the top of the first
pillar and lichen on the next one that is scarce distinguishable from the wild
grass. But, as a whole, the stones are striking for their plainness of surface,
regularity of form, and shared coloration. The ruin has been elevated to classic
simplicity. This temple welcomes the curved stalks of wild grass.
When I visited Delos in 1974, three stringent ancient rules were in force
(from Greek):
No one is permitted
to be bom on this island,
to live on it,
or to die on it.
I scrupulously adhered to the rules, although that was the day Greece declared a
national emergency and mobilized to repel an anticipated Turkish invasion.
Generally, in the Greek ruin, the tranquil, seamless perfection of the tem
ple is gone. In its stead is the bold, irregular alignment of chipped blocks that
balance weightily and eternally for infinite perspectival patterns. To the imme
diacy of recognition comes the nobility of material and the rugged simplicity of
form. The Greek min gets down to the basics of being a min. It causes us to
step back, made off-balance by the presence of the tremendous (Pis. 28, 38).
But it remains in touch with the human scale. The individual blocks of stone
are related in size to our body. You and I, with the help of one or two others,
might move this cylinder of a column or this piece of flooring.
Greek stone is a recalcitrance felt by the individual. This makes its forms
reside with remarkable stability. Their weightiness contributes content to the
geometrical form (PI. 45). Geometry, solid, though often irregular, is incarnate
in the Greek ruin.
The easily accessible and deeply felt unity of the Greek ruin fills our soul,
while we stand silent and subdued in contemplation. We are likely to attribute
our state of awe to the original function of the holy temple or to the spirit of
Greek civilization (see Chapter Six, “The Ruin as Symbol,” below). Yet these
associations may be gratuitous. The impressive dignity of accidental form
working laboriously with its material is what pleases us so much.
If, in a work of visual art, the Line of Beauty, usually curvilinear and un
broken, comes on the scene to please, then what we may call the Line of De
struction, which is jagged and disrupted, arrives in a surprising fashion to
please in a ruin. The unanticipated angular irregularity of the exposed edge is
entertaining, as it engages the exercise of our eyes. Unevenness gets even with
the world that we have organized to exhibit regular lineaments.
The Line of Beauty is an easy-to-see unity that we can point out, “Look
over there!” The Line of Destruction takes work to detect. It might not exist. It
happens as a juxtaposition of our ambulatory presence, the lighting of the mo
ment, and an unplanned feature of the material. But once we spot the Line of
Destruction, as in 1986, in the Balkans, at the ruins of the fortified monastery at
Manasija, Serbia, we can also point it out, “Look over there!” (PI. 6)
Elsewhere in the Balkans, the forms that inhabit the ruined Liburnian-
Illyrian fortress at Bribir (Varvario), on the Adriatic Coast of Croatia, are made
out of the stone blocks extracted from the hillside (PI. 7). These blocks would
be inclined to fall back into the hill, if not for their cemented attachment, thanks
to a thoroughgoing effort at preservation. The rectangular structure above
ground is graced by rectangles at its four corners and complemented by the rec
tilinear forms below ground. Though the material is heavy, the setting stark,
and the function grave, the forms and spaces, in 1986, are light and playful.
In Macao, returned by Portugal to China in 1999, the Catholic Church of
St. Paul had become a facade in 1835, due to fire. That wall is now a set of
forms in a grand setting (PI. 8). Our approach, in 1995, by mounting the stairs,
allows the cut-outs and niches to change shape and size. Although the original
identity of the ruin as church sticks in the back of our mind, we see the forms as
pleasant geometrical patterns ornamented by statuary.
The Ruin <;.s I 'onn 27
PI. 7. Coastal Fortress, Croatia, 1986

The Ruin as I'onn 29
The wall of Renaissance windows that survives Heidelberg Castle, Ger

many, is a marvelous display of free-standing design (PI. 9). It carves up the
sky with inventive ornamentation. Row upon row, level upon level, of lively
shapes leap forward and upward. This long wall of windows is no longer a
wall. Its building is gone.
While the lovely isolation of the pattern is fortuitous, human choice is evi
dent in its presence. The decision was made not to restore the building and
hence immure the dancing wall, thereby deforming it into a lifeless reproduc
tion of what had been lost. The decision equally was made not to tear down the
wall as an offense to human desire for unity or utility.
The beauty of the Heidelberg windowed-wall has been preserved for its
sake—that means for the delight of the visitor. The windows in the non-wall
are non-windows, because they do not serve as apertures to interior shelter.
They are activated space. They affirm that the beauty is not skin deep, but
three-dimensional. The windows make visible the depth of wall. They give the
breath to the breadth. The windows are a presence, not an absence.
The structure does not stand up against the sky or in the sky. Instead, the
sky stands within it, taking substance in the form. An airy conviviality is creat
ed. Color comes in too. It enters its blue, gray, or nighttime black with bright
contrast in the red sandstone. The unwindows are not neutral. They are unnatu
rally vital.
The Heidelberg structure, Germany's most magnificent ruin, needs no
guide, identification, commentary, or history, as we trudge along “The Philoso
phers Way,” in 1961, in this Romantic university town.
The ruins at Heidelberg, like those of the abbey of Arbroath, Scotland
(Fig. 2), that I visited in 1967, nearly overpower us with joy in their formal em
bodiment. These are sublime proformances, that, as objects for aesthetic appre-
F ig. 2. A rb r o a th A b b e y , S c o tla n d , U K , 1967

The Ruin as Form 31
ciation, must be ranked alongside of world-class achievements of architecture

or sculpture.
In our study of the aesthetic functioning of ruins, we have seen how some
ruins, liberated from function, serve our formal enjoyment. We will soon see
that the function still active in the ruin might well enhance our enjoyment.
Three
THE RUIN AS FUNCTION

What is a ruin but a useless heap of stones?
Brian Bailey, Great Romantic Ruins of England and Wales (New
York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1984), p. 8.
The ruin liberates function from its subservience to purpose. Functional struc
tures are present and may still be functioning, but their intended service to de
liberate aims has ended. When original unity is destroyed, purpose is smashed.
The purposefulness of the building is blasted. When purpose has fled, anarchy
marches in. Yet life marches on. The upper floor is gone, but the stairs to it
stare at us. The stairs live in their function. They are not form alone, but recog
nizable activity. Though the ruin is going nowhere, much may be going on in it.
Since the ruin is the remnant of what may have been a highly organized
and enormously complex structure that served human purposes, what remains
is likely to exhibit many structures that function, though their functions are not
those found in the original purpose. Yet we may find purpose in the ruin, newly
proposed by the function instead of imposed upon it. The pure purposelessness
of function emerges from the purposeless ruin.
The ruin teaches us to appreciate noteworthy structures. The strength in
survival under destructive experience translates into strength of shape, and vice
versa. We may discover the power of structures by seeking to destroy them.
When the Director of the Materials Testing Laboratory at the University of
Pennsylvania retired in the 1960s, after decades of labor, he remarked on the
smashing good time that he had enjoyed. So, too, children break things as an
experience in learning. They discover the unbroken within the broken and take
pleasure at the exposure of surprising shapes. The ruin allows adults to take
pleasure in the structural.
Ordinarily, we may admire how columns hold up ceilings or walls sustain
windows, but we become accustomed to their success in intact buildings. Rare
ly do we put ourselves fully into sensing the structural tension and force of a
single column or wall. We expect them to hold up well, while the structure that
interests us is the building as a whole.
Unexpectedly, the ruin introduces us to the structural interest of the single
form. The ruin removes the building from consideration and replaces it with an
assortment of walls, windows, towers, and pillars. We wonder how a pillar is
able to hold up its load now that the other roof-supports are gone, along with
the roof. The pillar need not provoke an inquiry into the science of loads, but it
does engender empathy. We sense its effort. We are aware of the strain upon
the shoulders of the form. The surviving pillar is not a standard, interchange
able element of construction. It has unique character and dynamic presence.
We have shifted from observing the exterior of structural regularity to

feeling from within. We interiorize (Ginsverb). The interiority of structure in
the individual form catches our subjectivity. Pillar and person are not observ
able, neutral, or classifiable objects. Person, like pillar, is an irregularity in a
world of standardized intentions. Person, like pillar, stands by its effort against
a world of hardships. Pillar, like person, has had experience of the world. Pillar
and person bear signs of their struggle and bare their awareness of mortality.
We human beings are functioning forms in the ruin.
In the ruin, matter becomes forms, surfaces become shapes, forms become
functions. Structure endures and vanquishes, form evolves and discloses, mate
rial enlivens and characterizes.
The functions are the intentions of structure. The steps mean to be stepped
upon. They offer to take you up, although nothing remains at the top. “Come,
tread on me!”, they proclaim. The steps reach for the feet. They intend activity.
They are not indifferent to the feat of climbing. To put it plainly: steps invite
our steps.
We need not step upon them. To recognize their purpose is enough. “We
are steps” is embedded in their presence. These stones are inseparable from
their stairness. No floor to climb to, but the steps climb nonetheless. Francis
Bacon had spoken of fortune as mounting a winding stair. In the ruin, fortune
has given a new twist to the stairs that fulfill their function despite vanished
ends. To the end, they do their inherent task to no other purpose. No ulterior
aim for the function in the ruin. The function is ultimate.
The attitude of reverie with which we greet a ruin owes much to the de
tection of function floating free of purpose. We are spectators of this strange
ness that suggests the world of dreams. We are also participants in the life of
the function without purpose. It all takes place within our waking/walking
dream. The randomness of destruction reveals the steadfastness of purpose. The
ruin delivers us from the deliberate in order to delight us with the designed.
Structures are free to mean what they are. They spring out of the ordinari
ness of being functional to live with their own meaning. The ruin extricates the
intrinsic from the extrinsic and exhibits the independent entity which has inher
ent interest. Function fulfills form, perfecting structure, expressing material,
presenting pattern. We see more than apertures and surfaces: identifiable and
active stairs, windows, portals, towers, and walls.
The ruin is a reintroduction to the functioning of construction. We meet
functions on new terms. They no longer are a part of a larger plan that strictly
limits their use. They often were meant to remain unnoticed and unappreciated.
The floor, not the stairs leading to it, may have been all-important. Now the
stairs take their turn.
The ruin is the revenge of the formerly unseen upon the whole made in
visible. The hidden springs into consciousness and takes up a central position.
The Ruin as Function 35
It attracts independent attention, thanks to its newness. We grow fond of what

we have found.
The integrity of the functional structure is surprisingly pleasing in the ab
sence of the overall governance. We take interest in the intimate relationship
between the evident function and its form and matter. The function functions
formally and puts its mind to its matter.
The ruin stimulates our curiosity about the workings of things. Much con
tinues to work in the ruin. Stairs climb, portals enter, towers look out, toilets sit.
They do all this with no notice of one another. They do their job heedlessly and
unashamedly. As if for the first time, we confront their activity. We discover
the aesthetic unity of a functioning form.
Before, we cared only about efficiency in the sense of “how well will it
work for us?” Now, we see how well the structure works for itself, how the in
corporation of activity organizes and characterizes its qualities. Function facili
tates. Activity energizes. Utility unifies.
The ruin finds in ourselves a new world. We, too, are filled with functions
that pursue their processes even when our purpose falls in doubt or dissolves
among life’s difficulties. The still-functioning stairs stop us in our steps, re
moving us from pursuit of purpose, and carrying us to the purity of functioning
for itself. We allow ourselves to live without direction in the ruin. Our height
ened awareness of organic activity is of our body and the ruin. Stairs are within
us. We are taking steps in new directions.
One function plays off another, instead of leading to another. This inter
play intensifies their independence and integrity. A tower and wall have a view
of the stairs. But, because the floors have fallen away, nothing unites them all.
Its indifference to the others enhances each. The identity of each function is
more sharply focused. No transition between them as occurs in a building. They
likely were not meant to be seen all at once. No logical connection between
them, no linkage of/by design. Yet we see them in the presence of one another.
A charm arises from their perceived unrelatedness.
Stairs, tower, and wall pursue their divergent aims. More power to them!
While they busy themselves in their business, appealing contrasts appear from
their endless activity. The tower perpetually looks out in a way that the stairs
cannot. The stairs take one step at a time. They cannot leap straight up to tower
over us. The wall puts its will against space, holding back whatever is behind it
from whatever it faces. Opposed to the tasks of stairs and tower, the wall walls.
Walls refuse to surrender their identity to pure form, or for that matter, to pure
matter. They may decline the opportunity so frequently offered by the ruin of
transforming themselves with stairs and tower into a larger form.
The wall holds back, the stairs climb off, the tower towers above them all.
But together they create a field of the functional, in which the ruin is decidedly
engaged in processes.
We may experience this pleasantness of one function seen against another

in museums of science and technology where working models perform dispa
rate tasks. What appeals to the eye in that case is the contrastive display of in
tentional activity, not the scientific connection of one display with another.
Similar enjoyment is available in the farmyard, work yard, or demolition site at
day’s end, when workers leave aside the machinery and tools without order
though still expressing their function. On streets whose urban furnishing is no
single design, but the result of incidental, unrelated accretions over time, we
can appreciate the clarity and wholeness of quite different activities, represent
ed by benches, traffic lights, signs, and refuse containers.
In the ruin, orderliness of activity embroiders the disorder of structure.
We continually make sense of things in the ruin, though the ruin might not
make sense. Part becomes whole when whole departs. The life of function aris
es from the death of the building. As we move about, changed perspectives as
sociate independent activities in the visual field. We thereby contribute to the
freedom of function in this confrontation of resolute process.
We value the functional activities in which we too are engaged. For we
have been climbing, as do the stairs, seeking an overview like that of the tower,
and we have penetrated the middle of enclosing walls, as do the windows.
The functions in the ruin preserve their humanity. While they operate
without reference to original plans, they are committed to doing something per
ceivable in human terms. They act with persistence despite disappearance of
the whole. They give themselves wholly to their activity. We admire their
loyalty and fortitude. Firm resolve in the face of hazards assures the smooth
ness of functioning. Function is probably the most recognizable presence of the
humane in the ruin. Though few steps remain, the tower is tottering, and the
wall is breached, their tenacity touches our humanity.
I report a sobering discovery that I made in 1982 in Scotland. High in the
smashed walls of Ardrossan Castle, above the seaside Scottish town, sits a
chimney, framing a passage upward, and still restraining space into a vigorous
enclosure. The floor beneath, like the roof above, is gone. Against the violence
of stone and wind, the chimney continues conscientiously. It holds its incom
plete form and battered stone closely together in the soul of its function. It has
not been abstracted into form alone nor fallen back into stone alone. Alone, it is
a chimney. It addresses the visitor who has climbed and stumbled, wandered
and muddled, “And who might you be?’’ Any answers that came to my mind
went up the chimney.
In 1969,1 stumbled upon a beached shipwreck, one of the fleet of wrecks,
in the Atlantic barrier islands of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, USA (PI. 10).
Huge nails stud the sand and drive deep shadows. Their heads glimmer in the
late afternoon sun like the silver coins of pirate treasure. The metal parts main
tain their persistent regularity, although the wood they fasten has split, rotted,
The Ruin a.s l unction 37
PI. IO. Shipwreck, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, USA, 1969

and sunk beneath the sand. The ship is gone, yet the nails nail. The practical
function is being fulfilled, while the ruin rises to the heights of abstraction, like
an enormous broken shell worn by the sea and deposited on the beach.
Birds have walked among the nails, and the tracks of people and dogs
edge the remains. A child had stepped so close to the end of the timbers that it
stood between their visible hulk and the buried portion marked by the project
ing nails. The left flank of the ship is raised by prominent crossbeams, ready to
float off again with sufficient tide, but the right side is being covered by the
drifting sand and a tentative line of vegetation.
This ruin is in process. We detect the effect of a sea breeze running bet
ween the nails and stirring up the sand. We feel the weight of the sand with our
toes, the blister of the sun with our skin, the bite of the salt air with our nostrils.
But the ruin refuses to let the wood fall away into formlessness. It clings to its
identity. The intention of the nails is forcefully felt as hammered into their
heads. They are driven to serve, and their pattern enchants. We have footsteps
to follow, our bones bearing our clinging flesh.
The functions in ruins are not displays of building structures, not models,
but survivors. They have a special intimacy with material, for they have lived
through destructive forces together. (1) The substance of (2) the function offers
its wisdom to (3) the structure, so that all three may get through life.
We are so enthralled by the parade of forms in the House of Columns at
Chichen-Itza, the Yucatecan jewel of Mayan Mexico, that we might miss for
the moment (1) what they are, and (2) what they are not doing (PI. 11). They
are, after all, columns, and hence are meant to support structures. Their form
perfectly conforms to their function. But what they happen not to be doing is
supporting a structure! In 2003, we are not bothered by that, nor, apparently,
are the columns bothered by it. What they are, with the form that they embody,
is everything to them. And to us.
They also serve who only stand and waite. (“When I Consider How My
Light Is Spent. . . ,” Milton, 1950, p. 86)
The steps in a set of stairs may be broken, chipped at the edges, worn in
the tread, cracked in the center, crevassed in the cracks, but the stairs go on
mounting. Enough substance is at hand in good shape for them to continue to
be who they are. The stairs take each step seriously. They need their substance
and hold it together in the intensity of intention.
How dull, in contrast, are intact stairs who stand with ease, paying no at
tention to the perfect state of their matter. Such stairs rise despite their steps.
The function transcends the material. The material is instrumental to an over
riding activity that pursues its goal without noticeable difficulty. A flight of
stairs is but of fleeting interest, unless it is a new and remarkable form.
The Ruin as Runet ion
PI. 11. The House of Columns, Chichen-Itza, Mexico, 2003

The stairs in the ruin profit from the boon of destruction, as their material
ity comes to the fore. The ruined stairs function with all they have, to be all
they are. They are mindful of their matter. Every piece counts. The stairs may
have been blasted and their steps smashed, but their staimess stares at us. This
is a more vital purposefulness than we feel in the tactful intactness of ordinary
buildings. In the ruin, functions continue at the limits of matter.
And of form. The shapes necessary for the activity are sufficiently in evi
dence for recognizability. The stones give shape to the function. But the shapes
have suffered, for they are incomplete and, in places, misshapen. They are the
adequate, not the perfect, shape for their function. Enough exists of the mount
ing arrangement of steps to elevate a pile of stones into stairs.
Shape justifies itself in preserving the identity of function. In turn, the in
tegrity of the activity reaffirms the shape. Good intentions redeem fallen
shapes. The organizing energy of the ruin to sustain forms in meaningful func
tion surprises visitors who had expected to experience only the broken, power
less, deformed, senseless, inactive remains.
The form may have been brought to the brink of its existence, being trans
formed, say, from window to hole, and it might therefore look forward to a
whole other life. In that case, it is form freed from function. Yet suppose that it
did not disappear as window, but we recognize the hole as what it was, which
means, in part, what it meant. The hole is form, but the window is function.
The whole window wavers between becoming formally free and rediscov
ering its inherent mission. From moment to moment, the window-hole alter
nately asserts its authentic being as windowness, holeness, windowless, whole
ness, windhole, wind ho! We are there as the grounds of Becoming. The ruin
comes to us and plays upon us with its disclosures of reality. We are the field,
the stage, while the ruin is the performer, the reformer of the former.
Return to Pompeii, in 1961, to catch a game of lines drawn up in the field
at its Gymnasium (PI. 12). On the left, marching to the rear, the elegant line of
pillars, their lower part rounded in cement, the upper part free to follow its flut
ing to the capitals. The progression toward the rear from the side lays down its
grid of shadows from where we stand. The shadows climb the wall on the right,
itself alternating with openings. Wall, shadows, and pillars are one.
Marching across the horizon to fence in the scene is a line of trees, those
pillars of nature. We are boxed in and directed toward the rear. The ruin reor
ganizes itself, taking features that were outside the original and joining them
with features within to forge a whole that has little reference to what went on
here. The ruin is too busy with its interplay to translate its history.
We are further led to the rear by a beaten path, on which we stand. Its un
evenness and turning is evidence of the human wandering in a world of abstrac
tions. The path takes us to steps and a doorway, to a sheltered space beyond,
and, exactly in our line of sight, to a refuse container. The point of the patterns
I'iic Ruin as l unction 41
PI. 12. The (ivmnasium, Pompeii, Italy, 1961

is that they come to a point. We have wandered into a large-scale fortuitous

conjunction of functions that has happily taken us into its silent game. The
Gymnasium at Pompeii has introduced us to the Athletics of Ruins.
When we visit a ruin, shifting occurs in the patterns of our experience.
What we detected as a window suddenly throws off its purpose and becomes
pure form. Later, we may discover it to have been a window all along, its love
liness of shape still serving for the sake of protected aperture between two sides
of an enclosure. Such changes are not arbitrary and capricious, closing access
to the object of our attention. They disclose the object, as if throwing open a
window. The ruin grows aesthetically upon us. The matter with form, and then
form without matter, are both present and attended to.
The ruin offers more of its inner life, as we come to know it intimately. It
is filled with surprises. It catches us unaware and turns about our awareness.
We change attitudes. The ruin waits for our proper response. It responds further
to our new attentiveness. What happens in the ruin happens in us. In the ruin,
we become explorers of our soul.
The functions that remain bear the humanity of intentions and signs of hu
man touch, such as the worn steps. Our sympathy stirs, even if no human being
could use these stones again for that purpose. The window may be so high up in
the wall that is floorless that no one can directly look through it at its level (Pis.
4, 9, 17, 50). Still, we appreciate its continuation of meaningful life in the ab
sence of human access. Yet we might make some window-use of it by looking
through it from down below.
We do not overlook the good intentions of the inaccessible tower over
looking us. By an act of imaginative sympathy, we can place ourselves in its
shoes and so experience the rest of the ruin as visible from above. The presence
of the tower suggests the perspective from which we would be seen in the mid
dle of the ruin. The tower, though we cannot climb it, raises us by looking
down upon us. It adds a dimension to the ruin and a location for us.
Functions in the ruin may still be used, as is the case with the stairs in the
Odeon, built by the Romans in 100 CE upon a Greek structure, in Gortyn
(Gortynia, Gortys, Haghios Deka)yCrete (PI. 13). Their activity invites our vis
iting activity. In 1974, we step upon the stairs. By that act, we enter into their
activity. We lend our weight to their functioning. We contribute our human
form to their intention shaped to human scale. We give them the life for which
they have existed. United in meaningful motion, we climb the stairs together.
Each step is a deeper penetration into function. Our body’s matter mounts
upon the stairs’ matter. We are both worn. We rise by some internal persistence
that corresponds to the intemality of the function that keeps the stairs in perpet
ual tension. The stairs are ready for us. Their readiness draws us to them. We
are ready for the stairs. Our readiness opens them to our participation. Since we
have the potentiality of climbing stairs, and an intention to do so, the stairs give
The Ruin as l unction 43
PI. 13. Stairs, Roman Odeon, Gortvn, Crete, Greece, 1974

life to our awaiting soles/souls. They respect our functioning. They recognize
our innemess. Comfortable familiarity occurs in together-being with the steps,
being in step with Being.
To take the first step upon the stairs in a ruin is to start the measure of
their spatiality by the extension of our presence. We see, sense, imagine, and
project that rise forward. And we create it, for we make the rise by rising upon
it. We enfunction the function. The steps climb in our step upon them. Each
step is a further test of their identity. They resound/respond to the advance of
our body. And slow us a bit. The climb is suitably hesitant, due to the overcom
ing of gravity in motion. The wear beneath our shoes also asks to be felt. Do
not miss the hollows and cracks upon the stairs, for these give individuality.
We are further slowed, because we have nowhere to go. The stairs may
lead nowhere. We are not upon a designed passage in a unified plan. The stairs
do not go to, they are. We must not pass them by without appreciating what
they are. The stairs cause us to linger, that quintessential disposition cultivated
by ruins. We have the time, at last. Time is suspended upon the stairs, while we
pause and stare upon the rest of the ruin. We have climbed into the timelessness
of the stairs. Though we have been moving on them in muscular procession,
which requires time for its unfolding, time is always available in which to do it.
The stairs have eternal potentiality for our movement, and now we appear
to have unlimited time too. At Gortyn are other things to see, such as the in
scription of laws in Dorian Greek, dating from 500 BCE, which had been re
spectfully integrated by the Romans into the Odeon, and refound in 1884 by
Federigo Halbherr in a mill stream. No imperative to get off the stairs, out of
the doorway, or away from the window, so that others may pass and go about
their business in the building. No one has any business in a ruin, unless the di
dactic task of learning about what is not there.
The ruin makes possible the luxury of pausing. It does not continue busi
ness as usual. Our breathing has changed from that regular activity needed to
propel us up and forward against gravity to the relaxed activity that is willing to
give way to gentle pause. We may not be aware of why we linger, what has
caused us to suspend the climb upon the stairs. We might not be concentrating
upon another feature. We pause for no purpose. A pause that refreshes our sen
sibility, because it clears us of causes. No need to stop, and none to go on. We
might as well dwell suspended between steps.
We sense our power of being and our openness of intention. We are not
driven, but we may discover. We may feel at ease in using the stairs, but we
have no need to use them. We exist with them, enjoying our not rising upon
them. We savor this contrast between the imperative of the stairs to continue
their task and the freedom we have to stand still on them. Not that we have
stopped them or countered their function. Instead, we have delighted in the im
mediate recognition of their work, while not being bound to conform to it.
Standing still upon ancient stairs, we recognize that in the ruin functions
free us to enjoy what hitherto we had rejected for granted. We are so used to
making use of structural functions that we are in danger of becoming function
aries of purposeful structures.
Our breathing, walking, timing, feeling, and thinking are given design by
the streets, vehicles, and buildings in which we conduct our lives. Because the
world shapes human functions, we can be efficient in our operations, though we
may have lost something at heart.
The ruin restores the loss of our humanity. We cannot be cogs in the ma
chinery, if the ruin is a true Luddite. It releases the freedom of the foot upon the
stairs. Foot and will are welded. We may go where we would or be where we
have stood. In the center of purpose, we may choose or choose not to choose.
We regain something of our long-lost youth, that longed-for time when, in Hen
ry Wadsworth Longfellow’s elongated refrain,
A boy’s will is the wind’s will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. (“My Lost Youth,’’
Longfellow, 2000, pp. 337-340)
Wavering upon the stairs, we become aware that whatever step we take is
freely proposed as purpose and equally befitting our being. Our purpose in the
ruin is to be free. The strange figure we meet upon the stairs is none other than
ourselves! We may function for ourselves by walking, climbing, sitting, or con
templating. The joy of experiencing eclipses the utility of human activity. This
is what the stairs have led us to.
The ruin is the temple of the non-useful. In it, nothing need work to a uni
fied purpose. Whatever we find that works does so for no end. The stairs are
free. Even our presence upon them, in their very heart of being, does not upset
their self-centered resolve. The stairs and the human being, each in its way, has
conquered servitude. The stairs, in their turn, have left their impress upon our
heart. An uplifting experience.
The pause has only been for a moment, but what is a moment, if not a
whole interior world! We take another step to the top. But what is the top of the
stairs that lead nowhere? No floor to walk upon, no continuation of our pas
sage. The climbing was self-sufficient. Its intention to climb was fulfilled, as
we are the living proof. But it did not necessarily mean to bring us to a floor.
The floor’s business is not that of the stairs. The stairs mind their own business.
They are absolved from making other connections. They are above that.
Reaching the top step has retroactive organizing force upon the experi
ence of the climb. Our movement is no simple matter of advancing one step at a
time. Otherwise, we would encounter only the stepness of the stairs. Instead,
we sense the staimess of each step. The whole informs its parts with the identi-
ty of its function which deepens in intensity as we increase our intimacy with it

by moving in it. We have not traversed. We have immersed.
And we have triumphed. A marked satisfaction crowns our having
climbed an unconnected stairway. We have done it, because, as the mountain-
climbers say, it is there, but also because we are there. “There” is a unity in Be
ing, which, though it involves function, need not integrate that function into
long-range plan. We have purposes without purpose. On purpose, we make
things and experiences their own purpose. Human beings and ruins are great
proposers, pursuers, purposers.
Between our steps on the stairway opens the innerness of our encounter.
In the moment the foot is raised, we step into levels of neglected experiencing.
The gates of the soul draw open, as we reach the next step. The outward ad
vance upward has been a deep progression within. Only a few moments have
occurred, but life is only a few moments compared to the longevity of the ruin.
Emile Zola took several pages to describe the mounting of a staircase in
Nana (1880). This was a tour de force in his art of realism. Yet he cannot have
exhausted the subject. Nor is his reader exhausted by the dazzling treatment.
The whole of a novel might be spread out upon the full description of the stair
case, for its aspects and implications are infinite. Ford Madox Ford begins It
Was the Nightingale (1933) with one foot raised upon the kerb (Amer.: “curb”).
In the last chapter, the foot touches ground. In-between is the flood of memory.
In-between our moments in the ruin is the flood of Being. The wealth of
Being enriches the moment. “Here!”, proclaim the stairs, “now!”, “this!”,
“thou!” The stairs bear all. Being has taken an enormous step with them. This
flight makes us dizzy. All in a daze-work. (We will return to Being in Section 5
of Chapter Nineteen, “Meditations,” below.)
In principle, the moment of revelation when we stood upon the stairs in
the ruin could happen anywhere. The daily world might harbor numberless mo
ments for such a happening, though the occasion to launch them appears lack
ing. The world, I am afraid, is too mundane. We are too taken up in mounting
the staircase of success, or we get our lift by the express elevator. We look for
efficiency as excellence. In the interest of the smooth working of the parts, we
hold back the whole, our hearts.
The world is too much with u s;. . .
We have given our hearts away,. . . (Wordsworth, 2002, pp. 515-516)
The world we have built seals up the windows to our innerness. It conceals us
from us. It requires that our steps not linger. Keep moving! Avanti! Vorwarts!
Yet our passage to the grave is marked by lingering doubt. We would pause a
while. Life reaches for us through the busyness of living, if only we knew how
to stop and listen. Why press onward, when we are already here? Where are we
here? Why, here is where we are.
The ruin teaches us the art of attending to the foundations of Being that lie
beneath the accepted world. The ruin gives us practice for the pause in the
midst of imperfection. We exercise detachment from the whole and from final
ends. We momentarily put an end to continuity of function, and we find that a
function’s intention is end enough. Somewhere upon a stair in an intact build
ing in the busy world, we might regain the truth taught us by the ruin, so that
between steps we penetrate to the heart of Being. We may review our vision of
the world—and thereby make revision of the world—in the light of the ruin.
Instead of expecting the ordinary world, with its striving for wholeness, to
teach us what we can enjoy in the ruin, let us allow the ruin’s revelation of
wholeness to instruct us in taking joy in our world. Ruins cry out not for their
restoration to match the seeming seamlessness of the world, but for our restora
tion of something essential that we have neglected in experience of that world.
The ruin celebrates matter, form, and function. It concentrates on the free
life that each may lead. The ruin also insists on the interaction of each, the ful
filling of one by the others. Purity and connectedness, cooperation and contrast
are the interplay, the innerplay, indulged in by the ruin, as it revises itself in ex
perience. We experience it in the process of becoming, in the making up of
its/our mind. The ruin is inventive yet intensive. It allows new isolation yet in
novative arrangement. The ruin is intimate with us. This means its innerness is
immediately accessible to our sympathetic interest. We recognize and respond.
Time is drugged and dragged away. Moments are all. The order of visit is
banished. New orders are given the visitor by the ruin. Matter comes to matter.
Form matters too. Materialized form may at one moment be totally free, when
the architectural is reborn in the ruin as the sculptural. Or form may function,
intent on its activity, though totally free from ulterior purpose. Functionalized
form may sustain appealing dignity in its splendid uselessness. We who have
access to some of the functions also participate with them in use, while we ent
er others vicariously through recognition and projection.
We are experimental artists of the ruin, “Don’t bother me with stairs!’’,
you might say, “Just let me enjoy the sight of the stacked blocks within their
cracked surfaces.’’ The shape of the stepped structure may suffice without refer
ence to function. Or you may insist upon the absorption of that form into a
more extensive form that reforms many shapes with lively plasticity. The stairs
are but one formal step in an elaborated working-out of shape, pattern, and tex
ture in space and over time.
Then stop that drive to “Only connect,’’ the motto of E. M- Forster’s nov
el, Howards End (1921). Be willing, instead, to live with disconnectedness and
see the nascent unity of that form apart from all the world of the ruin. Now the
stairs come back with a passion from within. Purpose bursts upon the scene.
We may take an active hand in the flourishing function by setting foot upon the
stairs. Just as suddenly, function has fled up the stairs, and form follows func
tion, leaving us alone with nothing more than stone. Nothing less than stone,
that stoic substance, so long-lived, stares at us. and delights the soul with the
genial simplicity of its substantial freedom.
The ruin invites revisiting, as do great works of art, because its aesthetic
nature is re-identifiable. With further experience and renewed attentiveness, we
may appreciate more of what the ruin is. Surprisingly, what we think we know
of the ruin is not what it has in mind. The ruin defeats the expectations to which
it has led us. It does not increase the quantity of its beauties, but it changes their
identity. The ruin rings changes upon aesthetic experience. It promises the un
expected. We may expect from it the exceptional.
Reader, the time has come for you to visit the toilet. Yes, right in the mid
dle of this book! Those in Ostia Antica, the port city of ancient Rome, are love
ly (FI. 14). They are exposed to the public eye in the open air, behind a low
wall. They retain a good measure of their Roman dignity. We are not accus
tomed to standing outdoors and gazing appreciatively at toilets. The subject ap
pears inherently inaesthetic. But let us overcome our disinclination or repug
nance to examine an ancient structure that has been preserved for posteriority.
Any initial embarrassment, followed briefly by smirking or amusement,
should give way to a serious contemplation. This is assisted by the wholesome
sunlight and the suggestion of the cleansing action of the rains that have
smoothed the stones. The bright tone of the stone too gives a tonic healthiness
to the airy space.
Now that we have become at more ease, putting behind us the unappeal
ing notions of the function, the pattern of the seats plays upon our eye. A distin
guished line of holes ornaments the benches that fit with naturalness the dimen
sions of the room, accentuated by the grooved floor. All this is greeted as har
monious and humane, even if we forget about the function. The aesthetic is ex
tracted from the toilet by an abstraction. But the function has a way of entering
the toilet sooner or later. Its toiletness is unmistakable.
Pleasant cutout forms in stone sit patiently. A flowering plant decorates
the top of the bench, a bonus for whoever would sit on the corner seat. That
seat deserves something in consolation. For to keep it to one side or the other of
the sharp angle, the seat has been placed uncomfortably close to its neighbor. It
cannot offer the same legroom as the others, and this placement also requires
the greatest reach for the wiping sponge that floated in the trough. Weeds clog
this bend of the trough and the footings around what we have discovered by
aesthetic analysis is the worst seat in the house.
These toilets in Ostia are ready and willing to function, requiring only the
reprovision of running water. We appreciate the ingenuity and formal design
of functioning structure. Catching ourselves in the enjoyment is enjoyable. The
Tin’ Ruin as / urn lion
toilets free us from tightly-held restrictions upon feeling and thought. Aesthetic
patterning of the material repays our attentiveness. The fine brickwork is sym
metrically deployed about the comer which has attracted our interest.
The seating is an impressive conjoining of great thick slabs that have held
up well. The lovely apertures are fitted from two surfaces. The care in planning
is evident. We know that the corner seat is no afterthought to make an extra
place after the assemblage of slabs. We can trace some of the order in which
the slabs were placed. We must acknowledge priority for the short slab without
cutout that completes the right facade of the bench. The last flat slab of the
right row, which abuts the last slab of the left side, rests on top of it. To put a
seat exactly in the corner would have involved advance notching of four slabs,
instead of two, resulting in less stable support.
The floor of the communal toilet is nicely cut. Good taste in planning and
execution of this sociable room. In 1981, the trough contains cigarette butts.
The seats uphold the trust confided in them. We may sit upon them com
fortably and use them confidently. Beneath the row of holes, we detect the
flushing passage, which is now dry, as is the groove in front of the seats where
the cleansing sponges floated. Quite hygienic and executed with competence.
“Well done!”, is the salute we wish to give these successful toilets, worthy rep
resentatives of a civilization that valued hygiene, was frank about bodily func
tions, and practiced unprecedented ingenuity in manipulating water for the
good of people. You must admit that the toilets should be flushed with pride.
We also felicitate the toilets on their fine presence in being themselves. In
the end, they speak of toilets, not of Rome. Despite Rome, they keep their seats
and please us with their character, resilience in a collapsed world, and self-
affirmation in matching a necessary function. Their shape, pattern, texture, pro
portion, harmony, articulation, color, clarity, persistence, intentionality, and
unity constitute an aesthetic object of high value.
Waxing enthusiastic about the Ostian toilets, we are grateful to them for
opening a new door in our aesthetic experience, though it is a toilet door. They
enlarge our recognition of the dignity of human functions. These toilets are
agreeable to a civilized animal that must move its bowels daily, even when vis
iting ruins. The many tourists who step over the wall to sit on the seats for their
souvenir photograph confirm the suitability/seatability of these amiable shapes.
The toilets stimulate a fondness for them in heart and bowel.
Their charm is due to our recognition that they are not ordinarily objects
of aesthetic attention. We appreciate the dissolution of supposed decorum. The
toilets have relieved us of internal burdens. Genial anachronism and amusing
incongruity are the entertaining results.
Four
THE RUIN AS INCONGRUITY
Astonishing is this stonewall, by fate broken;

ramparts burst; giants-work in ruins,
Roofs are fallen, towers toppled,
gate[towers] gone, rime on lime,
shelters scattered, to showers opened,
devoured by aging . . . .
From Old English: Anonymous, “The Ruin” (seventh century CE),
original text in R. F. Leslie, ed., Three Old English Elegies (no city:
Manchester University Press, “Old and Middle English Texts,” corrected
printing, 1966), pp. 51-52.
The ruin is something out of place that is home to out-of-placeness: the locus
of enriching incongruity. The ruin brings to fore what ordinarily is amiss, such
that we experience its prominence and dislocation. The function that continues
to function becomes ironic, poignant, or amusing, when we recognize that it is
functioning in a ruin instead of serving in a standard setting. The ruin renders
function incongruous insofar as it makes us conscious of that larger context
that is the ruin. How odd that a structure continues to perform its intentional
activity within a building that has lost its purpose. The irony is that the unity of
the original is gone, perhaps its identity is unknown, but the stairs, windows,
and towers keep up their efforts and are repaid with a unity each their own.
This curious irony may make the whole that remains more touching and
tender, especially if the function is humble and we think that the building is
grand. The basic oddity is that functions are extant in the ruin. The irony at
tached to each function increases, as we move across the ruin, uncovering one
and then another. In the absence of the whole, the functions are all.
Function may abut function in ways not permitted in the original. Intact
buildings segregate functions. In ruined buildings, disparate functions con
gregate, out of place with each other. These stairs should not be seen by those
others. That we see them so unexpectedly in one another’s company may make
them more interesting. Being out of place, they place themselves in noteworthy
confrontation. The ruin replaces order with incongruity.
Ruin incongruity is linked to anachronism, anomaly, ambiguity, irony,
and uncanniness (Ger.: das Unheimliche, “not homey,” “ill-at-homeness”), all
forms of disjointedness, oddness, out-of-orderness, out of the ordinary/orderly,
out-and-out irregular. Catch me if I conflate/inflate these terms.
In making the original invisible, the ruin makes visible what is not meant
to be seen. The hidden becomes evident, while what ordinarily is present is
absent. We are made to momentarily feel out of place in our calm contempla-
tion of exposed toilets or our lingering stroll through former sewers. The func
tion in the ruin does not engender the feelings we usually have when encoun
tering the same function in its ordinary place. In these extraordinary circum
stances, aesthetic unity occupies us. Then we reflect: how odd to seek the aes
thetic in a structure given over to such a function. The incongruity of our pur
suit amuses, yet pleases, us.
The ruin as a whole gives us this feeling of being out of joint, while we
are out of step. Awkwardness is inherent in the ruin. The plan of visit is un
clear, since the ruin has no purpose. Wandering comes to stumbling, distraction
to disorientation, lack of direction to being lost. Initially, we feel ill-at-home in
the ruin, since it does not accommodate our expectations for buildings. The
ruin throws us off, makes us lose our pace, causes us to take a step back, and
stops us on a step.
But as we come to know the ruin, we come to feel at home. The ruin’s
space is human space. We may breathe at the center of an organic whole. That,
too, is odd. We are at home in strange circumstances. This awareness gives ex
tra pointedness to the enjoyment. Successively, we have the sense of incongrui
ty, the experience of overcoming it, and the recognition of having overcome it
and of continuing to sense it. The strangeness of the ruin becomes familiar.
Strange, is it not?
The familiar becomes strange, thanks to the ruin. The window still func
tioning as a window, the wall as wall, or the portal as portal are rendered ironic
by the disappearance of the distinction between exterior and interior. Some
times, we are tempted to laugh at a structure that strains with all its intention to
hold back the outer world from entering an inner, protecting, space, though that
space has lost all identity, and we can step around the structure through a hole
in the wall.
Though circumvented, the structure is not belittled. It is worthy of our re
spect and may receive more attention because of its apparent defeat. That the
inner space is gone does not negate the structure’s meaning in fulfilling its
function. It succeeds in purposefulness, though the outcome is in vain. So
much the better. The incongruity heightens appreciation of the aesthetic value
of the persistent function. Incongruity in the ruin helps in the isolation, detec
tion, and characterization of appealing features. In seeking what is out of joint,
we may chance upon unity.
When the interior-exterior distinction is ruined, what ordinarily is kept
within comes outside. We may see the toilets, dungeons, and altars. They come
upon us suddenly with the unexpectedness of being in the open. Incongruity
jumps at us. The ruin appears to have turned inside out. It insists on disclosing
its innemess. The ruin offers accessibility to the visitor, simultaneously making
approach difficult because of unclear paths, mixed directions, and lost purpose.
What was kept out of the intact building swarms into the ruin. Above all,
The Ruin u s Incongruity 53
space enters, grows in every direction, and presses against remaining struc
tures. While space invades through walls and roofs, it does not fill the ruin, for
structures resist and stand their ground. Space invigorates what once were in
teriors, breaking into mundane functions and ordinary plans to give life.
The ruin stands in the open air; nay, the air opens up the ruin and stands
within it. This air is continuous with sky and is greeted by cheek and nostril as
our atmosphere as well. At Tara (Temair, Taueragh: “Lofty Height and Meet
ing Place of Darkness and Light”), where the great kings of Ireland held state,
little remains, in 1999, other than mounds covered with grass that waves in the
wind (PI. 15).
The wind inhabits most ruins, roaming among their broken bones. The
wind lays its shaping hands upon the ruin and teaches the stones new twists in
stairs and windows. Eerie, this airy presence of the wind, while the original,
like the Halls of Tara, is gone with the wind.
The way the blue sky sits in windows is amusing or amazing, given the
structure’s assignment to keep the outside out. The outside in, the sky steps
through the windows into what were rooms. The sky is backdrop for the ruin,
as often it is for architecture, the roof of rooves (Brooklynese). But the sky ent
ers the shaping of the roofless ruin. “Who has let the sky in to walk so freely
about my unburied body?”, asks the dead building.
The ruin has done it. It ensconces sky in its structure. Every edge of the
ruin’s being is hedged with sky, and thus intensified. Only the outerness of in
tact buildings is sky-drawn. The sky breathes life into the remnants. They ap
pear natural, healthy, and prosperous out in the open. They were not meant to
be this way. Their life was meant to be indoors. The ruin has lost the original’s
fundamental meaning of shelter by so generously letting in the sky. The sky
seeks shelter in the ruin and finds it (Pis. 8, 9).
We and the sky are equally at ease here. We each take our stroll and find
our seats. The sky wins our appreciation for seeming out of place but not being
so. In contrast to the way things are placed in architecture, the sky is at home.
We are seated indoors, letting the eye wander in this sky, for we are also out
doors. Strictly speaking, no doors may exist. Every once in a moment, we
make this discovery that we are outdoors when within the ruin.
Roofs are among the first things to be ruined. The sky has a heavy foot as
it kicks its way in. It comes bearing the gift of color. Blue is the universal com
plement to ruins. Architecture can take it or leave it. The ruin thrives on it.
Blue may surround a building, but blue enters a ruin. Blue buoys up the worn
stones and restores the pink to their cheek. The bright blue of the sky bathes
stones and scrubs structures to make them alert and clear. The material finds its
best friend in the sky. A homogeneous blueness dresses the variegated torso of
stones, pitted and scarred with time’s harshness. The blue is a soft uniform for
deformed limbs. Ruin-blue is the color of life.
The Ruin as Incongruity 55
Other blues and grays, pinks and whites enter with the light of sky. They
too substantiate the ruin and set off its colors and shading. The study of the
change of light on the exterior of buildings is worth our attention. More so is
this illumination that springs from within the ruin when light stirs and varies.
No exterior to the ruin. The light and color of the atmosphere are those of the
innersphere. The building has been brought to its knees, but its ruin holds light
captive. The sky, the air, the color, the light, the space are interiorized. What
was out of place finds its place. The ruin replaces ordinary being. It beams with
confident composure in its exposed centrality of place.
Whence the attraction of the ruin in sunset or sunrise, in spectacular storm
or glorious sunshine. These phenomena are worth marveling over for them
selves, and they are enjoyable as foils for intact buildings. Their grace for the
ruin is that they penetrate it and are penetrated by it. Ruin and sunlight pour
themselves over one another, beam illuminating beam, or beam obstructing
beam, with glancing blows struck from the shadows.
Intact buildings allow light to enter under carefully considered restric
tions. Mainly through windows must the sun wend its way within, or else it
courts entrance through the control of courtyards. Light ravages the ruin, enter
ing where it will. Light has its will of the ruin, which puts up resistance. The
ruin will not let itself be completely ruined by the invasive light. It has its com
ers, underarches, closed chambers, dungeons still, from which it bars the light.
The ruin awakes to the light, struggles with it, is shaped by it, swells with it,
yet flees it. To throw more light on the subject, we must acknowledge that the
ruin is dramatized, but not traumatized, by the changing light.
Ruin and rain are an old couple. One makes considerable impression
upon the other. The ruin is rain-stained, rain-smoothed, rain-cleansed, rain-
grooved. Yes, the rain washes away what was there, but it also washes, in its
way, what is there. What stands has withstood. The long-handed rain wields a
carver’s knife. In wearing away, it liberates what is within. It removes pieces
and particles, to create patterns and textures.
The rain tears with myriad fingers at everything. Hence, unifier. The
blows of the rain fall about wildly upon the bare heads of stones. Thus, simpli
fier. The rain falls between the walls. Purifier. No roof or gutter to drain or det
er it, the rain washes the remnants of roof where they lie between the walls out
into the street to enter the gutter. The rain has its revenge at last upon the world
of roofs that keep it out of our sheltered life.
Rain entering an intact building is greeted as an enemy that has breached
the defenses of human beings. One-third of the homeowners in America know
this insult to their humanity. Their roofs leak. We rush home to shut the open
windows when a storm promises to enter them and soak our drapes and manu
scripts. Rain does not belong in buildings. We belong in buildings, looking out
at the rain, listening to the pitter-patter of raindrops on the roof.
How strange to feel at home in the ruin where cloudbursts pour through
the windows from both sides, for the rain is indifferent to the window’s essen
tial distinction between inner and outer. Yet the window works, so intent on its
function that it is indifferent to the disappearance of the shelter behind it and
the appearance of the rain on both sides of it. We cheer the window for its self-
governance in the incongruous realm of the ruin where rain reigns.
The ruin allows the grass to grow green beneath our feet. Floors are fields
or, as in Scottish ruins, lawns. Strolling outdoors, we remark upon the continui
ty of that outemess, as we find ourselves within the sheltered zone. How odd,
yet natural, that the floor is the ground. How absurd for the floor of an intact
building to be covered with weeds or grass. The ruin, which doffs the roof of a
building to let in the rain, pulls the floor out from under it as well.
Vegetation has entered here and there, the blame falling on the fallen
roof, but the floor has been transformed into earth. The ruin is rooted in the
ground in this way that is quite unlike the undertaking of the original. Architec
ture may appear to sit on the earth, when viewed from outside or from carefully
designed courtyards. The ruin is required to let the earth sit within it to such an
extent that the earth swells with the abundance of its space. Earth communi
cates vitality to the ruin, because it is alive with vegetation. The ruin comes
home to the primacy of Mother/Father Earth.
What seemed out of place is just right. As we stand in the open field in
side the ruin, we understand that it has found a new footing. It has given up its
original rules and attitudes. The earth within testifies that the edifice has
moved. It has taken the irreversible step from being a building to becoming a
ruin. Now it stands within the earth. It grows out of the ground. Organic har
mony is established, for the ruin is reborn from the ground up. Though the arti
fact has been destroyed, the ruin is free to be creative in its own terms.
The grass comes in with green hands. Green is the other basic color for
the ruin. Architecture knows well how to use the green of landscaping for the
maximum enhancement of its setting. The greening of the ruin goes beyond
setting to substance. Green springs from within the ruin. Its soft uniformity off
sets the lined and chipped character of the earthen colors. Green cushions. It
works its way under orange, brown, and gray, respectful of their solemnity.
Green welcomes our foot. It absorbs our being with ease. Green is the universal
greeter. Intact interiors use greenery ornamentally for relief from their colorless
burdens. The ruin and greenery collaborate. One does not wish to be without
the other. The ruin is a charter member of the Green Party.
Dirt enters the ruin. Much of the ruining process is a turning of stone and
brick to dirt. The ruin may be unswept, save for the wind and the rain. Debris
clogs comers. Dust powders details. Dreck blocks footpaths. The min is falling
to pieces. Incongruous to seek aesthetic satisfaction in these unkempt circum
stances! We would not tolerate such dirtiness in an edifice that is actively used.
To see piles of rubble within a building is repugnant to the value we place upon
shelter. Dirt stings the moral sense. It is, well, dirty, which is bad, inefficient,
unsanitary, and ugly.
But the ruin knows otherwise. It instructs us that our standards of good
ness, healthiness, efficiency, and beauty are out of place. It proposes in their
place a new order of disorderliness. Here the mess becomes meaningful, when
it isolates the still-functioning structures worthy of our attention. The haphaz
ard pile of fragments is a commentary upon the dignity and vigor of the intact
material. The accumulation of dirt in corners gives shaping to the space, so that
the formless detritus offers formal possibilities. The presence of decay, as, say,
the fine dust where we rest our hand or the fine streak of rainwash where we
rest our foot, recalls that we are in the middle of the ruining process. The ruin
is still coming to be—and coming to be no more.
The orange grains that stick to our fingers and our shoes at Pompeii are
cast off by the forms in process. Dirt inserts excitement in encounter of the
emergent. At the same time, Pompeii is washing away. We each carry a bit of it
with us stuck to our clothes. The weather has done more damage to Pompeii in
the two and a half centuries of its exposure than it suffered during the sixteen
and a half centuries of its interment.
The ruin is dissolving into dirt. We catch it in-between, after destruction
but before dissolution. We are present at the destructive-creative process. An
intact monument is experienced as finished. It lives outside of time. But the
ruin is passing through time, just as we are. We feel that it will change the next
time we visit. The Pompeii that I had visited in 1961 was falling to pieces and
turning into dust, but the Pompeii that I visited in 2002 had been cleaned up
and stabilized. It was not the same Pompeii. I was not the same me.
The ruin may be more long-lasting than most edifices that inhabit the
world, but it will always bear its birthmark, proclaiming that it has come into
being by a passing away. So the dirt and dross of decay that have their place in
the ruin add poignancy to the occasion as indicators of the inescapably ruined
ness of the ruin.
The ruin lives in destruction. Observers of the work of the rain upon the
ruin, we are caught in the rain, a daily event in the exploration of Scottish ru
ins. It falls so thickly at times that we are obliged to seek shelter. We tuck our
selves snugly into a hole in the wall of some room that nonetheless is outdoors.
Or we lounge in a window frame at Dryburgh Abbey, our back to the trees out
side, and face the falling water on the floor of the church, now a lawn under
open sky. Reversals of ordinary experiences and relationships underscore the
quality of the ruin as place, its independence, and its creative impulse. We are
out of place, taking cover from the rain in an open structure, as we finish our
picnic, when we could be somewhere else, like the inn, designed to keep us
dry. The ruin has wet our appetite.
At times, our scramble to find a dry spot under split arches and roofless
walls is ludicrous. But the ruin takes us under its broken wing. It has a fond
ness for human beings and holds us to its breast against the storm. We feel gra
titude for the versatility and accommodation of the ruin, as we participate in the
ruin’s resistance to the weather. With the ruin, we fight off the rain and the
wind, or the baking sun and dry air. We are detached from the sheltering exer
tions made along these lines by intact buildings. What care we how the down
spouts do their job in cooperation with the outer works of gutters that catch up
the flow from deflecting roofing, as long as the system works?
The system does not work in the ruin, yet its remaining components and
makeshift substitutes are filled with interest. The rain plays upon the ruin, acti
vating forms and reordering them in terms of verticalities. The rain strikes pin
nacles and surfaces. It misses areas—in which we have taken our vantage
point. It is turned into a flowing by the shapes which pass it downward. So the
raining in the ruin, which we might have hoped to avoid, offers a show of fluid
dynamics involving unusual structures. As a treat, we hear the dramatic perfor
mance from a front-row seat
Incongruity arises from the activities of people in what they have done to
the ruin and what they are doing at the ruin. The Egyptian Pyramid of Cheops
(Khufu) at Giza, the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still
standing, is largely intact (PI. 16). Its pyramidness, formed out of 2,301,212
blocks of stone, is the world’s largest stone structure (ca. 2550 BCE). Its pol
ished outer stone has been stripped away to serve many a humbler construction
in the suburbs of Cairo.
Though the pyramid puts all its mind to protecting the earthly remains of
the Pharaoh, a huge hole punched in its face allows visitors to go down into the
sacred chamber. There, in 1990,1 almost suffocated to death among the sweat
ing swarm of people in the sweltering, airless, cramped burial vault. The Phar
aoh was the only one missing in the crowd.
The desert’s sands always threaten to bury the lower edge of the immense
pyramid. The sweeper of the desert does his part in saving the ruin. Beau geste.
(For further discussion of the aesthetic role of people in the ruin, see Section
11, in Chapter Eighteen, “Fragments of a Chapter on Ruin,” below.)
The fruitful futility often evident in the ruin is another mode of aesthetic
incongruity. Towers disconnected from all access that lead nowhere, stairs that
climb despite the absence of floors, portals that guard passages although the
walls are gone, windows that differentiate between innerness from outerness
when all has opened out to the freedom of the wind and the will of the rain,
sewers and aqueducts that ingeniously channel between them the fluid needs
for a dozen human functions although no human beings are engaged in them
and not a drop of water is present in the parched ruin: these incongruities stir
us. We are able to see the function for itself, regardless of the missing connect-
PI. 16. Sweeper of Desert, Pyramid of Cheops, Giza, Egypt, 1990

ions, or even because of the startling absence of those connections. The isolat-
able identity of function comes with the incongruity of absent continuity.
Unity is found and founded in the out-of-placeness of the structure that
bounds into awareness because of a stark absence. The function then takes its
place in appreciation. But the isolated becomes incongruous. The ruin is a field
of aesthetic reversibility. The unity may gain an extra touch due to its relation
ship. It is not alone, even when it is alone. It is not just a tower or stairway. It is
a tower or stairway in a ruin, and that implies relationship with other parts, oth
er wholes.
Perhaps the most pervasive incongruity in the ruin is the strange absence
that occurs amid presence, for what is not there may cast an uncanny reflection
on what is there. Not that we need to study and imagine the plan of the invis
ible original. We can sense the senselessness of a feature without knowing its
habitual connectedness. The feature grows with inner resolve in face of the
sensed absence. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Inherent irony is often apparent in the transformation of a function to a
form in which the form is enjoyable for itself but the function leaves the con
trastive suggestion of its present absence, its absent presence. The roseate
choir-window of the Cistercian ruin of Sweetheart Abbey, Scotland, has
changed its identity into the form of a broken cookie (Brit.: “biscuit”) that en
joys a radiancy in the space partially of wall and partially of sky (PI. 17).
It has shifted its reference as window from inner and outer to its activity
as free form from wall to air. Now it leaps off the planar into space, no longer
confined to windowness.
In 1982, we give ourselves up to the contemplation of the exuberance of
form. Yet the form bears the reminder that it was a window that led a different
life, moved in a different dimension, and had another unity. The reminder of
what is not there—a function—taps upon the consciousness of all that interests
us—a form—until we open the window to their confrontation.
The irony added to the enjoyment is that recognizable function has gener
ated independent form. We can have our cookie and eat it too. The Sweetheart
of a form is pure, indifferent to what it once might have been. Yet it affirms its
purity by unmistakable references to what it had been. This out-of-timeness oc
curs in a place, similar to the out-of-placeness that we experience in the ruin.
The florescent window is half gone, half in place. Its petals have a beat
that stirs heart and eye. They are truly open to the sky. The sky to their left
presses upon the nearest stone filament whose resiliency is aided by an extra
support at the top. Once a comfortably complete form in a confidently solid
wall that defined a roofed interior, the window is let loose in all its delicacy. Its
wall now takes exposing the window to the sky as its purpose.
The window’s fragile status is communicated by the serrated edge of the
blocks that angle upward behind it. A loose stone rests at the top of their climb
PI. 17. Sweetheart Abbey, Scotland, UK, 1982
on the platform that terminates the form. At their base on the right, an irregu
larly shaped stone is about to part company with its fellows.
Considerable strength is involved in raising this broken pattern of a wind
ow into the sky. Its immediate edging is a protective bow, an exciting arc float
ing high in the wall. This is as much the window as the thin dividers. Visual
Switching concentrates on one and then the other. The dividing members rest
their heads in the curved shelter. They stick their feet against the triangular
form that preserves its symmetry and thereby activates the space to its left,
where the rest of the window had been. Adding to the formal richness of these
upper parts is a small, square space in the middle of the triangle. The line
drawn under the upper portion unites them and helps distinguish the middle
level whose edges and apertures are verticals.
An entire set of arcades is intact on the right, while the set on the left is
broken, just as is the level above. These arcades face us. We are sighted in our
completeness or imperfection. A walkway runs behind the arcades. On the
right, it passes behind the adjoining wall and continues atop the remains. The
second level enters other dimensions than the free-floating upper level. To the
left, the walkway dissolves. We would step out into the air, if we walked upon
it, though in an amusing touch, the stones step down. Human outlook and func
tion permeate the second level. It, too, is underlined.
Let us attend to the lower level with its two shapely doorways. The lower
entrance still serves as such, and we are standing at its level. But the upper
aperture is converted quite happily to a frame for the Scottish countryside. The
greenery and purple haze are much welcome in the monotone of red stone and
the colorless moist sky. The lower level, about twice the height of the second
layer, is firmly attached to walls right and left, and to the ground.
While the fine half-window high in the sky has organized our attention, as
it flutters atop its walls, we cannot help but make further connections. In the
right wall is a high aperture related in size and direction to the two in the wall
that we have been studying. Then comes an astonishingly large frame for an
opening. We have taken a giant step in a series of experiences from ground
level in front of us to the heights on our right. The movement does not stop
there. Suddenly, it rockets into the all-encompassing arch that is not far from
where we stand and that gives us the experience of interiority.
The arch frames us within the ruin, the final triumphant frame for the
windowed-wall. It captures the space around the broken forms and gives them
full formal partnership. For instance, the raggedness of the stones on the left is
their projection into space. It is also visually and kinesthetically the probing
and indentations of the arched space. The frame gives the upper and middle
portions the recognition each needs. A second aperture makes a picture by its
frame, so the arch makes a grander picture, including the smaller. Framing it
self, the ruin catches itself for us in its aesthetic activity.
Multiple Framing Devices are evident. Apertures and arch have their
view upon things, including the animated space immediately in front of us. De
marcated by walls, it is entered and viewed by many different openings. The
wall, with which we started, is the back to this space, the grand arch above us
its front. The boundaries are enlivening, independently and in association. The
space, too, is stimulating, rising, twisting, and perforated. The space greets the
open freedom of sky. It makes the roseate members of the upper window beat
with passion.
The photograph to which we have been referring in our analysis of the
ruin is, alas, a two-dimensional object that necessarily focuses on the plane set
before it, so that as picture it favors design. Glimmerings suggest the motion,
depth, and spatiality in the scene that are constituents of the experience. The
photograph must make us see what it does not picture. We take for granted that
it is incomplete and cannot show all. The photograph also makes us forget that
it is not what is, nor was, there. The photograph transforms the subject by seek
ing forms within its grasp. It brings its unity to what it sees and seizes. In short,
we must not mistake the photograph of the ruin for that ruin. The photograph is
another kind of unity. Photography makes ruins out of everything (see Chapter
Seventeen, “The Ruining Eye,” below).
If the incongruity is savored in the functions freed from unifying purpose
and in the forms freed from functions, then it also plays a role in the materials
freed from forms. The forms may haunt their former servants, even as we rec
ognize that what aesthetically matters is the substance. Form breaks in with its
last gasp/grasp to say that it does matter. “No matter,” replies the material, “I
am all that dwells here now.” Matter and form have their dialogue over the
bridge of time. And function adds its few words, “You served me in this way
and that,” it says to matter, which shrugs off the reminder.
The sensuous character of the ironwork with its dashing lineaments may
absorb our attention, until we notice that we are standing in front of an altar, a
toilet, or a dungeon cell. We do not lose the material’s independence in that in
stant. Recognition enhances it. Irony enters. It deepens response to the materi
al. Whence, poignancy.
To be effective/affective, we must feel, not conceptualize, the recogni
tion. To be informed that this room was such-and-such does not produce felt
ironies in what we find. More likely, what we find will entirely displace what
we were told, for the experiential and immediate is stronger than the descrip
tive and abstract. Aesthetically, the room works formatively upon us, while the
knowledge about it remains in a different category, informatively, if we do not
forget it. The room must inform us through experience of what its form and
function were, if these are to play any incongruous role in enjoying the purity
of what is there. The sense of its past lingers in the ruin. This need not be the
shadow of its original unity. It may be the hints of countless lost unities, such
as, this was a window, that a wall, these stairs. To where, for what, and why,
we need not be aware.
The incongruity of ruined structures in contiguity with modern ones may
produce disharmony, a mutual out-of-placeness. Such juxtaposition might also
result in a splendid harmony (see Chapter Nine, “Building with Ruin,” below).
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Fig. 3. Crane and Facade of Church, Avila, Spain, 1997
In the mystical Spanish city of Avila, the silhouette of a church facade,

topped by a nesting crane (grulla), is addressed by the towering presence of a
mechanical crane (grua) at another site (Fig. 3). The old structure is the result
of destruction. The modern one is dedicated to construction. The ruin remains,
as it has been for hundreds of years. In a month or so, the machine with the
enormous neck will be gone. The two have nothing in common, but as we stroll
about the city, in 1997, craning our neck for mysteries, our bird’s-eye-view
brings them together for a silent dialogue.
In a ruin, the poignancy of doors, portals, and windows is due to their
having been meant as entrance and access for human beings. They humanize
buildings. They mark the scale. Gaping holes in walls preserved in outline are
the last remains of human meaning taking flight into abstraction. Ruins thrive
aesthetically on anachronism. In the original, this did such-and-such. In the
ruin, it does so-and-so.
The ruin exists with a past, yet without a past. While a remnant of what
was, what it is is not what it was. This duality embedded in the ruin’s special
kind of being is present in intact architecture only when an old building is put
to a new use without fully disguising its original purpose. Because it no longer
is a building, the ruin moves its aesthetic grounds which shrug off the remin
der. The ruins says to its original edifice, “Get out of here!”
What the human being does for the ruin, with the ruin, or in the ruin may
entertain by its creative incongruity. The hulking ruin of Jedburgh Abbey,
another of Scotland’s border abbeys, stands above a modest rose garden set in
the lawn at its heavy feet. The roses, in 1982, are a welcome relief from the
severe stone that looms massively upon a hill. We appreciate the thoughtful
ness in providing the garden, which sits where the cloister had been. The once
cloistered-space (claustrum = closure) is transferred to an open place that is at
first experienced outside the Abbey. It could well have been left as an outer
lawn. By an act of creativity, the space is retained as part of the ruin with flow
ers planted in the invisible cloister. That invisibility is pointedly felt in the
presence of these living things that bloom and wilt.
The cloister is almost totally gone. We would not have experienced it at
all, if not for the flowers which keep alive its remembrance. The absent cloister
is scented by the lovely roses whose soft petals are wafted in the gentle breeze.
Here we take our rest.
Momentarily away from the bustling Abbey with its overpowering might,
our tread is more measured, our breathing lighter, our sense turned inward,
while the flowers cloister us. The bulk of the steep stonework rises from the
garden in which we find relief. The flowers are fragile forms against this back
ground. But they have the power of life, blessing of color, freedom of move
ment, and strength of intention. They, too, are of the ruin. No outsiders or gra
tuitous ornaments, they are the heart of the cloister.
The space of the garden wells up with pride, as it addresses the towering
church walls. The cloister stands its garden firmly, while the rest of the ruin oc
cupies so much of the visual field. The stunning contrast is shot through with
joy, when we recognize this deliberate incongruity, for we have seen many an
old cloister in which no flowers remain, while at Jedburgh, the decision has
been made to plant the flowers as the only remains of the cloister.
Gathering our strength as we relax on a bench, we enjoy the presence of
the invisible. The flowers have given a florid identity to the space, and what in
one way is absurd, because out-of-place, we appreciate for being so appro
priately in place. No accident, this is due to insight and initiative. Intervention
has assisted the ruin to its further expressiveness. The intervention has been of
the gentlest nature, revivification, not reconstruction, with an authenticity that
is ironic and heartwarming, without sentimentality. The rose garden planted in
the grounds of the absent cloister at Jedburgh Abbey is among the finest incon
gruities we may experience in ruins.
Scottish church and abbey ruins are notable for continued functioning as
cemeteries. The churches, having been desecrated, sometimes by bloodshed,
are no longer in service. No longer churches, they are ruins, as at Elgin, “The
Lantern of the North.” Their neighboring cemeteries, however, remain con

secrated and in active use (PI. 18). The tombs are well-maintained, for the most
part, whereas the stones of the church are falling in. We might experience the
church ruin as ruin, instead of as church, detached from its history and religi
ous reference.
But we cannot experience the churchyard in its grave activity apart from
deep-felt values. It stones tell of grief and suffering, love and pride. A cemetery
is the deliberate remembrance of our humanity. The messages on the stones
may be all that remain of a family. The carvings of angels or flowers are al
ways inadequate. A simple expression seized in the last moment by the sur
vivors that bespeaks the inexpressibility of what they feel. We cannot put a per
son’s life upon a tombstone.
The stones and the tombs are at the human scale. Our presence is sized up
among the graves. We fit here. We are at home in an old cemetery, the measure
of all things human. While inevitable disorder occurs in the plan, with interrup-
tive trees and utilitarian structures, the cemetery retains the orderliness of rows
dictated by the uniformity of burial space. Since it is an old place associated
with what was a church or abbey, the graveyard is bound to be crowded, so that
everywhere we step may be upon someone’s tomb. The whole of the cemetery,
then, is alive with value, passion, presence. A stroll in an old burial ground is
an excellent tonic for the restoration of our spirits. The cemetery reaffirms our
humanity and is preparatory for further joy in living.
See the contrast, in 1967, with the adjacent ruin at Elgin. Its functions
have fallen into such disorder and have lost so many bearers of messages that
the ruin makes no sense as church. Its stones have lost their meaning, or else
they have substituted formal meaning for human content. The ruin is sparse,
made up mostly of air. Plenty of space for us to wander about without taking a
thought to avoid stepping on someone’s ancestor.
The church’s openness and upwardness emphasize its emptiness. The ce
metery springs from the ground up. The tombstones keep close to the ground;
their attachment as rows is to the horizontal. The ruin may reach for the sky.
Its stones have grown together as walls and forms, while the gravestones grow
separately, directly from the womb of earth.
From the cemetery, the ruin appears as another tombstone, a fantastic
ally, elaborately crowning the ground, surrounded by the lesser markers. The
ruin is the cemetery’s broken heart, a collective tribute that unites the individu
al markers, an organizational core for what otherwise wanders without direc
tion. In sum, the ruin at Elgin offers aesthetic unity to the adjoining cemetery.
Beautiful gesture.
Formal and material resemblances bolster the relationship. We perceive
arches and towers in the ruin in the shape of the tombstones. Our eye lights
upon those markers that share more of the ruin’s shapes, so that we stop to
dwell upon the harmony. Memorial stones and even tombs may be embedded
within the former chapels of the ruin, and transition structures, such as walls
that bear funerary markers and urns, may exist between tomb and ruin. Vaults
and elaborate grave markers in the cemetery have fallen into ruin like the
church. The stones used for the tombs are much the same as those in the ruins.
In Scotland, the common ground of the lively green lawn unites church
ruin and active cemetery. The lawn marches in from churchyard to church
without stopping at the door, for no door may remain. The floor is grass.
Where cemetery ends and ruin begins is not clear. The ruin may have so
many gaps that it has given up defining its territory, while the graveyard may
not be contained by wall or fence. Standing in the ruin, we see the graves as its
edges instead of its neighbor, just as when we stand among the graves, we see
the ruin as their coalescent center. So we may perceive church and cemetery as
constituting the ruin. Their incongruity wavers between ironic and touching
contrast to fitting and harmonious cooperation. Unity and disparity alternate.
Upon closer examination, we see that the cemetery usually is kept out of
the former ecclesiastical structure. The ruin is distinct from its circumambient
gravestones. The cemetery is officially no part of the ruin, no participant in its
structure. Thus, the cemetery is the ruin’s context, a characterization of its site.
We may free the ruin from its surroundings. It rises above what is all about it,
for what it is all about is, above all, form, matter, their functions, and incongru
ities within. But the site comes back in sight to enrich the ruin with its contigui
ty, incongruity, and collaborative unity.
The massive towers at Elgin are mighty forms largely freed from the
church’s framework, delicately linked by a high arch. The structure changes
orientation. We penetrate it visually from the side, now that the roof and most
of the walls are gone. The window stands like an elaborate tombstone. We can
observe its cutting edge, as we step into the space of the church through the gap
that once was wall. This side of the ruin features an alignment of impressive
forms broken loose from their original purposes and offering the delights of
their varied forms and curious incongruities.
In contrast, the cemetery is all in order, nothing broken, everything func
tioning. The church, disaffected, is dead to use. The cemetery, maintained in its
identity, is alive to human purposes. The ruins, as frequently occurs in Scottish
churches, loom up as dramatic background to the tombs, creating a magical
spatiality in which we stand, still as death. The tombstones are architectural
forms that respond to one another. And we respond to them. The ruin has so
firmly attached itself to its site that it extends with vibrancy under the ground
where we begin to read the names on the stones. To read our name here would
not be such a terrible thing.
After thousands of years, on an Egyptian temple wall at Abydos, the
mighty ruler continues to bash in the heads of captives, a standard exercise of
The Ruin us Incongruity 69
PI. 19. Temple W all, Abydos, Kgypt, 1990

pharaonic power (PI. 19). The features of the victims have been subsequently
obliterated, as a further disempowering of enemies. We make out what is going
on thanks to similar scenes carved on the outer walls of Egyptian edifices to
edify the masses. In this case, the all-powerful, larger-than-life, semi-divine
ruler has lost his head. We try to fill it in imaginatively for him, except that, in
1990, the presence of living heads interrupts us.
The workers at the excavation stand above the Pharaoh, dwarfed by his
figure and the wall. They have been engaged in carrying off the sand and filler
from the site in baskets mounted atop their heads. They are the masses who
save the ruin from oblivion. As human beings, they appear in such a small
scale, compared to the Pharaoh, that we find focusing on them difficult and dis
tracting, as if they do not belong here. But they manage to keep their heads.
A ruin profits by the vegetation that incongruously attaches itself to inner
walls, stands squarely upon floors, and tops inaccessible heights. Weeds are
symbiotic with ruins. They get along famously. By the process of decay, in
cluding the activities of vegetation, the ruin slowly turns into sufficient soil to
support life. At every point, life tests the ruin, seeking a foothold. The roots
hold the stones together by stabilizing the soil accumulated upon them and
tightening strands about them. But the roots probe every fissure and softness
and draw the minerals from the face of the stone (PI. 62).
Initially, we may be repulsed by the sight of wild growth in wall and
window, in room and entrance way, for this reminds us of the horror at seeing
such ruin in inhabited dwellings. This feeling accompanies the sudden thought
that the ruin has not been properly maintained. We get the acerbic aftertaste of
encountering slovenly neglect.
Such habitual attitudes are soon overcome by the reflection that we are,
after all, in a ruin, which has been subject to destructive action, and which is
not to be held to the standards of habitations. Then, we perceive the vegetation
as being in place. More than that, it changes its nature from something admissi
ble in the ruin to participant in the ruin’s identity.
The vegetation grows out of the ruin. It expresses form and stone, instead
of ornamenting them. The ruin gives shape to its vegetation and vice versa. We
may perceive the stone as the grounds or continuation of the plants. The plants
win the stonework over to their organic world. The vegetation invades the ruin
and brings it to life.
Some of the intruders dazzle us with the ease with which they make se
cure places for themselves on high perches. Plants flourish where the hand can
not reach. Even trees stand in window frames. We are accustomed to a civ
ilized control of vegetation in the interior of buildings. Planting there is pre
meditated, ornamental, or strategic, always subordinate to architectural aims
and never interfering with purposeful functioning.
In the ruin, plants smash such plans and take pains to pursue their
plentiful aims. They free buildings from rigid distinctions, stamping out the di
vision between the human-crafted and the natural. The ruin leaves the natural
and the human-shaped to grow together, out of the hands of human direction,
out of the grounds of natural development. The springing together is of stone
and plant, soft and hard, green and gray, swaying and stabile (PI. 65).
Witnesses to the duality of ruin, we respond through a secret sharing. We
are bone and flesh, solid and fluid, standing and moving, biological and physi
cal. The human being and the ruin are kindred. Vegetation connects us to the
ruin in a new unity. It, like us, is a hardy visitor, poking into every corner and
finding grounds for life in the stones. Any anatomy of the aesthetics of the ruin
must take account of the botany of the ruin.
Dead life is in the ruin. The blazing Pompeiian sun dries the grass and
scrub to brown leaves and hollow stems. Each season brings dying to the walls
and floors. The powder of bricks mixes with the dust of earth and the decay of
plants. Dead plants have an appeal, though too often in gardens we are quick to
dispose of them and quick to pluck the unseemly dying leaf. At Pompeii, the
dried vegetation holds on to its place, still fixed in soil or between bricks, join
ing them in color and texture. The plants are becoming minerals before our ani
mal vision. Yet they have form, as do the bricks. Deceased, they have not
ceased to enliven material and shape, though they have served beyond the call
of duty, giving up their life for aesthetics.
The graceful touch of plant life and the assistance of a bird or two may
transform a mundane pile of materials. The pleasing interplay between ruin and
vegetation supported the eighteenth-century practice, tr£s recherche, of build
ing ruins on noble estates. The ruin and its appropriate vegetation were de
signed and set in place as a sophisticated artifice meant to capture what was
supposedly observed to occur with simplicity in nature. The ruins, in a word,
were planted.
The oddities exhibited by the vegetative choice of location in ruins are
often amusing. A living form may take up a place where it should not be, say,
in the middle of a room, but it might fit perfectly as form in that space. Great
trees have a knack of complementing great ruins within which they unceremo
niously stand. What an anchor are the banyans to the ruins at Angkor Wat!
Invisibility invites new vision. Incongruously, a ruin may give super
vision/supervision to our eyes to see through the invisible walls into chapels,
through the floor into dungeons and tombs, and, as at St. Andrews Cathedral,
through the tombs into the coffins whose stone lids have been abducted (PI.
48). At the Colosseum of Rome, we see through the extinct wooden floor into
the sinister passageways, lifts, and ramps that facilitated the bloody games (PI.
37). In the Tour St. Jacques, Paris, which Blaise Pascal used for his experi
ments with falling weights (1648), we find, in the weighty words attributed to
Henry Miller, “At last, a tower without a church!”
PI. 20. S u n k e n B r id g e, P o d g o r ic a , M o n te n e g r o , S M , 1986

Let us proceed to a bridge that we cannot cross when we come to it. Sunk
in World War II in the general destruction of Montenegro’s capital, renamed
Podgorica, the bridge lies underwater in a stabilized bed of stones (PI. 20). In
1986, we gaze from above, standing on the bridge’s able successor, at the shal
low water below. On the right, steel beams break the surface to remind the riv
er of the bridge’s unexpected presence. Powerful structure turned into simple
abstraction. As we walk along our railing in the rebuilt city, that for forty-six
years was called Titograd, the forms below accompany us like the progression
of long-legged dancers. A lot of bridge has flowed under the water.
Ruinincongruity, to forge/force a term, extends to movement. We may
place ourselves in the ruin where we could not possibly be in the original. We
climb on top of walls to see within, we walk through windows to gain entrance,
and we sit in sewers to eat our lunch.
Incongruity informs the theme of the fall of the mighty, best exemplified
by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s memorable invocation (1818) of the fallen statue of
Pharaoh Ramesses II, “the Great’’ (1279-1213 BCE), who reigned sixty-seven
years, and whose honorific, “User-ma’at-ra” (Egypt.: “Power-Truth of the Sun
God’’) had been Hellenized as “Ozymandias’’:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair! (“Ozymandias,” Shelley,
1994, p. 589)
Those of us who are far from mighty might nonetheless fall into despair, as we
imagine the ruin the poet describes, or as we stand next to the sole standing
features of the statue at Thebes, its feet. More likely, we would smile sadly at
the irony of how the high and mighty have fallen. In any event, the Egyptians
have been considering coming to the aid of the once-mighty statue by putting
him back on his feet. What would we do, then, with the poem?
Four years after publishing his poem, Shelley drowned at age 30. A vo
lume of Sophocles was in his pocket.
The ghost town (Geisterstadt, ville morte, cuidad caida), whose very des
ignation sends a thrill through the language, may prove to be a great ruin due to
the complex structure of the town sketched by their interrelationships. The
ghost town, in that case, is a ruin, not a set of ruins. We stand in it, not outside
its ruins. Standing in the grass and clay that once were its streets, we can sense
the organic character of the dead town filled with oddities.
The Minoan settlement of Gournia on Crete, Greece, has been reduced to
low walls covering a hill. Yet, in 1984, we experience completeness, as we
climb its main street that the town surrounds (PI. 21). Activity proceeds all
about us in the life of stones. The walls converse. The spaces are pauses in
their conversation. The street is a lifeline upon which we slowly travel. The
74 7///: AESTHETICS OF IWINS
PI. 21. M in o a n S e ttle m e n t, G o u r n ia , C re te , G r ee ce , 1984

The Ruin as Incongruity ly
PI. 22. G h o st T o w n o f T a m e r z a , T u n isia , 1996

world has been made over into stone whose smoothed roundness offers restful
ness to foot, hand, and eye.
The hillside is alive with its simplest unit—boulders—engaged in sunlit
enjoyment of being. The patterning of the many edges is pleasing and culmi
nates in the horizon, so that we know our location within the ruin. The ruin is
perfectly at ease in its wholeness in which we find ourselves at home.
Ghost towns that once haunted the American West have largely become a
thing of the past. Vandalism and demolition have torn down what seemed to
many an eyesore. Ghost towns have also been turned into tourist attractions by
restoring them to life. In such cases, they can scarcely be accounted ruins. The
ghost town at Calico, California, which I visited in 1969, had, in effect, given
up the ghost to take on the flesh of functioning old-time village.
The abandoned village of Tamerza, in the Jerid of Tunisia, near the Alge
rian border, though a victim of flooding, still appears inhabitable (PI. 22). In
1996, we are drawn to enter its portals and'walk through its sunny squares,
though we would need to keep an eye/ear open for flashfloods. The luxuriant
arbor that profits from the water of underground springs is in sharp contrast to
the worked-stone of the failed village and to the lifeless, massive stone of the
desert mountains. Wandering/wondering about these levels in the eerie location
in the dry, but deadly, heat, we feel a chill.
While we may expect a ruin to confuse viewers and curtail what we can
see of the original, and while it can obstruct our passage and make our visit
awkward, it empowers us to see through things and move through them. The
ruin bares itself to human access and enlarges the scope of our being. Despite
its ruination, we human beings can find ourselves at home on its site.
Five
THE RUIN AS SITE
The ruin remains to be scene.
The ruin may cultivate an aesthetic relationship with its site. We must keep in
sight that the ruin, whatever place it occupies, is grounded in some place. Like
architecture and outdoor sculpture, the ruin is set in a context, surrounded by
surroundings, through which we move to reach it, and in which it is visible in
contrast or harmony. The ruin does not stand alone, even when it stands alone.
A painting, in principle, is portable. It may not be fixed permanently to a
site. It can leave its original location without loss of dignity. But buildings are
rooted in the earth, and they lose something in their transportation. When a
building is abuilding, the site is kept in view as what the building sits upon and
what sits around it. Buildings make public appearances. While whatever might
go on inside them is usually hidden from the world, their exterior is present to
the world.
The architect turns to the landscape artist to make a fitting arrangement
around the building that will serve it. A building’s landscaping articulates some
of its meaning. Consider the garden placed outside picture windows, the path
that leads to the front door, the shrubbery that defines a play area or sets a limit
to automobile access. Landscaping brings home the message, before we have
entered the path. By the time we have crossed the threshold, we have been ex-
perientially well-informed of the building’s purposes and attitudes.
In the tightly-packed space of the cityscape, with little scope for landscap
ing, the architect should be attentive to the neighboring structures when design
ing the building. Even if some architects are haughtily indifferent to the other
buildings nearby, they cannot afford to neglect their building’s connection to
the street. Access must exist: ingress and egress, at least. Usually, an enormous
number of regulations must be met, affecting height, steps, lights, signs, fences,
pipes, windows, walkways, driveways, and entrance ways. In cities, buildings
are largely built to context.
Then comes the ruin. If the ruin is in the city, it may it have lost all rela
tionship to its street. The street, which continues to exist and is obeyed by intact
structures, may no longer be the ruin’s street. Whatever had reference to public
regulation, including a front door, may be nonexistent. The front of the build
ing, or what faced the public space of street, may have departed. This is no af
front to our sensibility. The structure is not defaced and disgraced because it
has lost its fronting. As a ruin, it is free to turn its back on regulations and pub
lic expectations. It may grandly ignore the street on which it was born, though
it had eagerly joined in the harmonious play of that street in its early years.
We may walk along a densely fitted row of obedient houses that abut
abruptly upon a renegade in ruin. How strange that a large structure here does
not play the game. It pursues its aesthetic interests without a care for what it
was, where it is, or who we are. Refreshingly out of place. But quite a site. Its
indifference to the rest of the world amuses us. We take a measure of its
creativity in the frame of reference that is its context. We see the orderly street,
even if the ruin does not, as the visual and spatial frame for the ruin. We have
also existed within the frame of mind of the street in our approach to the ruin.
We arrive at the ruin by a process of passing through a context which colors
our expectations. Getting there is part of the ruin.
Sometimes, the context of inner-city ruin is neutralized when the rest of
the street is torn down, perhaps to keep lesser entities out of the way of a cel
ebrated structure. Yet the potentiality of the structure to make itself enjoyable
may diminish when it loses the specificity of its location. It could be anywhere.
The hereness, thisness, and nowness is dulled, and so may be its wholeness,
wittiness, and newness. Paradoxically, the urban ruin does better aesthetically
when the cityscape in which it is sited is not ruined. If the street in which it
lives is still active, then the ruin jumps out in assertion of its independence.
The context provides helpful contrast between features in the ruin and
their corresponding intact embodiment in neighborly buildings. The sheath of
outer material that the ruin has cast off to reveal the more solid character of its
underlying substance may still be visible in the adjacent houses. A conversation
is possible between the visible and invisible. Along the street, we can see a lay
er gone from the ruin. But we cannot see in the other buildings what the ruin
shows of itself. The vitality and openness of the ruin stand against the protec
tive closure and circumspection of its contiguous companions.
Our acknowledging glance at active windows of neighboring habitations
intensifies the irony of iron bars upon windows that no longer shelter rooms.
The intact house is everything the ruin is not. All its functions offer unified pur
pose in service to human activities. The ruin has been deactivated. Its only use,
quite unintended, is aesthetic. The intact relatives may display no aesthetic in
terest. In that sense, they would be better off ruined.
The mundane context is a springboard for the ruin’s artistry, which de
stroys the reigning dullness. That strikes a chord within us. We have had to tra
verse dullness, adopting to its measure, as we come to the ruin’s pleasure. The
well-regulated drabness of our lives is relieved by the exercise of meeting the
ruin. Ruin to the rescue!
The adjacent structures may sport few details that have reference to the
ruin, but they sketch measures for height and volume. The sparse ruin might
not have a lot left to it, but we may know a lot about the space of the ruin’s lot
due to the flanks of houses standing by. Thanks a lot! We feel the space posi
tively as energized by the ruin. It presses against the neighboring structures,
which are surprisingly negative in their spatiality, though fully occupied by
The Ruin as Site 79
buildings. The space of the mundane intact retracts. It is inert and a trifle inane.
The ruin’s space is charged. It flexes outward with active originality.
The functioning buildings on the street may be of a different epoch and
genre than the ruin. We can enjoy the anachronism for its contrast in space. The
ruin escapes time, free to be what its heart desires, despite its origins. The ruin
ignores later developments. It is its own later development.
We may experience something purer in ruin in the street of time-bound
buildings. They are fixed in their servitude to a past, as they continue to put up
a good front. They may succeed handsomely. The ruin is of a markedly differ
ent order, confidently something else. It and the intact architecture go their sep
arate ways. By being next to each other, they have the opportunity to assert
their disparate selfhood.
Let us leave the city for the country and seek the ruin in a rural or land
scaped setting. Suppose that much of the original landscaping remains about
the scant remains of the building. Such oddness strikes us as humorous or pa
thetic. The contiguity can move in the direction of mockery or tragedy. The sit
uation appears wrongheaded, where the more important part, a human-crafted
shelter, should have suffered destruction, while the lesser part, soft earth and
vegetation, should have endured. This makes no senê.
Something else is wrong with this result, when the landscaping, though
excellently preserved, can no longer make sense for a structure that has lost its
purpose and its inhabitants. This ruin labors with absurdity. That may be to its
credit aesthetically, highlighting its definitive freedom from purpose, its irrevo
cable break with a servitude that lies at its door, if it still has a door.
Formal values reside in the contrast. The jagged spires, smashed arches,
and scattered fragments show well in a surrounding of rounded shrubbery,
straight hedges, and full trees. The ruin in that context is more a ruin. It cannot
respond to its perfect landscaping, for its exertions are directed elsewhere. The
original was on good terms with its grounds. It kept its windows on the garden,
and its entrance at the foot of the walkway. The original attends to the inten
tions of its landscaping. The ruin has no intention of noticing the grounds of its
original existence. The plants may remember. The ruin does not.
Rarely is the original landscaping preserved. Usually, it has suffered with
the ruin under the destructive forces. In addition, it may have been submitted to
a neglect that did not apply to its companion, since little reason exists to main
tain an elaborate landscaping for a building no longer intact or in use. Neglect
ed grounds quickly degenerate, as the writer of any book discovers concerning
that author’s lonesome garden.
The original landscaping about a ruin is cut back, plowed under, or let go
wild. Neglected ruins, however, only go to ruin. They may improve with time,
purified by the further loss of what they were. Then the grounds are open to
another turn of affairs, when they are fixed up to go along with the ruin that has
been thought worth saving. This “fixing up” is a choice between what is there,
what is thought was probably there, and what is thought would be nice to have
there. There, you have it! Context is chosen.
Complete restoration of the landscaping is absurd, since the original
building that it had enhanced is in ruin. Just leaving the grounds as they are will
not do, for they are not manifestly compatible or entirely convenient. Redoing
the landscaping to address the beauties of the ruin is also out of the question,
since this takes upon itself a creative freedom that ill-fits the spirit of authentic
ity. Consequently, choices reach out to each other for compromise.
Over the course of a few hundred years, the ruin has an influence upon the
terms of the arrangement, and nature offers lots of opportunity for choice. The
people entrusted with the care of the ruin and its grounds exercise values,
though they might not be aware of that characterization of their activities in the
pruning, propagation, planting, transplanting, and protection of the plants. Taste
is implemented. This is done in the face of the ruin, which whispers its sugges
tions. While the landscaping of most country ruins is neither a deliberate plan
nor a surrendering to nature, it has a talent for becoming expressive of the ruin.
The ruin may be seen as controlling its environment, ordering the world
of its access to serve its purely formal being. The ruin rescues its grounds from
utility. Resistance to this spirit of the ruin is attested by a ticket booth, gate,
postcard stand, refuse container, mower shed, and public toilet. How to place
these is an enormous challenge to keepers of the ruin, if they wish to keep as
much of its aesthetic nature as possible.
This is far less a problem for intact monuments, since such structures,
even if uninhabited, still serve human purposes. Anachronisms may be commit
ted in the intact by these insertions, although the formal qualities need not suff
er. In the building, the ticket wicket can be placed just inside the entrance,
while the toilets can be tucked away in an unnoticed comer of a lower floor.
The ruin cannot afford these luxuries. An entrance, properly speaking,
might not exist, nor a lower floor. More than that, the ruin, unlike an intact
monument, is not accustomed to serving any human functions. It has been set
free from that kind of existence. To have these uses pressed upon the ruin is al
ways more painful, especially if they intercept its instructions to its grounds.
These thorns in the side of an harmonious rapport between grounds and
ruin may serve as ironic sting, when we focus upon the incongruity. Here is the
paltry hand of human beings insisting upon a mundane purpose, while behind
this looms the vast, uncaring, and useless purity of the magnificent forms we
have come so far to see. We are given the opportunity to discover a mistake, of
significance to our aesthetic self-respect, when the placement of the necessities
and conveniences on the grounds of the min, as unfortunately is generally the
case, fails to recognize the role of the grounds for the min.
Access should be to the min and the grounds, undisturbed by the facili-
The Ruin as Site 81
ties, which therefore should be placed outside the grounds. We should experi
ence the ruin in its context, not as an object between ticket booth and toilet
stalls. These functions, which we expect to find associated with any famous
ruin of large size, are the things recognizably out of place. The ruin is not out of
place. It has abandoned all attachments to usable function. Hence, some of the
best experience of ruins comes with the smaller, lesser-known ones.
Lack of attention coupled with a rigid management of space and imperi
ous signed-instructions, might cause us to neglect looking for the grounds, until
after we have paid our entrance and stepped into the ruin. Too late! The ruin
has stepped up into an exhibit. It has no place. The experience is comparable to
getting off a bus in front of a cathedral, such as Notre-Dame de Paris, on the lie
de la Cite, and walking through its doors, without first looking at the site. En
trance into an aesthetic field must be an act that carries the weight of existence.
While absorbing Notre-Dame’s site, I have noticed tour buses stop at the
modest entrance to the nearby archaeological crypt. The visitors are promptly
led down into Europe’s largest set of underground ruins. But the guides fail to
call attention to the public space (parvis) before the ecclesiastical edifice, and
to the Seine’s relationship to the wonderfully-presented ruins that await. This
setting was crucial to Gallo-Roman and Medieval life. But I hold my tongue.
We should be willing to approach a ruin with a sensibility alerted to the
life of its grounds. Yet where the grounds of the ruin end in the countryside and
the rest of the countryside begins is often unclear. This might be more fruitful
as an ambiguity than any deliberate clarity. We may find the ruin emerging
from its grounds, converting them to its presence, though no clear demarcation
exists. We then feel the ruin’s naturalness as its appropriate existence in this
site, as if the ruin and the setting have grown together.
This organic relationship confirms the vitality of the ruin, once we get
within it. It has an energy evident beyond it that is bound to be felt within. We
experience the innemess of the ruin and its outward reach from a distance and
close up. The non-utilitarian grounds alert us to formal possibilities in the ruin,
when we let our eyes play over their green mounds, dense clumps, tall trunks,
or uniformly smooth slopes. The eye is open to the play of the abstract in stone,
thanks to this foreplay of grounds.
The chief ancient monument in Switzerland is probably Augst, a small
and pleasing Roman site (Augusta Raurica or Rauracorum), in the small and
pleasing country at Europe’s center (PI. 23). The site is meticulously cared for,
with well-maintained paths and faultless lawns that gently bend to accom
modate the uncovered shapes. The ancient stones do their share in keeping
things in order. The appealing stepped-form upon which we gaze is delicately
arrayed. Signs of stabilization are the smooth cementing on top of the original
stones. No breaks, no missing pieces noticeable in the steps and walls, though
the stems of pillars remind us that something here was destroyed.
PI. 23. R o m a n S ite, A ujjst, S w itz e r la n d , 1971

The Ruin as Site 83
The planting is tastefully pursued. The small shrubs make an abstract gar
den out of the curious remains. In 1971, two trees, one behind the other, stand
out serenely on the hillside. Enough room for them in the small site. All is
framed, from our high point, by the leaves of another tree. A gentle, pastoral
scene, looking out to the tree-lined bank of the Rhine and Germany beyond. An
outpost of Roman civilization in origin, but quite Swiss in presence. We cannot
separate this ruin from its site. The site is the ruin.
Let us leave the Rhine for Loch Ness, Scotland. The entrance way at Ur-
quhart Castle requires a bridge and suggests a moat (PI. 24). The ruin is more
than the remaining stonework. It includes the grounds that were part of the
original and that participate in what remains. These fields join the grounds, as
does the line of trees on the left that add to the edging for the Loch.
The complicated entrance way gathers the earthworks about it, just as the
tower organizes the descending heights of the trees, and the middle section of
horizontal wallwork accompanies the moat and a stonewall. The ruin grows
with its setting. It sits attentively upon the crest of the bank like a creature dry
ing itself. It contemplates the Loch from its reclining height. The tower is the
head, the entrance way the hind quarters. The opposite shore is wilder, yet it
shows signs of a like hilliness on the right, and of fields and housing on the left.
Even the fence line, which springs out from where we stand to cut into the
horizontal disposition of the ruin, is continued on the other shore by a border of
the trees and a marking of the hill. Gentle timelessness. The well-cared grounds
have room for a bench upon which a couple is seated. They are near the end of
the fence line and under the shadow of a fearsome pile of stone. Other human
beings stand about, silent features in a landscape.
The stretch of wall from entrance to tower is appealing in its rugged twist
ing lines, the upper edge caught in the sun, the lower one held by the hill and
followed by the shadow of the upper. The tower is ordinary, save for its useless
windows and the prominent features at its edges that give it the animate quality
of a mask.
This ruin is a landmark in its region, a high point along the Loch, a view
point upon the countryside, an organizer of the landscape. The Castle has mag
netic properties, drawing us toward it through a charged field that has become
firmly attached to the ruin-shape. The field is inconceivable without the ruin.
Grounds and castle have embedded themselves in the undulating high
banks and hunch their shoulders under the heavy winds. Ruin-and-grounds are
grounded in their surroundings. We do not experience the ruin as an interesting
object placed on a site. It is an expression of the unique subjectivity of stone
and locale. What we cite as this ruin is more than the ruin.
Because it is a compromise between the earth’s fertility and the human
hand’s designs, the ruin can arrive at what is so difficult for architecture: per
fect naturalness of place. Of the marriage of ruin and its grounds at Urquhart,
PI. 24. Urquhart Castle, Loch Ness, Scotland, UK, 1967

The Ruin as Site 85
we may say that they lived happily ever after, though to the left of the tower,
the dark form beneath the waters, in 1967, may be the Monster.
PI. 25. Vianden Castle, Luxembourg, 1961
Vianden, the castle-ruin in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, grows out of

its hillside (PI. 25). In this verdant setting, the tall, rounded towers are nobler
forms of the surrounding trees. The rock of the hillside is greened over, but the
stonework of the castle communicates the stoniness that must lie underneath.
The greenery has entered the castle grounds. Some of it grows at the foot of
walls; some of it flings itself over walls. The old gray stone has grown with a
green twist.
Large white patches reassert the strict human intentions of the structure.
The human presence is affirmed by the convenient location of two automobiles
in balanced relationship to two arches in two segments of access way. The ve
hicles are incongruities with formal and affective value.
The whole lines up nicely: the round towers in front, the forward wedge
of the ruin, followed by a tighter rectangular arrangement of towers, all flanked
on our right by the segmented access space, and crowned at the back by the
ragged-edged triangular form that most insists this structure is a ruin. We are in
the air, in 1961, on a chairlift that brings us this instant of fixed balance and sta
bilized arrangement. We thank the Luxembourgeois for giving us the lift.
In entering the grounds of a ruin, we make a living gesture upon a living
gesture. We enter the life of the ruin, before we enter its stones. The grounds
greet us and accommodate our presence in their receptivity. We are no longer
outsiders, but guests. The grounds shape our motion, inform our breathing, and
take over our direction. What they do for us, the ruin had done for them. We
feel the ruin’s reverberation, as we traverse the grounds. Ruin and grounds have
found their way to traversing us. We move through each other, toward, with,
for each other.
Pausing a moment on our way across the grounds to the ruin, we feel the
ruin’s advance. We enjoy the freedom of the countryside, a reward upon which
explorers of ruins may count. In the open air of unregimented fields and invit
ing greenery, we approach at leisure the goal of our visit. We experience the
ruin’s choices, as its goals are translated into the grounds.
The countryside is never nature. It has known the human being’s shaping
hand. We come to know the ruin’s shaping hand upon the countryside, for we
are participants in its creative action. We are in at the transformation. We are in
the innemess, innerment, innermeant. The approach to the ruin is not limited to
the physical arrangement of arrival, to be assessed in terms of convenience,
safety, and presentation of the best view. To approach the ruin in context is to
arrive at the terms imparted by it to its surroundings, including ourselves.
Hence, the approach is the arrangement, participatory and vital, that is the best
preparation for appreciating the ruin.
What is a ruin if not the ruin in site? Relieved of its outer garment and
transported elsewhere, the ruin would lose power when tamed into being an ob
ject. Thus, since 1968, the Temple of Dendur sits safely in New York’s Metro
politan Museum of Art, having been rescued from the high waters of Lake
Nasser retained by the Aswan High Dam in the remote silence of the Nile cliffs
of Egypt. Tastefully displayed in a generous spatiality with carefully controlled
approach, the ruin, nonetheless, has lost ground. For all its authenticity, we can
not but think that it is in the Met, as we are, not along the Nile.
The Temple of Dendur, though denuded and oddly out of place, is strong
ly appealing. An exhibit in a temple of art, not a ruin. Though it is an object of
aesthetic interest, it does not address us on its terms. We are happy that it was
rescued. We are grateful for the large yet gentle space it occasions, with a view
of Central Park, in an everlastingly overcrowded museum. But we are saddened
by what we have lost: the ruin as ruin.
The Egyptian Temple of Debod, that made its debut in 1972 in the Parque
del Oeste in Madrid, fares better, since it dwells in the free air, surrounded by
water, with the towers of skyscrapers in the distance. But here, too, in 1997, I
The Ruin as Site X7
PI. 26. Palace ol llisliam, Jericho, West Hank, Palestine, 19X1

could not shake the impression that I was sitting next to an attraction in a pleas
ant municipal park instead of with a ruin. In Turin, Leiden, and Berlin, you may
see other temples, tokens of Egyptian gratitude for countries that cooperated in
the archaeological salvage work along the Nile.
In Jerusalem, the well-organized lofty halls of the Rockefeller Museum
(the Palestine Archaeological Museum), designed by the English architect Aus
tin Harrison, offer many delights of fine stone-tracery in exciting and vivacious
fragments from the Umayyad Palace of Caliph Hisham, near Jericho (Ariho).
These pieces contrast with the old-fashioned stolidity of the Museum.
Let us travel, in 1981, to the site of the Palace in the Israeli-occupied
West Bank of Palestine (PI. 26). It is completely exposed under a ruthless sun.
Our steps are slowed and our movement cautious. We enter through a gate that
provides a little shade and adds a frame to the most splendid of fragments: the
ornate window. While we may say that the pieces from the Palace have been
built into the Museum, here we experience the space of the Palace as built ar
ound the window, which sits on a pedestal on the ground. The site is spatial.
The architectural feature is at the right eye-level, and its protected spaces
suggest comfort for the human body, as we bear up under the terrible sun be
neath the level of the sea. A balance is struck between the three sets of pillars
and the two niches. We do not regret the missing part of the arched block as a
disfigurement, for the sky and trees offer their compensation.
The adjoining foliage welcomes the extravagantly fanciful designs. Close
inspection shows this spirited decorative form to consist of pieces patched to
gether. A big dollop of cement humorously flops over the front of the middle
column topped by the broken hat of the finial. The quantity of cement in this
section of ruin may equal the volume of fragments. If you were to wipe away
the cement in the imagination, you would see the stone screen tumble to pieces.
We deduce from the open evidence of the ruin that a pile of fragments was
erected by the human hand into this delightful form. A scientific restoration,
yes, but the realization of an aesthetic value only latent in the original pile. As
ruin, it lacked this form.
Restoration has only gone so far. The form that waited in the pieces to be
given its expression by human assistance is not completed. The cementing
holds things in place. Pieces, such as the capital and arch above the left-most
colonnette, are missing, and pieces, such as the left column, are broken.
The three columns that hold this architectural screen together are in strik
ing states of ruin. A minimum remains of the right-hand column. We follow
with amusement the interplay between the lively carved fragments of the origi
nal, or what we might better call the original fragments, and the heavy, plain,
restorative cement which permits unifying form. This gem is framed by—and
frames—similar interplays. Fragment and form make the field of the ruin, in
which we are standing, a realm of aesthetic value.
The Ruin as Site 89
The fragments carve a pleasing curved space, as they, and we, stand in the
open air. Beautiful details flourish on the arched blocks. The foliage that frames
the remains and that thrives in the oasis of Jericho befits the ruin. Though an
earthquake caused the palace to fall, the ruin springs forward with freshness.
In the Museum in Jerusalem, our feet become tired, and we grow hungry,
as time passes. The same physical activity, quite minor, is required to get
through each room. In the ruin, we climb about, getting a feel for the layout of
the Palace, its footing, not its plan, its attachment to the earth that shook down
the Palace in 747 CE, shortly after its completion by Caliph Hisham. The on
site fragments are massive, proud, pensive. They support an enormous load of
air, and they smile under the fiercely blue sky in the unbearable sunlight.
In the Museum, the pieces are like jewels, detached from the world and
from all cares of light, heat, or space. Theirs is a comfortable inertness. They
are arranged in the room to assist the eye in attention and selection. The Mu
seum gives thought to our aesthetic experience by seeing to it that we have the
minimum difficulty of visual and physical access to the finest pieces.
We stumble in the ruin. Much bewilderment, stretches of unclear terrain,
uneasiness about where we will find the next shade, unsureness of where we
are going. The ruin is to be explored. The Museum to be enjoyed. From the
ruin’s walls, we cannot help but glance at the terrible harshness of the moun
tains and the unfailing luxuriance of the vegetation in the watered valley. The
starkness and brilliant fertility echo in the ruin, which speaks the language of
creativity but cries out under the bleakness of the physical universe.
The Hisham ruin in site obliges our participation. We sense it through our
hips, nostrils, and sweat glands. Permanence, not fragility, is its character. It
could not be anywhere else. The pieces in the Museum are delicate yet mov
able. They could be sent out on loan. No sweat in seeing them. Our space does
not count for much. We easily come close enough to each piece. Our body is
little more than the ambulatory mounting for our eyes. Museums have an art of
suspending everything else but this eye-to-eye encounter with an object. Each
object has its integrity. The space that separates it from the others is the univer
sal neutrality of museum space. (On the aesthetics of experience in museums,
see, below, Chapter Eleven, “Sculpture and Other Visual Arts as Ruin,’’ and
Chapter Seventeen, “The Ruining Eye—and Other Senses,’’ pp. 349-350.)
We visit things in the space of the Museum. On the site, we are visitors in
the space of the ruin. Things there may not be independent wholes. They are
united with ground, space, and each other. Unclear identity, unresolved rela
tionship, and unintelligible space also occur. The ruin is a risk aesthetically.
The ruins of Hisham’s Palace in the Archaeology Museum prove that
fragments take on new aesthetic life as wholes with no necessary reference to
what they were and did or where. But the ruins of Hisham’s Palace in Jericho
show that the ruin has an aesthetic bond with its site. That is something more
PI. 27. Refugee Camp, Jericho, West Bank, Palestine, 1981

The Ruin as Site 91
than cement. The ruin is at home by being where it is. To penetrate and enjoy
its wholeness is to discover it where it is, for its whereness is much of its what-
ness. This is the ruin. In the Museum, all that is missing is the ruin.
Jericho is celebrated for its walls, which at one time and another came
tumbling down. The walls, in 1981, are high, bare, rounded mounds. The traces
of human craft have largely been erased. Earthly projections, not fitted blocks
of stone, are visible. These appear not to have been placed on the ground but
have grown from below, like multiple breasts baring themselves to the insistent
sun. The mounds shape our movements. Right at the edge of the orange-brown
soil starts the blessed expanse of verdure that from prehistory has thrived on the
inexhaustible waters of this valley below sea level, the most fertile oasis and
the oldest continuously-inhabited place on Earth.
From the walls of Jericho, we see the Refugee Camp built by the United
Nations for the Palestinians (PI. 27). These low orange-baked ghostly forms, al
legedly never occupied, have given up their human attachment. Silence swal
lows the camp. Barbed wire, the national shrub of Palestine and Israel, impedes
our further advance. The camp floats in the desert as if a mirage, a bad dream
clasped to the bosom of the scorched earth.
The skeletal quality of the camp contrasts with the vitality of the tropical
verdure and the mounds of living earth upon which we are perched. We look up
to a mountain range with a holy site, the Mount of Temptation (Matthew,
4:1-4), and now down to the bottom of the stacked walls of seven successive
cities to the beginning base upon which things fell and were rebuilt. The ruin’s
inward-lookingness contrasts with its vantage point for seeing the sights of the
region. Those sights, ancient and modern, march in upon the walls.
What of a ruin in the wilderness, seen totally free from human contact, the
ruin subject to the pure presence of nature? Gone from such a ruin are (1) the
ambiguity and amateurism of human puttering about the grounds, (2) the inef
fectual gesturing of ticket booths and toilet walls, (3) the moderating influence
of pathways and the stiles/styles of fences. These are the trappings that most of
ten ruin the ruin, by trapping it in the purposeful nets of a human world. The
ruin, you might assert, above all human creations, belongs to nature. Nature re
claims the ruin for its own. Nature destroys the human ties and creates the ruin.
But where is such a ruin? I gently ask. In nature! I am sternly answered.
But where in nature is that nature in which a ruin so purely dwells? Answering
this is beset with thorny problems. Suppose we propose a well-known ruin set
in rock and vegetation, say, at Delphi, in mainland Greece (PI. 28). Undoubted
splendor adheres to the stone remains of the Temple of the Oracle through the
grand efforts of its mountainous emplacement and the delicate gestures of its
sparse vegetation. But a well-beaten path leads us to Delphi. The approach to
the site is by a road, not through nature. (1) An official entrance, not carved by
nature, awaits us, (2) rules and regulations, not wilderness and abandon, greet
PI. 28. Temple of the Oracle, Delphi, Greece, 1965

The Ruin as Site 93
us, (3) finally, facilities for the visitor, not indifference to the human being, are
at hand. The grounds at Delphi, despite the naturalness of the setting, are
shaped for the human presence.
Within the ruin proper, if we can properly speak of the ruin as distinct
from its setting, the presence of natural activity is subject to human veto. Not
every sapling or seedling stirring between the stones is promised life as a tree.
Not all soil and organic debris that washes down upon the temple floor is al
lowed to stay in place to gradually cover the stone from sight. The ruin is sta
bilized from continuing encroachment by nature. This far, but no further.
The activity of nature is held in check, screened by human sensibility and
choice. The setting of Delphi appears natural, including natural features out of
human reach, especially that startling stark cliff of Mt. Parnassus. But to see
Delphi as the arena where the human meets the natural without the intervention
of the human is to shut our eyes to what stares us in the face.
The monstrous mountain, terrifyingly beyond the human measure, blocks
out the sky. It dizzies the eye, when we try to scale it visually. The cliff has
footholds and ledges, some slopes, and maybe caves. But wherever we imagine
the human form, we feel it trapped and about to tumble. If the wall were inac
cessibly smooth, we would not be so terrified. To look up at it induces the sick
ening feeling of falling. The body of Aesop was supposedly thrown down from
its heights by those who distrusted his tales. That story must have a moral.
Here the enmity to our species is emphatic. The scraggly, sparse, and
stunted vegetation is our surrogate in clinging to the cliff, though it does not
find a path to climb it. No moderating transition appears from the vertiginous
verticality to the level upon which we may stand. The rock abruptly comes to
an end, and room appears on an uneven terrain for trees and stone structures.
The trees shield us but slightly from the terror of the plunging cliff. They afford
a little green relief from the rude color of stone.
The ruin grows out of its hillside. A stony ambiguity occurs on the left,
just beyond the pillars, as to what is rock and building block. The trees border
the construction and have made their way within. The ruin has intimate connec
tion with earth and life.
In 1965, it is alive with people engaged in many activities: viewing, talk
ing, sitting, standing, walking, reading, photographing, writing, or sketching.
They cluster and dot the ruin, just as the vegetation does on a larger scale with
the cliff face. The figures grow out of the ruin, just as it grows out of the hill.
Their range of activity introduces complex vitality. Life goes on in the ruin,
despite the overbearing inhumanity of the mountain.
The couple on the far right is virtually alone with the experience. Another
couple is equally apart in the exact center of our vision, one figure seated, en
gaged in sketching, writing, or reading, as is so often portrayed in paintings of
ruins, while the standing figure looks on.
Nearby, a woman standing alone takes a picture, addressing herself to the

tallest pillar and the incommensurate mountain behind. A moving line connects
the top of this finite figure, whose hands are raised to head, with the top of the
impressive pillar bearing the unique capital. The line then moves off to infinity
toward the topless mountain.
The ruin exposes a series of indentations and blocks that invite sitting. A
crowd of visitors stands on a layer of stone, which, in turn, sits upon stones that
expose a subterranean level. The ruin comes up from the earth. We are told that
rising vapors here at the navel of the world inspired the ancient pronounce
ments. Self-fuelfilling prophecies. The site is oracular and ocular.
The visitors are not intruding upon the ruin’s sanctity. They have come on
pilgrimage. Their buses are visible through the trees down toward the right.
Consulting the ruin, the visitors face the terrifying contrast of nature with the
brave effort of the human alternative. The temple is present in a pious mystery.
We feel the connection between the forces within the earth and the aspirations
within the mortal visitors.
The temple is inhabited. The pillars are its answer to the mountain. They
are controlled shapes, rounded, spaced, and compiled by human measure. Form
standing over against (Ger.: gegenilber) chaos. The drums are sharply apparent.
A single drum is all that remains of one pillar (counting from the left, call it
“one”). Two drums are about the height of a human figure, as we can see. We
can count the number of drums on each pillar, although they are not equal in
size, so that commensurability is visible.
The two right-most pillars (six and seven) are of the same height, which
they share with the third pillar. The fifth pillar is one unit higher than the three
equal ones, while the second pillar takes another step upward. The fourth is the
great pillar that soars above the rest. Not quite double the height of the third,
sixth, and seventh, it is about one-third again as high as the second. The pillar is
special because of its double-sized base and its articulated capital.
A pleasant play of quantities occurs between the seven pillars. The first
represents the minimum for a pillar. The fourth, with eleven units, is the maxi
mum for this structure. It stands ready to uphold a cornice. The alignment,
which changes as we move, angles upward, a finite sheltering form opposed to
the peaking of the mountain. The ruin sketches a home for our humanity lost in
a silent cosmos.
Several diagonals invigorate the confrontation by slashing across the ver-
ticality of the mountain. A line of vegetation plummets toward the highest pil
lar, the apex of the triangle that finds its base in the single block of pillar one.
Further down, the wandering line of trees modifies the staggering diagonal of
the mountain that cuts off the sky with its gentle clouds. The edge of the stone
work and the remaining line of the triangle from apex to pillar seven is another
diagonal in the series, paralleled by the indented stone edge facing the lower
The Ruin as Site 95
left. The ruin is wedged into the site. It does not cower from the confrontation.
It stands and meets it head-on.
We stand above the ruin, looking down upon it, in reflection, from a posi
tion that, while part of the monument, does not make its identity known in what
we have been experiencing. We have wandered off from the crowd and the cen
ter of forms, so that we are outside the unity we perceive. Wholeness has come
into being, and this differs from what we experienced earlier, down on the floor
by the pillars where our fellow creatures are. We now grasp their multiple pres
ence, the layers of flooring, interrelationship of pillars, bordering of trees, and
hulking mass of the imperturbable mountain.
Thanks to the activated awareness of our fellows, we are above and out
side, while still within, the ruin. They are centers of consciousness and physical
presences. We enjoy an intimately human perspective and a more divine con
templative view, as we delve the ruins at Delphi.
In most ruins celebrated for their natural setting, human beings control,
select, and conceive their nature. Because they are celebrated, they have been
adapted to human access. These utilitarian features grafted onto the ruin may
strike us as a desecration, but what is to prevent desecration of ruins if not con
trolled access? If the facilities inconvenience our aesthetic experience, they
facilitate our being on hand to have such experience. We can stand at the edge
of a ruin, as at Delphi, and on several sides see only natural features of the
earth, untouched by human beings for centuries. A stirring component of the
enjoyment. The ruin does engage in dialogue with nature.
But the ruin is not quite in nature. Notice how those creeping vines and
spreading trees are cut short, as they reach the walls. If this were not so, we
would not be able to stand upon the wall and enjoy the sight of nature. Nay, we
would not be able to see the wall, and the whole ruin would be engulfed.
The magnificent Mayan ruins in the forests of Yucatan, Belize, Guatema
la, and Honduras must be perpetually kept clear of the forests. Though the for
est is all around them, the most famous ones, strictly speaking, are not in the
forest. An intermediary zone says something about preserving the ruin from na
ture and expresses the value with which we regard the forest as neighboring the
ruin. In 2003, at Uxmal, Lamanai, Tikal, and Copan, I experienced nature and
not-nature simultaneously.
In 1959,1 inadvertently had an occasion to encounter a ruin in its natural
approach and setting, though this was not my intention. My aim was to visit the
American Anasazi structure known as Casa Grande, located in Casa Grande
Ruins National Monument. Accordingly, I took a bus to Casa Grande, Arizona,
only to learn upon arrival at the station that the Casa Grande I was seeking was
nowhere near its namesake town. I took another bus somewhere else that was
closer and proceeded to walk along the desert. Before long, an odd man in an
old car missing a door offered me a ride. A ruin driving a ruin. He appeared to
have survived The G r a p e s o f W rath. I was happy to profit from his generosity
and held on to my seat tightly, as we bounced up and down over the dirt road.
He let me out three miles (five kilometers) later in the middle of the desert
and pointed to the direction in which I would find Casa Grande. Under the
blinding sun, without a drop of water to drink, I trudged across the sandstrewn
desolation, wading through irrigation ditches filled with chemical solutions,
slipping under barbed-wire fences, and entering upon the grounds of the Na
tional Monument. Thus did I avoid the entrance road, the information kiosk, the
warning signs, and the water fountains. Blinded with perspiration, choking with
dust, broiling with heat, muddied by ditches, worried by gnats, but stung with
curiosity, I arrived at Casa Grande (Fig. 4).
Fig. 4. Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, Arizona, USA, 1959
It stood grandly in nature, silhouetted by bleaching sunshine against the

trembling blue sky of the shadowless, unclouded day. To protect it from de
struction by the forces of nature and preserve it for future visitors, a metal roof
on four piers towered above it. Without the roof, the C a s a would be returned to
earth by the rain. With the roof, the ruin remained in its natural setting. The
roof was an artifice. So was the great house.
To grasp the ruin in a totally natural site is reserved to the original explor
er of jungle, mountain, desert, or sea bottom. Only then, with no path to it and
The Ruin as Site 97
no entrance gate, can human beings find their way through nature to the ruin in
nature. Alas, the aesthetic thrill of archaeological discovery is to be experi
enced rarely. In Central America and the Yucatan, John Lloyd Stephens (1805-
1852) had experiences no one else can duplicate. He found ruin after ruin in the
jungle, following up each local reference to Xlap-pahk (Mayan: “old walls”).
We may analyze that experience in three stages: (1) The shock of discovery,
which is the identification of something meaningful, human, and still powerful
in the midst of an otherwise overwhelming non-human environment. (2) The
recognition of the awful power of nature to swallow up or tear apart human
achievement. (3) The joy of recovery of what had been lost, its redemption
from the oblivion of nature. The alternative arises: Save it or leave it.
If we choose to save it, we clear it out, cut back the growth, chase off the
animals, uproot the seedlings, cut down the trees, sweep off the dust, shovel
away the earth, hold back the sand, channel away the water, mark out a trail,
and invite in the tourists to enjoy the ruin in its natural setting.
While you and I are not going to encounter the ruin in a perfectly natural
setting, we may enjoy those features of nature that make part of the ruin’s set
ting and impart something of value to the ruin. This may create the context of
contrast, as in the human structures that stand facing the mountainside at
Delphi. That the ruin is near a natural wonder is significant, because the rem
nants may retain the intention of a confrontation. The inner energy of humane
ness faces the outerness of natural power. The ruin may continue its graceful
form and its exercise of function, while the mountain or the desert responds
with massive, formless, functionless forcefulness.
The earthiness of the adobe structure of the Anasazi Pueblo near Albu
querque, New Mexico, in the United States, expresses a permanence, as if it
were the structure of the earth itself, out of which it climbs (PI. 29). Vigorous
steps are everywhere. Walls are rooms. They scurry about in dancing bands of
light, greeting one another, extending their arms from thickset dark shoulders
with equanimity and equality. The spaces of the rooms are about the same size,
and the heights are even. No holes in the walls, no doors, windows, or roofs.
We do not experience this site as something destroyed. We experience it as an
abstraction that endures, melding earth material and human activity.
The shaping and smoothing of the hand is evident. The steps are just right.
What we have called rooms are homes and chambers of the heart. The ruin is a
community with labyrinthine interpenetration. It has no form. It is form. Not
boxed in, it is alive. The ruin may be symbolic of the life-force of the ancient
American Indian, that pious rootedness in the life-giving earth. Community in
mystery inhabits the living shapes.
The earth that the ruin occupies is a band from right to left, stretching
from where we stand, in 1969, toward another, thinner, band, the dark green of
trees that signals the riverbed of the Rio Grande (Mex.: Rio Bravo). The unin-
PI. 29. Anasazi Pueblo, Near Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, 1969
The Ruin as Site 99
habited ruin, which was communal housing, a village, a people, for all of these
are the meaning of pueblo, lives on, absorbing life from its bordering verdure.
The ruin stands silently; the river flows slowly. They put their hearts together in
the eternal greenery.
Beyond is another band. On the picture plane, it is no thinner than the
trees, but we recognize it as a plain that extends an enormous distance back to
the foot of the mountains. It is desert, only sparse scrub and no human struc
ture, which gives intensity to the green band. The gleam on the adobe edges is
balanced by the shadow of the walls. Shelter is here and under the trees, while
the desert and starkly rising mountains are bleak and forbidding. The jagged
ness of mountains and the band of clouds above them echo the line of trees and
the edging of the ruin. Finally, bare sky is in the upper right, balanced by our
standing outside the wall on the lower left.
This ruin participates in a composition, a stratification of textures and col
ors that make the elements of nature. Like the other bands, the ruin is enduring
and fundamental. It cannot be silenced in asserting human necessity in nature’s
structure. We have made the earth speak to the mountains and sky. The ruin
rests on bedrock in our soul. It opens our earthbound heart.
Nature the brute, undeveloped; ruin the artist, sophisticated. Some Greek
temple ruins, such as Sounion on the mainland, and Lindos on the island of
Rhodes, occupy promontories and pinnacles from which dazzling visions of
land and sea awe the soul. The ruin at the edge greets the cosmos. We are grate
ful for the ruin being here to give us this sublime occasion. The ruin has the hu
man perspective; it is of our world. But it has been freed from perfect inward
ness in the temple to turn fully to the grand outerness of the universe. (On the
experience of nature itself as ruin, see Chapter Ten, below.)
(1) The ruin can reorganize its surroundings through the gradual interven
tion of human agency. (2) We can also find the ruin among powerful natural
features which it cannot touch or reshape and which escape human influence.
Whichever fate awaits the ruin in its surroundings, (3) it always has room for
the action of natural forces within it, notably those of vegetation and climate,
which operate as well in the city ruin. Though we have been analyzing these
three distinct kinds of context, they have a way of occurring together in twos or
three. Thus, Sweetheart Abbey is at the edge of the charming village of New
Abbey, Scotland, open on three of its sides to cemetery and then fields, but it is
reached by the high street.
The ruin is frequently a Framing Device for its surroundings, whereas the
intact structure could only offer its shoulder for the outside view to lean upon.
Through the opening in the ruin, we can visualize the mountain, trees, or sea.
The ruin may turn into a photographic prop for packaging the scenery. The in
timacy of the relationship is lost in favor of an extrinsic utility. We use ruins as
scenic frames for a pictorial grasp of nature. Their successful use comes easily.
First, choose the feature in nature to be highlighted. Then, keeping one eye
upon the target, move into the ruined room, seeking its framing intervention
that will be true to the initial picture. If the room has a lot of apertures and emp
ty spaces, because of its windows, columns, gaping walls, or many towers, we
should be able to get the desired result several times.
The ruin functions in this setting like a set of bare trees or a handful of
pinnacled rock-formations, though with more possibilities. An advantage to
such utilization is that the ruin, unlike the natural frame, suggests that it, too, is
gazing upon the scene, for it has human characteristics. Throw a sunset into the
frame, and we come out a winner.
The ruin is a formula for taking pictures of its surroundings. When such
pictures are frequently seen on posters, postcards, and travel brochures, they di
rect our vision on site. Another case of life imitating art. Or habit perpetuating
taste. The person who finds the frame in the ruin in this way feels in the midst
of a picture. The aesthetic rightness of the picture confirms the rightness of the
person’s position. We are in the right place and hence have succeeded in the
proper use of the ruin. The proof is the photograph.
Photographs are the true trophies of tourism. They have taught us to see
through the ruin more often than to see the ruin. They have trained us to use the
ruin in our encounter with nature, instead of opening our experience to the unu
sual encounter of the ruin with features of nature. Beware all photographs of ru
ins! (On photography and ruin, see Chapter Seventeen, “The Ruining Eye—and
Other Senses,” below, pp. 338-346.)
Even without a camera, the surroundings may frame the ruin. This hap
pens if we slowly approach the ruin through its setting. The long walk up, ap
proach at an angle, circling around at a distance, zigzag across a space are rec
ommended for chancing upon the presentation of the ruin by its surroundings.
The context contributes its insight into the site we have in sight. The ruin may
gradually shape up between trees or against a mountainside.
The grounds can fix the ruin in a moment. We do not find a unity from
within, because we have not yet entered the ruin. We find it from without, be
cause we feel the ruin within its context. The plausibility of the occurrence re
lies on the ruin occupying the center of a clearing. Gravity in the natural lines
of destruction of edifices leaves a high point in the center, while lowering its
lines toward the extremities. This produces a pyramidal disposition with an ex
tended base and a moderate height. The rough shape makes the ruin sit solidly
in its surroundings in another form of pleasing picture.
We may use the natural, as previously we had used the ruin, to capture its
partner instead of to recognize the ruin as intimate collaborator. Pleasurable
framing of the ruin at a distance may make us disinclined to investigate the
scattered stones from within. Both pictorial modes of experiencing have aes
thetic value, and we need not be apologetic in using them.
The Ruin as Site 101
PI. 30. Tcmplo Mayor and the Cathedral, Mexico City, Mexico, 1985
The danger in their predominance is a neglect of the experience of the

ruin. We should attend to the setting of the ruin for its formative affluence, not
exclusively for its framative influence. Something is to be said for alternate
framing, whereby we open ourselves to perceiving the ruin through the sur
roundings and the surroundings through the ruin.
While the surroundings often surround what is given to them as the estab
lished ruin, sometimes the ruin comes later and turns something that has been
well-established into surroundings. The Aztec Templo Mayor that reemerged in
Mexico City’s center changes the surroundings, including the mighty Cathedral
(PI. 30). In 1985, each serves as context for the other.
At Threave Castle, Scotland, the ruin is marooned on an island in the Riv
er Dee, adrift in time (PI. 31). Scene through the trees. A protected place and a
protective structure: high walls, small windows, probably a moat, for we see a
wooden bridge enter. The castle as defensive tower has suffered violence. The
jagged roof is cut out against the sky, and then, upon reflection, against the wa
ter. Some windows have been torn through. The entrance gatehouse or guard
house is in fragments. This building, weighty with its unknown history, has suf
fered. If we could enter, we would learn more, but that requires crossing the
river. And that requires obtaining the services of the boat.
The ruin remains distant and secretive, indifferent to our existence. The
fields give no clue to its character. The castle rises starkly from them, set back
from the river with no visible landscaping. Not even a tree has found hospitality
near the castle. The gray stone with its massive surfaces aimed at us absorbs the
moisture in the air and the color in the sky. The rust color that reflects the fields
is a striking pattern of aging on the facade.
The sad desolation of the perfectly still scene gives way upon contempla
tion to excitement of form and color. For instance, the jagged roof, the ruin’s
superb aesthetic element, receives distant recognition in the lines of treetops be
hind that may occupy the opposite shore. Leaves, through which we are obliged
to see the site from this shore, in 1982, contrive a jagged border.
We experience the island with its castle as a large realm within an em
brace of waters and then of woods. The dense, intense mass of the castle is a
navel in the belly of space. The drabness of the scene is delicately relieved by
the gratuitous presence of yellow and purple flowers in the field.
All takes on a new life plunged into the river. The water retrieves the
blueness of the washed-out sky. It gives rebirth to the space of the world. It off
ers us the boat and its shadow as pure curvilinearity in contrast to the boxed
form of the castle’s shadow. Then the castle rises above the objects and shad
ows in its untamed existence. The play between reflection and object expresses
the tension between all this as appearance versus the hidden core of the castle.
The shadow of the castle is transformed by the swirl of river grass, in vivid
contrast to the pointed, still reflection of the boat. The castle, in the words of its
PI. 31. Thrcave Castle, Scotland, UK, 1982

reflection, is caught up in a swirl of activity. The ruin stirs Dee-lightful reflec

tions. Enough that we sit here on the bank. No need to call for a rower.
We glance out the window of our moving train in Spain in 1960 to
glimpse the arches of the lofty Roman aqueduct at Merida (Augusta Emerita)
PI. 32. Roman Aqueduct and Clotheslines, Merida, Spain, 1960
(PI. 32). Will the rails move through it, or will its arches move over the rails? A
blurring of interpenetration. Each carries on its mode of being with linked
alignments. The aqueduct is linked together in great hulks, borrowing the meta
phor of a coupled train. Patches of countryside and townsite are caught with
fragments of the winter sky.
A European scene that may be repeated from train windows across the
continent. The ruin in the landscape, lived with and worked around. We are
traveling on modern conveyances over dry land under a bleak sky, while the
aqueduct resides permanently but no longer carries a flow of water and in a
blink of the eye will be gone.
The arches march across the scene, stepping over the ground with their
long legs, packaging glimpses of the urban setting behind and packing in some
puffy winter clouds. The ancient forms make a grill to bound the space fenced
from us by shabby, rusted, metal panels, and marked off on the left, though
beyond the slowly moving frame of the train window, by the white regimenta
tion of collective housing.
The aqueduct takes all this trouble to corral the laundry plain. The wash
had been done in pump houses or perhaps in the nearby river and hung to dry,
flapping in the breeze. Some of the sheets lie on the ground. An orchard has
been installed between the low bridge and the apartment dwellers. Mud, earth,
dirt, rust, lighted by the display of white linen.
The ruin’s three-storied height contrasts with the lower levels of the pres
ent occupants of the scene: bridge, utility sheds, clothes poles. The level of life
has fallen. The eye travels back and forth between foreground and network of
ruin. The impressive verticals are playfully related with arched connectives.
Four pillars on the right are tied together at the top. But this regularity is aban
doned in the succeeding sets of pillars toward the left, where only a few are
connected on top, while some links are established lower down.
The result is a pumping up-and-down motion in center and left of the ruin.
This communication of motion in a reliably engineered alignment befits our
movement by train. In an instant, the seen is gone, though the ruin has magnan
imously insisted on its permanence.
Ellen and I had to wait thirty-seven years before stopping at Merida, mas
terpiece of antiquity, to see again its magnificent aqueduct (PI. 33). This time,
in 1997, we had the time to get up close to the structures and stand under them,
letting the pure form carry us away.
The ruin enhances/enchants/enchances its unities, including incongruities,
by feeding upon its context. The ruin can reinvent its surroundings and interior-
ize them with its life. The ruin re-forms the world. The world that it draws into
its care may include a bundle of intentions, traditions, values, and goals. The
ruin may operate upon the larger context of a community’s life, offering a sym
bolic unity to its moral and spiritual identity.
100 /7//: AESTHETICS ( W RUINS
PI. 33. Arch of Roman Aqueduct, Merida, Spain. 1997

Six
THE RUIN AS SYMBOL

How great was Rome, her ruins instruct.
From Latin: sixteenth-century motto
The ruin is enriched with symbolic value, when a community retains a broken
structure as a cultural treasure. The symbolic ruin is the meaningful monument.
It brings to mind, or to soul, a value saved and hence vital. Such a ruin is no
leftover of someone else’s world, a survivor of time, though out of place. Such
a ruin cannot be interesting only for what it tells of the irrecoverable past, that
life long dead. Nor can that ruin be of formal value only, indifferent to what it
is and who we are.
The context goes beyond the physical and visual surroundings to the con
cern and attitude that govern the ruin’s preservation and presentation. The sym
bol looms larger than the stone. The ruin is greater than the site. It insists that
we share insight.
The ruin is a choice. It has been preserved as a remnant of something
valuable in the past. The symbolic ruin is testimony of a community’s identity.
A unity that expresses in a single space the larger, sometimes vaguer, unity that
underlies the life of a people. The ruin addresses that life as its context. It is
shot through with meaningfulness, though its meaning is not of the same kind
as the role of intention in function. We value what the ruin does for us in our
solidarity, not what the ruin does for itself in its solitude.
The ruin bares the mark of the human touch, but it can put its mark upon
our humanity. A past chosen, a present valued, the symbol expresses forward-
looking energy. A creative springing forth into communal life.
Why do we preserve the broken pieces of the past? Out of neglect, or re
spect for their aesthetic value. Out of numbing shock at their destruction, or
shortage of funds to tear them down completely. Out of hope that one day they
will be restored, or suspicion that something else worthwhile can be built out of
them. Out of a dozen reasons, a ruin may be allowed to exist. Among these is
that the stone shores up our values.
We can keep monuments for this reason, although only incidentally are
they ruins. We might not notice their ruinedness, when imagination insists that
this is the church or the castle of our worthy past. We may deny ruinedness,
like age, damage, and decay. Blind to the ruin, the community may see the in
visible in its mind. In reading a local guidebook, we might not know whether
the work we wish to visit is complete or in a state of ruin. Many times, I have
been disappointed in traveling to a remote monument only to find it reasonably
intact. Oh well, that’s luck.
A knack in photographing for travel brochures and picture books puts the
ruin’s best face forward, giving it the illusion of being intact or merely dam
aged, instead of being a ruin. In many places, people refer to the local ruin as
“the monument.’’ And we can hear the incautious language used to call the lo
cal monument “the ruins,’’ as if everything from the past had to be in ruin.
Maybe ruins are not thought to be in ruin. Part of the ruin may be sufficiently
intact for us to take it as the whole of the monument, the rest being blinked as
inconsequential sidelines. Many ways exist of getting around the ruin, but let us
turn to the ruin that is frankly preserved as ruin.
It may symbolize the suffering a community bore that binds it together
and calls for remembrance. War often inflicts such suffering, the unforgettable
affliction that isolates and identifies a people. The people survive, though the
aim may have been to destroy them. The ruin is fitting as reminder/remainder
of this trial, for it too has suffered destruction yet survived. It shares the scars
of the people. It no longer is what it originally was. Many people were killed in
the war that smashed its roof. The presence of loss is necessarily noticeable.
The ruin commemorates the invisible. But all is not lost, if the ruin is still with
us, just as we are still with us. “Poland lives while we live!’’, say the Poles.
The ruin celebrates the continuity of the living. We carry on, and so does
it. We join it in marking a meaning to our identity. Though we may live in
prosperity with not a broken stone in sight, other than those of the ruin, it re
calls a level of suffering that we, the continuity who pass before its doorless
walls, knew at some moment. And we will be succeeded by others passing by
these walls. The ruin tells the individual of the public meaning. All of us now
and those of the future are its intended context.
Fated for destruction, the ruin has risen from its ashes. If it is just a pile of
ordinary materials, formless and without function, it cannot move us, for then it
would be a disheartening waste. Something of aesthetic merit stirs in the sym
bolic ruin to catch the heart and to which we pin our meaning. Some lovely
form, bright incongruity, piteous functioning structure, exposed nobility of ma
terial: these will draw it to attention and allow us to attach our feeling for the
past. The ruin is redemptive of itself and us. We seek ourselves in the ruin as
symbol. The symbol’s guiding light is its conjuring of unity that makes us
whole again. The symbol is the incarnation of a soulfulness.
The symbolic war-ruin, though it may be packaged for propaganda pur
poses, has a naive honesty. It does not lie about what has been done to it. It re
mains forever a victim of war. It makes its gaping wounds available to our
eyes. But the ruin finally triumphs. It continues to live, despite its sufferings. It
takes pride in abiding. So the Alamo (Sp.: “cottonwood’’) in San Antonio,
where all its defenders died, is a symbol of the valor of those who wrenched the
province of Texas from the nation of Mexico. The ruined Catholic mission, that
had been turned into a fort, was lost to the siege of 23 February-6 March 1836.
Again turned into a ruin, but subsequently patched up, the Alamo is a re-
The Ruin as Symbol 109
minder of the cost of the successful mission. “Remember the Alamo!” is more
than a slogan of the past. In the United States, it is a rallying cry for Texans,
Southerners, Westerners, and Yanquis generally. Having achieved indepen
dence in 1836, the Republic of Texas was annexed by the United States in
1845, which led to war between Mexico and the United States (1846-1848).
Mexico was obliged to transfer two-fifths of its territory to the victor.
The ruin of the battleship U.S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, is a
memorial to the massive dying that took place so long ago, on 7 December
1941, “a date which will live in infamy” (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), but that
is fixed to the mentality of being an American. Remember Pearl Harbor? The
shock of history bursting into America near mid-century. No tombstones are on
the sea, says nautical lore. But here the wreck of the battleship is a fit marker
for those entombed aboard and their comrades-in-arms who died in the attack.
The ruin at Pearl Harbor, dedicated as a war memorial in 1962, reaches to
the depths. Terrifyingly honest about death and destruction. Enormously pride
ful about life and commitment. We might not encounter the Alamo as a ruin,
because of its reworked fa$ade and the wide, clean plaza with its ease of ap
proach for the tourist. But the Pearl Harbor monument leaves no doubt about its
ruined character, as it concedes our approach through treacherous waters. Our
existence is suspended with that of the ruin. Standing solemnly above the de
structive element, on a floating dock, we take heart. The ruin communes. It
joins us together. In 1987, blobs of oil make their way to the surface from the
submerged wreckage.
In the symbolic ruin, we move from the aesthetic feeling to the moral sen
timent. Poignancy is the rivet that ties one to the other. The symbol is affective.
It effectively involves us in a feeling way with nonliteral meaning. The symbo
lic ruin has a public dimension colored with the content of loss, pride, identifi
cation, continuity, suffering, and survival: moral experiences. By becoming a
symbol, the ruin gives aesthetic expression to shared moral values.
Churches are bound to suffer. They are given prominent place in village
and city, and they can serve as last refuges. War may care naught for religion,
or religious fervor may inspire war. In either case, war turns churches into ru
ins. Churches make good subjects for symbolic ruins. They are likely to be re
tained, because of their many attachments to the community, including dedicat
ed chapels, memorial stones, and sculptural images.
A general kind of reverence resists tearing down the poor remains of a
holy place. Churches are likely to be old when they are ruined. Instead of re
building them with their own stones, the community may decide to put up a
larger church elsewhere. So grows the plausibility that any town in Europe har
bors a church ruin. Some of these have symbolic value.
A sculpted pair of figures by Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945) mournfully
kneels on the floor of St. Alban’s Church, left in ruin by the Allies, in Cologne,
Germany (PI. 34). Plain architectural forms arch over this gray world of dull
materials left exposed to the heavens. We acutely sense the aboveness, because
the structure that extends between the inwardly-concentrated figures and the
sky lacks ornamentation. From above come light and darkness, rain, leaves,
birds, remembrance of the bombs. We share, in 1961, the out-of-ordinariness of
this world below.
St. Alban’s provides no protection, resting place, or even detail for in
struction of the eye. Gone is the church’s churchness. Present is the sanctity of
the figures, though they are not saints, wholier than thou. The unidentified,
grieving for the unidentifiable.
We respect them in their loss. We enter their innerness. The ruin without
the sculpture would be nothing to us. The sculpture without the ruin would be
moving works of art that dwell apart. Ruin and sculpture round each other out,
each giving peace to the other. By together-being, sculpture and ruin make
place for the third party who stands under the open sky in the space of this
church on the same floor upon which the mourning figures kneel.
A church in ruin is ironic, and iconic, because its original irenic mission
has been terminated by bellicose action. The church aims at spiritual elevation.
The ruin exposes its material foundation. The church contains sanctified shelt
er. The ruin opens everything to the natural elements. The church turns its aes
thetic concern to programs of spiritual content. Pure sensuousness or ugly ma
teriality may emerge in the ruin. The church aims at a timeless otherworldli
ness. The ruin speaks of the here and now of earthliness. The church is kept up
with pride, its cleanliness next to godliness. The ruin is broken, uncared for,
dirty. The church stands aloof from neighboring nature. The ruin vegetates.
The church is ceremonial in instinct. For the ruin, in the words of William
Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming’’ (1921),
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; (Yeats, 1956, p. 185)
Church: the community inside. Ruin: the community outside. Church: inter
mediary between human and divine. Ruin: non-intermediary selfhood. Church
music. Ruin silence.
The symbolic use of the church ruin refuses to surrender these painful an
titheses, by insisting that we see them. We have a ruin that was a church. We
also have a church in ruin. A loss to the spiritual life of the community. Yet to
retain it is a gain for that spiritual life.
One hot day in summer 1971, at the busy center of Leuven/Louvain, that
marvel of old Belgium, I order a waffle with ice cream in the cafe and reflect
upon the passing tide in this city of practicality and scholarship. The Church of
St. Pieter/Pierre/Peter is across the street (PI. 35). Its worn orange stones suf
fered in the bombing by the Allies in 1944, but the church is in use.
The Ruin as Symbol
IM. 34. St. Alban's Church, Cologne, Cermanv, 1961

1 12 77//: AESTHETICS OF RUINS
PL 35. St. Peter’s Church, Louvain, Belgium, 1971

Above the entrance, the Apostle gives his blessing. His head is missing.
The church is not a ruin. It retains its long-standing unity and functions as it al
ways has, though it has a twisted history of poor construction, partial destruc
tion, and patient restoration. On the whole, it is in good repair. Sections around
the entrance have been pockmarked by bursting shells, and there, too, the
sculpted stone has been swept away, with the notable exception of Peter.
But he has lost his head. “What is the meaning of this?”, I ponder, while
people enter the intense blackness of the doorway and disappear, having re
ceived the blessing of the headless Apostle’s invisible hand. The people are
prosperous enough and sufficiently caring to provide funds for restoration of
the statue, for Pete’s sake! If need be, a new statue can be carved or molded,
while the old one is relegated to the museum, or better, the rubbish heap. Simi
larly, they could afford to redo the stonework around the entrance and so re
move any sign of the damage suffered.
The churchgoers apparently feel no affront in leaving the wounds in
place. To leave them may be more valuable, for Peter continues to bid holy
welcome to a people who have suffered unholy war. He speaks heart-to-heart.
The innerness of the statue addresses the innerness of persons and thereby com
municates the innerness of the church, which is in use. Innerness is not a matter
of appearance. The heart-catcher of the townspeople is the headless Saint.
The Saint makes his welcoming blessing with a missing arm and gazes
into our soul with his missing head. Well-stationed above the entrance, he is an
inhabitant of the bleak exterior, from which he beckons us. The dark innerness
of the doorway draws us forward, as does the dark socket of the missing arm.
The gesture of blessing is complete, though the hand is broken. The com
munity has made the bold choice to bless itself with this statue. It is only stone
work. We see that by gazing into the gaping openings where once it had a head
and arm. The simplicity of its materiality and form are all too clear. It is not a
fine statue as a work of art or of craft. Were it complete, we would likely pass
under it with nary a glance, since it would fade into the usual uniform context.
Any interest in the intact statue would quickly peter out. We would enter St.
Peter the church, but with no thanks to St. Peter the statue.
Now the figure extends a personal invitation to his church. We have
learned to appreciate the continuity of function in ruins. But functions were
touching or amusing because untethered to a unifying purpose. Here the ruined
statue conforms to the original purpose of the church, which is in use. Techni
cally speaking, the statue might not be a ruin, since it has not changed unity and
use. Yet it has! It has reshaped itself into something else. Not just because we
cannot imagine the head and arm as being in place, but because the brokenness
has been absorbed into the matter and form of what remains. The statue has un
dergone a conversion from the ordinary to the symbolic. Saint be preserved!
The ruined statue gained a purpose as a rallying point for the spirit of the
community that it did not fulfill before. Before, it was a conventional identifi
cation. Now it is a symbolic manifestation. Then, it was integral to the church.
Now it is integral to the community. Formerly, it was the choice of a sculptor
and architect. Presently, it is the choice of a congregation. In its past originality,
it probably was uninteresting. In its present originality, it is joyous.
In the street of clutter and bustle, of disharmony and cacophony, and con
sequently of unavoidable ugliness and uncomfortableness, St. Peter waits with
eternal calmness, a welcoming world of meaning in a broken statue, a unifier
who endures and prevails. I finish my waffle and cross the street.
A ruin may become emblematic. As such, it is the self-conscious badge of
identification for a city, community, or country. This choice insists the experi
ence of that ruin is inconceivable without realization of whose ruin it is. A pro
prietorship binds the ruin’s identity to that of the people. In its turn, the ruin
swells with civic or national pride to give heart to its community.
Heading for the Colosseum in Rome, the modem visitor is distracted by
the sidewalk vendors of souvenirs, miniatures of the Colosseum, no doubt. The
illegally parked vehicles, waiting tourist buses, and the traffic jam ahead are
slight matters of passing importance played out before the imperturbable monu
ment that reigns over the vast space. Its image so absorbs us that we risk being
run down (PI. 36).
The Colosseum is protected by the municipality as the hulking remains of
a structure significant to the earlier history of Rome. More than that, the Colos
seum is the quintessence of Rome, the monumental city on a cosmopolitan
scale whose vital organs are the ruins of European civilization.
We can scarcely avoid the ruins in Rome. They plague the patience of the
modern city. Because of their financial demands, enormous upkeep, unwel
come complication of traffic, and incessant attraction of visitors, vendors,
loungers, addicts, and stray cats, the ruins of Rome seem to ruin Rome. The
new Rome gets lost in tangling with the old Rome. Obligation toward the par
tially invisible creates visible strains. Getting around town is not easy, even on
foot, because of the ruins. Visitors to Rome must expect fallen arches.
More than most world-class cities, Rome suffers from its history. Modern
Romans must struggle with leftovers from ancient Romans. But Rome has cho
sen, if uneasily, to live with its dead. Its commitment brings life to the ruins.
The ancient courses through the modem. Rome accepts its history. Brava!
The Flavian Amphitheater, built 72-96 CE, appropriated the designation
“Colosseum” for itself from an excessively large statue of Nero that stood near
by. The largest building of Roman civilization, it is so colossal that we cannot
miss it. All roads lead to Rome, and all Roman roads lead to the Colosseum. It
is the terminus of the mighty stretch from the Capitoline Hill through the Ro
man Forum, past assorted triumphal arches and basilicas. The roadway is a
wide, straight thoroughfare that skirts the pompous, white stacked-tiers of the
The Ruin a.s Symbol 115
r w i~ n rr~ r-~ fj~ ~ * *?
im fim v
PI. 36. Interio r, The Colosseum, Rome, Italy, 1981

Victor Emmanuel II Monument and imperiously cuts through fora to bring us

to the Colosseum by an approach of increasingly grand vista.
How many Roman ruins had to be covered over so that this road could
take us by the most impressive route for a distinctively Roman scene to the
ruin? We greet the exciting presentation cinematically, view after view coming
into view with our motion. We have made this trip many times in the movies.
Rome imitates art.
The Colosseum presents its best edge to the road. The full height faces us,
turning to the left with a magnificent curve that obliges our road to give obei
sance. To the right, a dramatic drop accentuated by diagonal buttresses. We feel
the grandeur of the ruin in this sharp announcement of what is no longer there.
The bold wall that plunges from the topmost level connecting with the lower
has been bolstered to arrest the decay. Seen close-up, it appears an unfortunate
intervention in what should take its own course, but, from a distance, we greet
the sheer line with pleasure for its vigorous decisiveness. In the space of the
gap, a cluster of people gives the measure of proportions.
A colonnade on the right with tasteful planting and a series of grandiose
street lamps guide us forward. We see several levels of the remains, assuring
that this monument is incomplete. The imposing road bends to pass the impos
ing structure, drawn to the Colosseum but finally deflected by it. The gesture of
deference is fitting in face of the ruin’s impervious/imperial dignity.
The aesthetics of approach to the Colosseum is of political import. The
Via dei Fori Imperiali was built under the Mussolini government, in 1932, as a
feature in the revived imperial identity of Italy risen from its Roman ruins. On
his state visit to Rome, the night of 3 May 1938, Adolf Hitler took this route,
which was dramatically illuminated for him. Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, Mao
ism: each has its aesthetics.
In 1981, the autos and buses were cleared out of the Colosseum’s circum-
ambience, allowing it at last the proper space for its stature. I stood by, as
workers welded metal rails to reserve the area for pedestrians. Drivers cursed
us. A proposal has recently been circulated to tear up the road to liberate the ru
ins over which it marches.
The foreigner brings the Colosseum to Rome. The ruin, colossal as it is,
seems bigger than its pile of stones. Thus, John Dyer, the Welsh ruin-poet ordi
naire; apostrophizes the Colosseum in “The Ruins of Rome’’ (1740):
Amid the towery, huge, supreme,

Th’ enormous amphitheatre behold,
Mountainous pile! . .. (Dyer, 1971, p. 235)
Stendhal, that tireless French traveler, proclaims of the Colosseum in his

Promenades dans Rome (1829) (from French): “it’s the most beautiful of ruins;
here all the majesty of ancient Rome takes breath.” He adds that it is “perhaps
more beautiful today now that it is fallen in ruin than it ever was in all its
splendor” (Stendhal, no date, pp. 16-17, 24-25).
Edgar Allan Poe, in “The Coliseum” (1833), celebrates the monument’s
grandeur, gloom, and glory! (Poe, 1938, pp. 948-949)
Poe, who had never been to Rome, flexes his poetic talent by fitting a generic
ruin-poem to the Colosseum. He had colossal nerve.
Charles Dickens was drawn daily to the magnet of the Colosseum during
his visit to Rome. While depicting “its solitude, its awful beauty, and its utter
desolation,” he exclaims (1846), “It is the most impressive, the most stately, the
most solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight, conceivable. . . . GOD be
thanked: a ruin!” (Dickens, 1974, p. 163).
Mark Twain, that sophisticated American innocent abroad, arrives (1869)
at “the monarch of all European ruins, the Coliseum” (Twain, 1980, p. 198).
Henry James sends his innocent American flower, Daisy Miller, in the
bittersweet novelette that bears her name (1879), to visit the Colosseum at night
in its unhealthy air and unrespectable atmosphere. It will be the death of her.
And Edith Wharton sends her not-so innocent American young lady to
“the dusky secret mass of the Colosseum” for a decisive nocturnal rendezvous
in the delicious story, “Roman Fever” (1934) (Wharton, 1958, p. 15).
This assortment of testimonials could be expanded to more than book
length. We get the impression that the authors are responding to one another, as
they face a colossal literary challenge. The Colosseum that dwells in their texts
comes to dwell in the sensibility of other visitors to the monument. The Colos
seum is a literary ruin. And a painterly one.
We still take the Colosseum seriously. We allow it to stand in its glory
rather than put it to use. The movement of visitors about it in clumps or singly
activates the interior, which takes on interest because of its irregularity, its bro
ken, worn, stubborn stoniness.
The liveliness of the immense encirclement is communicated to the oblate
space of the invisible flooring, which answers back in kind, having eschewed
the simple blankness of original smooth surface to indulge in the most intensive
flexing and turning of stone and space (PI. 37). We peer into the Colosseum’s
bowels. Their expression of vital functioning disturbs yet intrigues. We are
forced to become spectators of colossal convulsions.
The architectural ruin stirs primitive responses, due to its astonishing
mass that swallows up the human form, the staggering verticality that leaps past
us from sky to basement, and the violence suggested by the sky-filled titanic
arches and compressed subterranean corridors. We cannot feel at home in this
ruin. It overwhelms our scale and our soul with imperial grandeur. The Colos-
PI. 37. In te r io r , T h e C o lo sse u m , R o m e , Ita ly , 1981

seum is the archetypal vision of the Roman Empire and of the city of Rome’s
centrality in that empire. The omphalic shape is a life source, though fatal
deeds were done here. This ruin rises from its existence to union with a cultural
identity. It is reborn as symbol.
We look through the floor into the maze of passageways and chambers
where human beings and beasts awaited their entrance into the arena. A hidden
world exposed within the circumference of the stands. Visitors gaze downward,
dwarfed by grand space, thickness of form, and troubling intricacy. The folds
and curves are terrifying intestines. If we were let in from the gates, outside of
which someone sits in the sun, we would be helplessly swallowed up.
The chambered spaces of this underworld are echoed in the upper world
that we look down upon through an arch that frames all and allows us to remain
partially hidden. The dentilations in the stone, ciliations in weeds, and vertebra-
tions in chambers are of an enormous broken beast, slaughtered and blanched.
The detail is disquieting. Writhing forms to the left and far right accommodate
the curved sides of the enclosure. Huge gullets run the length from gate to gate,
denying any hiding place.
We look in vain for relief from the inhuman vista, some affirmation to lift
us out of the sinking experience. The shirt of the man at the rail is agreeable,
but in the next moment it underscores the figure’s puny scale. In lower left, a
plant stands out with curved head, the same dried-out weed whose clumps clot
the lifeless passageways like scum upon bones. The benches for spectators have
been restored in upper left, but their white fragmentariness produces uneasi
ness. We take shelter leaning against this arch in shade. But the ledge in front
of us with its stabilizing cement glimmers uninvitingly in the deadly sun. The
wall tells us that to approach it, rest our hands upon its hot surface, and lean
over into the concavity of space would be dizzying.
Despite all the uncomfortableness of the ruin that is beyond the measure
of the human form, this arch yokes things into global order. The arches that
flank the entrance ramp epitomize the organizing shape that we sense. We
struggle to bind the disparate and threatening elements into an organic whole.
We reassert the human scale and the life-energy of arch by our standing within
this curved stone. Yet the aesthetic vision we impose does not withstand the
nonorganic, antihuman, inexplicable elements.
On the right, just above the curved walls below the floor, is a series of
striking standing forms, aligned like sentries, massive, without obvious func
tion. Throughout the lengths of the four main subterranean chambered masses
are delicate arrangements in white stone visible at top. Blocks strangely line the
floor along the main corridor. A series of indentations is visible in the lower
portions of the masses. All these features may have been part of the system of
trapdoors, ramps, pens, and passageways needed for the performance of the
bloody games. Sand absorbs blood. “Arena” is the Latin word for the sand that
was spread on the floor. We lean in the arena of death where no sandy floor re
mains to hide what underlies.
A ruin can become an aesthetic touchstone to a nation’s cultural self
conception. How a country treats its ruins is symptomatic of its attitude toward
its identity. The changing attitude manifested toward its ruins over time is a fair
index of a people’s historical development. The ruin is revealing in these ways,
largely because its treatment is an unconscious and gradual matter far from the
central public concerns. More attention is generally given what is intact or what
is needed to be built. In most countries, the ruined is of secondary interest.
Yet for some countries, ruins are valuable as unique cultural heritage, sign
of national identity and territorial integrity, powerful image for political action,
and drawing card for tourist expenditure. A nation may be said to have reached
maturity when it has self-consciously come to grips with its ruins. Angkor Wat
graces the flag that Cambodia waves, though the stylized image does not sug
gest ruin. Cambodia is developing the site as its number one attraction. “Come
here!’’, it announces, “to see the culture of the Khmer.’’
Awakening to ruins necessitates making choices. These choices of what to
do about the ruins are choices of who the community is.
Choice for Ruin
tear it down
rebuild it
leave it alone
forget about it
build on top of it
move it to a museum
clean it up
use it for something else
landscape it
pave around it for parking
put in a service road
forbid highway access
fence it in
erect a ticket booth
write a guidebook for it
sell reproductions and postcards
permit guided tours
restrict number of visitors
make it a national monument
seek designation as a World Heritage Site
denounce it as a local eyesore
mow the grass

let it grow
put in lighting
put on sound-and-light shows
sell ice cream
install toilets
add gift shop
tear down contiguous structures
employ guardians
advertise on posters
distribute brochures
build interpretive center
introduce telephones
sell color film
support scholarly research
open tea house.
The community cannot reach a sound decision concerning one ruin with
out taking into account similar ruins, and then dissimilar ruins, and still other
monuments not yet ruins. A national policy develops as a strategy for treating
ruins. The style of treatment may reveal the prevailing aesthetics, which is also
detected in the presentation of the national museums and other official build
ings. The ruin is unofficial speaker for the nation’s taste.
In the broadest context for the ruin, we experience it as part of a vague
whole: a culture’s values and choices. Visiting an ancient Greek ruin, we are
sensitive to the Greekness of the ruin. The ruin speaks for itself and for Greece.
The Greece of which it speaks is a continuity of culture, so that although the
ancient times are past, the ruin is present in Greece. It is true to its origin. The
uniforms of the guardians and the appearance of the ticket booths make clear
the stamp of Greekness on the national monuments.
Each ruin in Greece has the same preliminary feel, due to the arrange
ments made for preservation and appreciation of the national heritage. Similar
approaches, facilities, vegetation, opening hours, and styles of postcards. The
guides look the same.
Visit to one ruin relates to visits to others in the same country. We may be
led to think that the particular ruin is part of an itinerary that requires several
visits to be filled in before the whole is appreciated, that whole being ancient
Greece as alive and well in modern Greece. A cultural pressure is put on our
visit to get away from the uniqueness of the ruin at hand and move on to the
rest of the series. We are meant to connect the ruins.
We bring to Greece an awareness of the Greekness of the ruins we wish to
visit. The map is a national one. We struggle with the same language from day
to day, which may strike the pedant as a ruin of ancient perfection. The olive
trees that border the scene evoke by their dry fragrance under the sun the flavor
of last night’s salad under the cool sky in another town. Feta accompli. We may
barely notice a unifying odor for the country’s ruins. But it embodies a national
quality, so that each ruin is greeted with familiarity. The I know-not-what (Fr.:
je ne sais quoi) of the Greek heritage may be due to the olive oil.
We bring consciousness of the country to which we have traveled. It re
wards us with pride of accomplishment and satisfaction in being where we are.
We have invested so much money, study, and time in coming to this place that
we would find difficult to put aside the thought of where we are located. We
experience that ruin in Greece as a Greek ruin. It is not a ruin in and by itself
that could be experienced anywhere, indifferent to history, culture, and politics.
What Is It?
What it comes to
is what we come to.
What makes it what it is
is what has been made of it.
What has the poor ruin to do with national boundaries or national con
science? The civilized, noble, and enduring character of the Greek nation is
represented by its ancient ruins. Ancient Greece, the foundation to European
and Western civilization, is alive in modem Greece.
This proud identification with the ruins authenticates the Europeanness of
Greece, a country whose geographical isolation and Levantine culture led Os
wald Spengler, in 1918, in his Fall of the West, to deny it is part of Europe, any
more than Turkey could be considered European. Modern Greece affirms its
European heritage, opening the door to Western visitors who may enter the
grounds of their own civilization. Ancient Greece, whose mins are present, is a
guiding consideration in the choice of future for the country. The Greeks insist
on the difference between Greece as Western and Turkey as Eastern.
Opposition to Turkish rule and culture is crucial to the history of modern
Greece, which arose in the nineteenth century to fight for its independence.
The phoenix, a mythical self-resurrecting bird, is the emblem of Greece. What
should constitute modern Greece has been claimed to be what constituted the
extent of ancient Greece. Where classical Greeks were, there modern Greece
should be. Testimony of the ancient presence is offered by striking ruins. The
mins are keys to the nation’s wholeness, and they define its territoriality.
In a gesture of friendship, in 1864, the United Kingdom ceded to Greece
the quasi-independent United States of the Ionian Islands. In 1880, Greece
gained Thessaly and part of Epirus. The unification of a greater Greek state
brought steps in the twentieth century to incorporate lands with Greek

speaking communities and Greek-speaking ruins. In 1912-1913, Greece got
parts of Macedonia and Thrace. In 1913, after a brief period of independence,
and of exciting archaeological discovery, Crete united to Greece.
In 1919, Greece obtained the Bulgarian coast of the Aegean and, for a
time, Smyrna (Turk.: Izmir) in Asia Minor. In the Balkan Wars of the 1920s,
Greece laid claim to a large portion of the Turkish mainland that had been part
of the Greek-speaking world of antiquity. In 1948, Rhodes and the rest of the
Dodecanese (Gr.: “twelve islands”), taken from the Italians in World War II,
came into the hands of Greece.
The scenario that had been used for Crete at the beginning of the twen
tieth century was revived in 1974 for acquisition of another independent,
though divided country, Cyprus, following the overthrow of that island-nation’s
government. But Turkish intervention and subsequent partition frustrated the
union (Henosis).
In 1974, Ellen and I were to fly to Nicosia International Airport in Cyprus
to begin archaeological study on the island. Luckily, we were prevented from
landing. Instead, we got off the plane in Athens. The following clipping from a
Greek newspaper describes the scene of constemation/constipation that we had
missed at the Nicosia airport:
-a ~im preventing a..,

or Turkish attempt to
the strategic runways.
Greek and Turkish forces
faced each other 500 yards
apart on the western edge of
the airfield where advancing
Turkish marines supported by
armor has cut the main high
way from Nicosia to Mor-
phou.
“It’s an explosive situation/’
said one U.N. officer. “One
shit could set it off.”
“We have a very large force
at the airport now consisting
of British. Swedes, Canadians,
Danes, Indians and Finns,
said the U.N. spokesman.
•Abandoned suitcases of tou
rists who had fled the Turkish
invasion were stacked protec
tively around several firing
sites.
The Indian commander of
the U.N. Force in Cyprus
Mai. Gen. Prem.
Cyprus remains divided. In 1983, the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus

declared its independence, but no one recognizes it, except Turkey.
Greece has been in process of formation. Its choice of a Western identity
was highlighted by the defeat, with the aid of the United States, of a Marxist in
surgency in 1950, membership, with Turkey, in the North Atlantic Treaty Or
ganization (NATO) in 1952, stretching the notion of the north Atlantic, and
then membership, without Turkey, in the European Union (EU), in 1981.
At the same time, Greece struggled internally between monarchy along
constitutional lines, dictatorship along lines of a military junta, and representa
tive democracy along Western parliamentary lines. In 1965, Ellen and I were
caught in tear gas near the Acropolis, as the regime of the Colonels repulsed
demonstrators for democracy. In 1974, we joined the Greeks dancing in the
streets to celebrate the fall of the Colonels and the return of democracy. In
1985, we listened to the President of Greece, at the foot of the Acropolis, wel
come a philosophy congress to the place that gave the world “demokratia.”
Essential to this nation-rebuilding, this soaring of phoenix wings, is
Greece’s vision of its classical heritage. The ancient tragedies are played in the
ruins of the theaters, though the texts may be translated into modem idiom. The
world’s most impressive sound-and-light show (son et lumiere), designed by
the French, takes place with the Acropolis as its setting. It offers a dramatic in
terpretation of the site as a jewel of Western history.
In Athens, in 1965, the colorful geometry of an uninhabited cafe contem
plates the white geometry of the Acropolis (Gr.: akro-polis, “heights of the
city”), atop the mountain (PI. 38). The ancient ruin is inaccessible in its height,
distance, and timeless nobility, while we are at the flat level of the mundane,
changeable and unnoticed in its ordinariness. Yet we come to notice the chairs
and tables with their intricate crossings of limbs and their panels of canvas, be
cause of the ancient stones they address.
The cafe displays intentionality: it will see the Acropolis. This echoes an
intentionality in the Acropolis: it will be seen from here. This outdoor cafe is a
most transitory sort of being. Fold up the chairs and tables, and it is gone. No
adaptation of the ground to their presence. It could all be a parking lot. Stacks
of the furnishings appear at the end of the lot by the fence.
While we do not see as much of the Parthenon as we wish, haunted by the
image of its reconstruction that we saw in textbooks, we are treated to a com
prehensive view of the entrance structures on the right, the Erechtheion at the
left, and the sunlit fa$ade of the Parthenon in the composition’s center.
The elevated unity of the disengaged mount is apparent. Powerful walls
on the left are built into the massive rock. In the exact center, the Parthenon’s
corner pillar leads us down to tremendous construction on a promontory. A
large gap is on both sides and beneath it, until we get to the trees. One tree car
ries the vertical line further down to the welcoming spacing of the chairs.
PI. 38. Cafe and Acropolis, Athens, Greece, 1965

The stoniness that cusps the monument contrasts with the simple paved or
dirt surface of our level. No wild vegetation near us, only a stunted shrub and a
single tree whose space is well-controlled. To the right, the Acropolis takes
steps to come down to human access. A bright-colored shirt may be moving on
the hillcrest to the right or between the grand structures. But those forms are as
insignificant now to us as would be the backs of the chairs.
The sea of paving and the fence separate the cafe from the monument.
Beyond the fence is another world of rugged fields, accentuated trees, scattered
walls, clustered houses, wandering paths, and, sitting above them, the mount
with its magical world. The gate is open, and one wide path moves upward
from a point just about on line with the set of verticals we noticed earlier. A
branch of the path caresses the outstanding tree. The cafe and monument relate
by space to space. One might be incomplete without the other.
The guidebook makes no mention of the cafe as part of the Acropolis. We
can surely take our fill of the famous ruin without stopping here to view it. The
cafe is a good distance outside the ruin. Yet, in providing the border and the
frame for the ruin, the cafe enters into relationship with it and brings out its best
qualities. In turn, the ruin takes an interest in what is outside it. It springs forth
to give an organizing sense to what may be far off. The ruin reaches to our seat
in the cafe where we have come for relaxation and refreshment—and the view.
We get more than the view, the scenic picture. We are able to participate in the
spatial repercussions that flow from the mount.
Even the cafe enjoys sitting in the sun, taking in the view, with no people
to distract it. The cafe is relaxed. We notice the sag in the seat of the chair near
the center and the crumpled backrest of its companion. The human presence is
the invisible contemplation of the visible. We speculate, over our cold drink,
about who is the spectator. The organization of our companions, the chairs,
echoes the alignment of pillars in Parthenon and Erechtheion. The mount is
visually balanced by the houses lower down on the left and by a hazy moun
tainous background. On the right, the nearby tree provides the terminus.
Our chairs are bounded too. On their right is a large, incomprehensible
shadow, fortunately geometrical, that stops any movement away. On the far
left, a chair is losing its backrest, as if divesting itself of a sweater in the heat. It
addresses the phalanx of chairs much as the Erechtheion does the Parthenon. A
miscellany of chairs in lower left, center, and right confirms the accidentalness
of our discovery of relationship. We could have chosen any of these other seats.
In the front row, our view of the sight would have been unimpeded. A strict and
perfect order exists to the placement of all the chairs visible, including the ones
seen singly. Their disposition is fully deducible.
How many chairs are at each table? Three, of which the two more notable
ones face the diagonal toward upper right. These seats would be taken first. The
beverage lists hang discreetly from the left side of the tables. The third chair is
placed alongside the table, facing the lower right, creating a diagonal that cross
es underneath the setting of the mount with its emphatically centered edge. The
third chair has its back to the view, facing the sun. In its waiting state, it proves
no obstacle to the two principal chairs. The third chair is an auxiliary that we
can move for access to the table or the view.
We deduce that the chair on the lower left is an auxiliary, as is the chair at
our own table in the center, while that in the right corner is the left-hand mem
ber of the principal seats at the next table. You can now determine exactly
which seat we occupy. We? Yes, I occupy it, and so do you. We are in this
thing together.
Such rigor of geometrical thinking upon what ordinarily is inconsequen
tial fits the sight. The ruin extends its activity to where we sit. Although bring
ing the great Acropolis down to the level of a sidewalk cafe is an incongruity,
the intentionality of the sacred mount justifies the experience. The Acropolis is
placed to reach out to all the mundane activities of city and countryside. It does
not mean to be seen just for itself. Whatever goes on must have relationship to
it. It is the senior partner in all contexts from which it may be seen. The soul of
Athens, the heart of Greek identity.
The Greek government, ably represented by Minister of Culture Melina
Mercouri, has demanded the return of the Parthenon Marbles, known in Britain
as the Elgin Marbles, from the British Museum in London, to the Acropolis.
The mercurial Minister argued that the continued absence of these treasures in
distant hands, instead of in place in the ruin, is a defacement of a national
monument that requires restitution. This is more than an issue of proprietorship
of artistic treasures. National pride is at stake, as Greece continues to reclaim
its identity from those powers that exploited or neglected it.
The case against return of the marbles reminds us that had not the Scot,
Lord Elgin, shipped them to England at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
they would subsequently have been destroyed, vandalized, worn away, or sto
len by the French. The Caryatid boldly carried bodily from the Erechtheion,
and now in the British Museum, is in superb condition. She survived the abduc
tion. Her compatriots left in place to face the elements and the polluted Athe
nian atmosphere fared so badly that the Greeks had to remove them and replace
them with replicas. If the original Parthenon marbles would not sustain being
returned to site, then what is the gain in changing their abode from one museum
to another? In their present museum, they continue to be available to the world,
in fidelity to Phidias, so that the Greek heritage has not been diminished.
Finally, runs the argument against restitution, a bad precedent would be
established by returning artworks after a century or more to their country of ori
gin, since vast public collections, gathered at much expense and considerable
bloodshed, would have to be broken up, resulting in an international reconstitu
tion of the museum world. The scale of such exchanges would be too great a
boon for recipients to manage and too great a loss for possessors to afford. To
return the marbles is to ruin the art world. A statute of limitations must apply to
repatriation of statues.
The rebuttal: Something has been torn from the Greek heart, and that
heart yearns for its return. The fragments are imprisoned as museum pieces, al
beit in some of the finest museum rooms in the world, whereas their proper ex
istence is as parts of a ruin. They have lost the essential to their identity. To say
that they are well-presented to the public calls for revision. They are, well, mis
represented to the public. Granted that England is proud of its care for Western
civilization, including the Greek contribution, and so shares indirectly in the
meaning of the fragments, yet the value of the pieces is greater to Greece as the
substance of its continued civilization.
Ancient Greece can be alive in Greece in ways that it can never live in
England, because of the continuity that is Greece. Interruptions of the Greek
destiny are due to others who decided what to make of its culture. Greece has
been victimized. In the game of world culture, it had lost its marbles.
The Acropolis is the image of the Greek tragedy. Its divine Parthenon was
blown open in 1687, when a Venetian mortar shelled the Turkish powder mag
azine. Greece has a claim upon others for making itself whole again. The frag
ments from the Acropolis are like the islands of the Aegean. The precedent es
tablished by the return of the marbles need not apply to paintings and objets
d ’art that are independent and have no attachment to place. The pieces in disp
ute have a different kind of being (Gr.: onta). This is an ontological, and logi
cal, dispute.
The marbles are missing pieces that deprive the national monument of its
due. Continued refusal to return its fragments affronts Greece’s dignity. It can
not part with the identity that springs from the nation’s heart. Greece is wound
ed. The marbles are not a commodity transportable like a work of art. They are,
in sum, a symbol.
The United Kingdom might not sufficiently appreciate the significance of
the dispute in these terms. In Britain, discussion has taken the more literal
terms of the legalities of acquisition, ownership, and international obligation.
Britain is being called upon for a symbolic gesture appropriate to the symbolic
meaning of the fragments for the Greeks. Such a gesture would be to return the
pieces despite the legalisms. This would affirm the magnanimity of the British
people, while re-authenticating a common tie to Greek civilization. Chiefly, it
would give the laurel to modern Greece for also being ancient Greece (although
Christianity interrupted the continuity). This symbolic gesture might lead to
spiritual invigoration at the two extremities of Europe.
Yet to be satisfactorily answered is how and where the pieces will be
placed if returned. If they are stuck in a Greek museum on the Acropolis, then
they will not have returned as part of the monument, though they have come
back into national hands. Acquisitions of which citizens may be proud, they
would not be animators of the ruin. What good is getting fragments kept so
long from the ruin only to keep them from the ruin for the sake of protecting
them? Would the Greeks be imitating the practices of others against which they
have so long complained? Will the pieces prove disappointing, even if housed
in as noble a museum setting as their present quarters, because they still are
seen as museum pieces instead of as integral to the nearby ruin?
The Greeks are in danger of taking a loss in winning the dispute. If they
were to put the fragments back in place, they would reanimate the ruin, but how
will they withstand criticism for exposing priceless treasures to ruin? On this
score, too, they may lose by appearing ill-equipped to manage their national
heritage. However, even if the fragments were ruined by returning them to the
Acropolis, the British might find the gesture worth their while as symbolic act.
These negotiations require a philosopher. I’m ready!
Some of the greatest Greek ruins are outside of Greece in southern Italy
and Sicily, and we find notable examples of Hellenic works in Turkey. This is
because the scope of ancient Greece and of its Greater Greece does not corre
spond with present-day Greek statehood. Italy and Turkey are enormously en
dowed with ruins from a multitude of civilizations.
Turkey is eclectic in its treasury and treatment of ruins. The Turkic peo
ples arrived in Anatolia in the eleventh century on lands which had sustained
great civilizations, including the Hittites, Greeks, Romans, and Christians.
Modern Turks take all this in stride. A superb range of riches of every kind has
come within their control. Grand and strange ruins attest to the scope and inclu
siveness of Turkish history.
Embedded in the crown jewel of Turkish civilization, Istanbul, former
capital of the Ottoman Empire, are the remains of Constantinople, the jewel of
Eastern Christianity and the Eastern Roman Empire. And within these remains
are traces of a prior Greek city, Byzantium. The name of the place speaks of
envelopment of the past. Istanbul is the Turkified rendering of Stanbul or Stam-
boul, which still designates a quarter of the metropolis and is the Westerners’
shortened form of Constantinopolis, the city of Constantine, that signals a
Greek-speaking Christianized Roman Empire.
When I taught in Istanbul, in 1965, before going to class, I would sit in
the Roman Forum, near an Egyptian obelisk and a serpentine column from
Delphi, not far from Haghia Sophia/Aya Sophya, the celebrated Christian basi
lica, later a mosque, now a secular museum, and I would appreciate the master
piece of Islamic architecture, the Blue Mosque of Sultan Ahmet.
On the Aegean coast of Turkey, much attention is given the Hellenic
cities of Ephesus and Pergamon, graced with many formal beauties and note
worthy for their large size. At Pergamon (Pergamum, Pergamos, Pergamus,
Bergama), the city that gave its name to parchment, a column to the left and
130 7 ///: afst /iftics of ruins
PI. 39. Pergamon, Turkey, 1965

one to right in the background continue their good offices. In 1965, another fig
ure draws our attention, as a central attraction (PI. 39). Most of the stones are
freestanding. One has been turned toward the left, making our passage more
personal. Gray cement in the center supports a single white block That cement
is necessary to the distant figure positioned as if at an altar. Original pieces and
cement columns form a pleasing statuary.
Strolling through Pergamon, we are figures lost among stones. Greeted by
disconnected pieces, we are fellow wanderers in the sunshine. The scattered re
mains occasionally unify as a meaningful assemblage. To left and right, the fig
ured columns upon steps bid us rise between them. They frame the seen.
Turkey is the proud home of monumental curiosities, including the Hittite
ruins at Bogazkoy (Hattusha), the partly submerged ruins at Pamukkale (Turk.:
“Cotton Castle,” Hierapolis), the Roman theater at Aspendos, and the Byzan
tine rock-churches and dwellings in Urgiip (Cappadocia). Modern Turkey is
the successor to all this. Yet in 1966, at the exposition of a thousand years of
Turkish art circulated by the Smithsonian Institution, in the United States, I
heard someone protest, “Most of it is not Turkish!” Though this might be true
in an art-historical sense, it misses the self-conception of Turkish civilization.
Unlike their neighbors, the Greeks, the Turks do not have a political need
to identify themselves through ruins. They make little of the ruins, which are
taken for granted as part of the Turkish world. Turkey is one of the rare coun
tries of Asia that Europe never colonized. To the contrary, in its earlier identity
as the Ottoman Empire, Turkey ruled the Balkans in Europe, for centuries.
Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938), the quintessential Young Turk, who fought
the Western powers, and the Greeks, took the name Atatiirk (1934), Father of
the Turks, and moved the capital from Istanbul, in Europe, to Ankara in Asia,
in a burning wasteland close to the Hittite capital. A symbolic gesture.
While only three percent of its territory remains in Europe, Turkey is
resolute on being admitted to the European Union. The EU has yet to admit that
this Muslim country is part of Europe, though 4,287,609 Turks work in Euro
pean countries. Europeans have not understood the liberation of Turkey from
the Ottoman Empire and its development as a secular, Westernized, state.
The Italians are proud of the Greekness of the Greek ruins in Italy on two
accounts. (1) As evidence that the Italians are the natural successors, via the
Romans, of the Greeks. (2) As things of beauty that naturally inhabit their land.
The Greek temples at Paestum (Poseidonia) and those on Sicily are perfectly at
home in their Italian setting. Greek ruins in Italy and Turkey are far from that
Greekness insisted upon in experiencing similar ruins in Greece. Nationalism
steals into ruins and makes them symbols. Nations sort among the available ru
ins to make their choices.
Israel, like Greece, is a struggling modern state, once ancient, that suf
fered under the control of others for millennia. Like Greece, Israel has had to
fight for its independence and territorial integrity against more powerful and
populous Muslim neighbors. Both countries were under the Turkish yoke for
hundreds of years. Both have complained of the intervention of the Western
powers in the legitimate expansion of their territory. The ancient culture of both
has been fundamental to Western civilization.
Israel, like Turkey and Italy, is blessed with a mixed heritage of ruins.
Among its prehistoric, Jewish, Roman, Christian, and Islamic ruins, the Bibli
cal ruins elicit keen national interest in the world’s only Jewish state. While the
other sites are significant in world history and impressive aesthetically, the
Jewishness of ruins impassions the nation, especially if they relate to the He
brew Bible. Mutual authentication is involved. The Bible verifies the ruin; it
helps put it meaningfully on the map. The ruin fits the fundamental context that
has held the people together as a nation, although they were scattered across the
Earth without a state. The Bible confirms in the ruin the Jewishness of the land,
the Land of Israel, Ha Eretz Yisroel.
In turn, the ruin confirms the Bible’s reliability, not necessarily as God’s
teaching, but as the historical record of an ancient people who endure. The ruin
makes the Bible live. This Bible is no mere collection of stories and imagin
ings. It is an authentic expression of events and experiences that occurred to in
dividuals and tribes at times and places we seek to identify. The Bible is given
new significance, as the same people, the descendants of the ancient ones, take
control of the same lands. The Bible nowadays may serve in Israel more as a
register of claims for real estate than as a set of guiding myths.
Or else the mythic power of the sacred book has been invested in the
identity of the territory. Ha Eretz Yisroel, as used by Prime Minister Menachem
Begin (1913-1992), was no neutral term for the location of the state. It was a
mystical expression of the nation’s destiny in the Promised Land. Zionism in
the nineteenth century sought a homeland for the Jews, their own state, even if
it were to be in Uganda. But later Zionism won a concession from Great Bri
tain, the mandated power, in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, of a Jewish home
land in Palestine, limited by the provision, “it being clearly understood that
nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of ex
isting non-Jewish communities in Palestine” (Eban, 1968, p. 357).
Begin’s Zionism, which I observed while on a peace mission in 1981, was
a quest for Jewish control of all of Palestine, and more besides, in a Greater Is
rael. Where Biblically were Jews, there Jews should again be. The occupied
portions of the West Bank of the Jordan, formerly administered by Jordan, were
assigned the official Israeli names of Judea and Samaria, until a succeeding Is
raeli government grudgingly acknowledged their identity as Palestine.
In my boyhood, before the creation of the State of Israel (1948),
“Palestine” was the name used for the Holy Land revered by Jews who sought
to make it an independent state. It remains the name of the Holy Land revered
by Arabs (Christian and Muslim) who have been trying to make it an independ
ent state.
Archaeological digs that unearth the Jewishness of the land confirm the
political push of Israel. Such a site is Masada (Heb.: “fortress”), a terrifying
place, a bare rock of dizzying height, without shade or vegetation, in the unin
habited desolation that rises from the burning bank of the Dead Sea, under the
open oven of the sun (PI. 40). Life, an outsider, is in danger here. Water is
pumped in, a cable car leaps toward the summit, and corrugated lean-tos give
respite from the oppressiveness of the uncaring heavens.
At Masada, each of our steps must be tentative to avoid over-exertion and
a tumble. Our feet, heartbeat, breath, and epidermis are cautiously alerted to the
ruin. We experience it through a wide range of bodily organs and functions that
we rarely call upon for aesthetic enjoyment. We move slowly, gingerly, about a
broad summit marked by strange structures and vague areas. We are quite un
at-home.
The materials are magnificent in their bold bareness. Big boulders have
been lifted from, then piled upon, the rock. The ruins of Masada spring out of
the barren mountain, a miracle in the desert. While the forms and uses are hu
man, the ruin repels human presence. It does not welcome us in its timeless sol
itude. It has freed itself from its history and our needs. We are obliged to recog
nize its awesome autonomy.
It draws us to the edges for its defiant view of the humanless world. We
see the grand mountains of the chain over which it towers, the salt lake that dis
solves into the burning atmosphere and is held in uneasy suspension, the plum
met of the footpath on which several people, single-file, move away like brown
ants seen by a giant. Something is sickening in all this. We run the hazard of
being overwhelmed. The ruin cares nothing if we drop from the sun, trip behind
a wall, or lean over far enough to take the fastest route down.
We are sobered by the Roman encampments that are visible from above,
neatly assembled walls of stone that enclose habitable spaces. They wait and
watch. Masada is permanently encircled. Assailable. The studied simplicity of
the encampments reminds us of the human conflict involved in the ruin. The
curved beauty of the final ramp is an incongruity. It is the means by which the
fortress was brought to ruin. Terrible drama is connected with the sublime ruin.
Thanks to the guide, guidebook, signs, postcards, and physical context, we can
not shake off the meaning of the ruin from its aesthetics.
Here, as Josephus Flavius (ne Yoseph ben Mattathias, 37 CE-95 CE?)
tells us, was a final heroic struggle in 73 CE for Jewish liberation against Ro
man oppression. The complex at Masada has become a monument to the Jew
ish will to survive. Ingenuity in the arrangements is apparent, once we are in
structed didactically. The defenders adapted to their needs the royal palace that
Herod the Great had built to serve in troubled times. Their alterations, in turn,
suffered ruination. The defenders realize that the surrounding forces have them
trapped on the fortress, with no hope for victory or escape. Eleazar the Zealot
encourages them to take their fate in their own hands (from Greek), “since we
are bom to die”:
While our hands are free and hold swords, let them yet render a service
able deed, as unenslaved by enemies, we must die free men, taking with
us the lives of our children and wives. This our laws command, this our
wives and children beseech, this necessity is imposed by God. This is the
very opposite of what the Romans desire, for they fear that any of us will
die before their conquest. Let us hasten to deny them their anticipated en
joyment, leaving them instead to be astonished by our death and amazed
by our courage. (Josephus, 1928, bk. 7, pp. 612, 614)
Josephus imagined the speech in Hebrew and wrote it in Greek for appro
bation by the provincial government serving under the Latin-speaking imperial
rule. Subsequently, it was translated into Hebrew for posting at the site.
At Masada, the dream of freedom turned to ruin. Though defeated, the
dream assumed a powerful unity in the mind. More than a place, Masada be
came a defining moment in the history of the Jewish spirit. Intense interest in
creased in the place when Jewish history finally brought a state back into the
Land of Israel. The ruin makes real the historicity of the spiritual event. The ev
ent makes the ruin take on a special glow as the goal of a pilgrimage, monu
ment of a nation, symbol of a commitment.
Modem Israelis maintain an ambivalent judgment concerning the merit of
the defenders’ last act at Masada. For a few, it remains the noblest gesture of
courage unto death. Masada means freedom or death. Jews will never again
permit enslavement and vile execution as the pleasures of their oppressors.
For others, the gesture made at Masada is one that Jews can never again
allow themselves. For Jews to destroy themselves to avoid being taken by their
oppressors is to carry out their oppressors’ aims. Instead of committing suicide,
Jews should kill their oppressors, no matter the odds. Masada is a current image
that stands for a moment that continues to face the Jewish people. The response
that Israel makes to Masada is subsumed under its existential cry as a nation,
“Never again!”
The “Masada Complex” is the monumental drive in the Israeli will to sur
vive. A siege mentality that sees each confrontation as a threat to survival. Gen
ocide is the nightmare that haunts every Jew. World War II launched a defini
tive program designed to eliminate all of them—all of us (PI. 90). One in three
Jews was killed. Terciated. Those that remain are hypersensitive to the reemer
gence of another Final Solution (die Endlosung).
The State of Israel was born in 1948 while invaded by six countries. It
had to fight for its life. In subsequent wars as well, the state’s existence ap
peared at stake. Masada loomed in the mind of the nation. Officers who com
pleted training in the Israeli armed forces were ceremoniously acknowledged in
a candlelit ceremony at Masada, including a procession to the summit and vigil
at the top. Here they took their oaths: “Masada shall not fall again!”
The Masada Complex means that extraordinary effort could be engen
dered by the nation for its self-defense with an ingenuity of arrangements. Is
rael’s vitality is largely due to its shared sense of precariousness, living under a
sentence of nonexistence pronounced by others far more numerous. Strong
community spirit dwells in the small country with enormous cultural and politi
cal diversity, and it may be due to the recognition that all will die together un
less they are ready to fight together. This threat of total destruction has pro
duced impressive achievements in nation-building.
But the Masada Complex in the thinking of the Begin government and its
successors had a way of turning every disputed issue into a matter of survival,
every unfriendly act into a threat to national existence. The confidence of self-
sufficiency in defense became an arrogant belligerency that taunted the rest of
the world. Over-reaction turns into overweening pride. Chutzpah. Insistent on
its national integrity, Israel became interventionist. Begin (Nobel Peace Prize,
1978) began by invading Lebanon in 1982, hoping to strike at Syria. Masada,
emblem of the refusal of defeat, threatens to become the emblem of implacable
destruction waged on all enemies from within Fortress Israel.
I heard the story that when Begin visited the Pyramids of Giza outside
Cairo with President Anwar al-Sadat (also Nobel Peace Prize, 1978), he ut
tered, “What hard work by the Jews!”, having in mind the Exodus story of Jew
ish enslavement. Sadat, however, took offense at the slighting of Egyptians in
building the pyramids. Recent archaeological excavation by Zahi Hawass has
brought to life a tomb complex for the Egyptian workers at Giza, adding sup
port to hieroglyphic documentation that public service was a standing require
ment for the erection of such national projects. Begin and Sadat were a case of
mixed symbols. Qa date. They did not have the chance to begin over.
I will add my observation to the case. In an Egyptian temple, I saw the
following signature carved on a wall, high up out of easy reach:
Having survived and succeeded for more than fifty years as a nation-state,
thanks to the force of arms, Israel struggles off and on to make peace. This re
quires giving up land it has conquered and settled, while a hostile nation-state is
built from ruins next door. Palestine will be what the Israelis have not yet de
stroyed. Israel has been too successful in pursuit of the War Process, which is
paraded about under the guise of the Peace Process.
Palestine, led by Yasser Arafat, has never failed to miss an opportunity
for ending the war. Both countries would do well to rethink their myths and to
recognize that they share the same ancestor, Abraham/Ibrahim, the same
Semitic/semantic roots for peace (Heb.: ShaLoM\ Arab.: SaLaaM), and the
same land.
A wall in East Jerusalem (Heb.: Yerushalayim, “Peace Will Come!”) at
tracts our attention. In 1981, checkpoints control access to it, and a machine-
gun nest is tucked atop it. We are obliged to observe decorum. This is not like
other tourist sites. It is in deadly earnest.
The space that leads to the Wall works magically to calm us and gently
conduct us forward with its downward slope. The space defers to the Wall,
without magnifying it or overwhelming us. It is just the right size for the reflec
tive, uncoerced encounter of the individual with layers of stone, yet it is as spa
cious as need be for the comfortable movement of sizable crowds.
The space is heartwarming because of its reasonable size, uneven yet in
teresting edges, agreeableness to human presence, open simplicity in a city of
crowded forms, and honest and humane approach to the Wall. This space pul
sates, as if we were in the palm of a great hand or the chamber of a great spirit.
One of the world’s finest spaces, the Israelis created it by tearing down a lot of
old Arab houses.
A railing separates the direct access to the Wall from the surrounding
space. We may draw up to the rail and contemplate from here, at the right dis
tance for an observer, protected from the Wall’s immediate space. A partition
divides that space in two, and access by human beings is through separate
gates, one for males, the other for females. The section of Wall that we see re
served for females is approximately one-third of the whole.
We cannot help seeing the people at the Wall. They penetrate that space
reserved for the Wall. Their attitude is reverent attention. They address the
Wall with the fundament of their being manifested in the involuntary swinging
of the body’s exuberant innerness or in the silent fixity of the human form as if
entranced. The Wall emits an affective field. Attending to its visitors, it listens.
The Wall is not high. If higher, it would overwhelm. Instead of reaching
up, it reaches down with the patience of age. The Wall is anchored in the holy.
The Wall reaches forward as well. It comes out to the human pulsation, thanks
to the preparation of the space that we have traversed.
The blocks, even these greater ones at its base, are within the human scale
and show in their size, shape, and finish the touch of the human hand. Many
blocks are rough, worn, and uneven. They have not broken free of their service
to the identity of the Wall.
The flooring of the inner space is smooth, even flawless. We are unaware
of it. We do not mind our step, and no stumbling occurs. The “floor” is continu
ous with the stonework of the space behind us. Neither ground nor floor, it is
space in which we exist. The Wall meets the heart across the purity of space.
Books are brought to the Wall. Near the partition are tables with texts.
Prayers are read and intoned before the Wall. Even the silent person with
closed eyes may be reciting. The Wall is textual, scriptural, discursive. It is in

silent dialogue. It receives messages. Meaning is breathed in the space before
the Wall. Meaningfulness is brought to the Wall by its participants who find it
full of meaning.
The Wall is also a cipher, an aleph, a root of meaning whose full articula
tion awaits the human heart. The Wall is a sounding board of the heart, a reso
nant terminus. Nothing is thought of as being beyond the Wall. The Wall does
not speak to what is on the other side of it. It has within itself endless depth,
walling nothing in or out. The Wall is self-existent. In a word, a ruin. Its whole
ness is gone, and its holiness is present.
Further checkpoint at the gate, obligation to cover our head and wash our
hands. All at once, we are at one with the Wall. As we face the Wall and look
into its face, all else around us disappears. Our back to the world, our heart is to
the Wall.
We come closer still, always under the watchful eye of the Wall, the in
nerness that we sense of its existence. About a meter away, just a few feet, we
are at the best place (PI. 41). This is the optimal distance between human be
ings, within arm’s reach, eye-to-eye, but with a separating space that permits
freedom of movement. The Wall and the person respect each other. Just as we
see the veins in a person’s face and the dust caught upon the jacket, so now we
view at close hand the countenance of the Wall.
It bears signs of the millions of prayers to which it has listened and the
millions of tears that have fallen upon it. Prayers have been inserted in it. They
jam every crack within reach with the gaiety of their whiteness and occasional
color. People have plastered the chinks of the old Wall with their prayers. Some
are wedged in with a firmness that promises long duration. Well done, friend.
But how long will that petition (Yid.: kvitel) on a scrap of paper remain in place
in these weathered stones in the open air? Others have slipped from their secure
place and totter on the edge, twisted with passion and rotted by nature. Nothing
will save them from falling to the ground and being swept away. They don’t
have a prayer of remaining forever.
I have been watching a man praying with full heart and both hands upon
the Wall, swaying back and forth to the rhythm of his fervent whisper (Yid.:
davening). He is answered by a scrap of paper, the heart of someone else’s
heart, rolling out of the Wall and falling silently at his feet upon the ground.
The Wall is impregnated with these hopes of the heart, gestures of com
munication with the incommunicado, insistences on meaning to the stones that
stand mute. The Wall shudders with the pathos of its burden, as if it retains
God’s presence (Heb.: Shekinah). The messages are not attached on the surface.
They are pressed into the stones. Entrances, probings of the innerness of the
Wall. Proof of the innerness of people. The scraps without the Wall would be
only fragments of yearning. The Wall without the prayers would be only stone,
The Ruin ns Symbol
PI. 41. The Western (Wailing) Wall, Past Jerusalem, Israel, 1981
untouched by suffering. The Wall has to care, because we insist on it. It resides
with benign intention and unassailable dignity. We come to the end at the Wall,
but it opens its heart to us. Something is at the end, infinitely saddened by, but
endlessly receptive of, our woes.
A chair waits before the Wall, a presence before a presence. The chair sits
on perfectly smooth fitted-stones, upon which we also stand. This is the world
in our control. The stones of the Wall overawe our world, as they block it and
outreach it. The chair is too close for comfort. Even to stand at the Wall is to be
dwarfed by it. Our face would be at the level of the block on the second row, it
self an unseeing face with furrowed forehead. It keeps its thoughts to itself.
Prayers have been inserted above the block, in the very crack that crosses
it, on its left side as if in its ear, and under its chin. Invisible people have sought
to humanize the impassive block by pressing their longing upon it. The blocks
to left and right and underneath have lost their stern face. Have they worn away
under the care of so many a prayer? The hollow cheeks of the lower block are
caverns for the stuffing of the heart’s utterances. Here they will be protected
from the occasional wind and the rare rain an<J slowly turn to mold and dust,
making a powdery filler for the wall. The wall has been cemented with tears.
Before the Wall
I come as close to the Wall as my heart can bear.

This ruin has plenty of room for human care.
In its cracks and hollows caused by weeping and wear,
Shall I insert a tear, one kiss, or this form of prayer?
Pages torn from notebooks, pieces of cardboard, printed messages, small

envelopes, calling cards, writing on the back of advertisements, each is folded
for privacy and durability. They are piled upon one another. The heaped hu
manity must extend to the Wall’s heart, which could only weep upon reading
them. The welts of stone are polished imploringly by hands and lips. The pray
ers are the Wall’s tears.
The chair is placed where we can lean over and push our deepest longing
into the most protected recess of the Wall. Sitting here, we could reach out with
both arms to embrace this pathetic block, our forehead resting against it. The
Wall is a touchstone of the holy. We marvel at the size of the blocks, the
framed finish of the intact ones, the wear of the unfaced ones, the checkerboard
alternation of the ones with the others. We observe the nonchalant decorative
ness of the plants that spring out of the Wall in which prayers have been plant
ed. Is this the answer, after (W)all?
Our study of the Wall comes back to the empty chair, the human presence
in its finite form that dares to draw its seat up to the face of infinite mystery. A
long time, we contemplate this contemplation between chair and Wall, until we
are moved to walk away or sit down.
On the wall of the Hebrew School that I attended in Brooklyn in the
1940s was a framed photograph, in black and white, of the Wall with reverent
figures before it and wild outgrowths upon it. On how many other Schul walls
did the Wall take a haunting part? To be a Jew is to come up against a Wall.
On the Sabbath (Saturday), in 1981, a group of scholars on a study mis
sion was brought to the Wall to observe the prayers, the guide pointing out to
us in subdued tones features of the Wall’s holy use. A local soul advanced to
the group and loudly protested that we were desecrating the Sabbath, for one
member of our group was making notes in pencil. Strictly speaking, writing,
like other work, is forbidden on the holy day of rest. In Israel, someone is al
ways available to kibbitz, criticize, and forbid. The guide, a plucky young wom
an, born in Israel (a Sabra), answered in an equally loud voice that our friendly
interlocutor was violating the Sabbath. A heated interchange ensued on the top
ics of hospitality, tolerance, holiness, Judaism, the meaning of the Sabbath, and
the meaning of the Wall—which throughout remained silent.
Not long after, solemn ceremonies were to be held at the Wall in connec
tion with the first Incoming of Survivors of the Holocaust. An Israeli woman,
Member of Parliament (Knesset), was to be one of the speakers, but since the
ceremony would be held on the male side, a no-woman’s land, her presence
could not be permitted. The Wall, like the Holocaust, is segregated.
The Wall is alive. Higher up where the prayers cannot be inserted flourish
wild caper bushes (Capparis spinosa). They thrive on their host and suggest
that the whole Wall is an organic being. The bushes are expressions of life that
spring out of stone. Have they fed on the prayers? The bushes thrust outward
with superb indifference to the people. They do not listen to the recitations, for
they have songs of life to sing.
Finally, the finery of the vegetation gives such fineness to the Wall, that
we are relieved from the heaviness of the experience, the dread seriousness of
the place. The capering of the bushes is a welcome distraction. They have
found their way and made a life for themselves. Incongruity is established.
Someone, asked what he saw when visiting the Wall, answered, “Weeds.”
The stone has withstood so much for so long, while the life forms upon it
are so transitory and may be plucked out in an instant, that the Wall may be
amusing itself by tolerating them. These are no gorgeous flowers planted or
heaped upon the ruin in its honor. They are plain desert wildflowers that take
upon themselves to bloom in the Wall. The exceptionally careful maintenance
of the surrounding space and the stone floor in which no weed is allowed con
trast with this unkempt feature of the Wall that is irrepressibly noticeable. What
can be the meaning of allowing plants to grow in the Wall?
We recognize the decision to allow the plants to stay. To weed the Wall
regularly and spray it with herbicide so that no living thing marred its being
would be quite easy. The choice has been to live and let live, to allow the Wall
to grow by means of this form of life, just as it grows by means of human life.
This randomness and caprice of life softens the Wall’s load. It confirms the ru
inedness of the ruin. Unthinkable that walls of intact buildings be allowed to
sprout plants. The ruinedness here is not otherwise disguised as, say, by replac
ing the greatly worn stones and refinishing the others.
This ruin needs its ruinedness. That is the whole point of its meaning. The
vegetation underscores that meaning. We may see it, too, as a prayer inserted
by life into the bare stone. Like its human counterparts, the caper plants must
come unworked sometime, though they hold on to their crevice for all their life.
Despite the tenacity of their being, they, too, are mortal visitors to the Wall.
Their living aspiration is a fitting companionship, not a degradation of the
Wall. At times, no one is at the Wall. It is left alone to breathe more easily in
our absence, but never without its living internalization of hope.
The stones are the remains of the western wall (ha-kotel ha-ma’aravi) that
surrounded the Temple of Herod the Great, the Third Temple, which replaced
the ruins of the Second Temple, the reconstruction by Zerubbabel, of the ruins
of the Temple of Solomon, the First Temple, which was built to house the Ark
of the Covenant. Of all Jewish shrines, this was the holiest of holies. Solomon’s
Temple was destroyed in 586 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian King,
who carried off the Jewish people in captivity. The Second Temple was com
pleted about 515 BCE. Its successor, Herod’s Temple, completed in 20 BCE,
was utterly destroyed in the year 70 CE by the Romans, who carried off the
holy trophies to Rome, as depicted on the Arch of Titus at the foot of the ruins
of the Roman Forum.
Gone are the Ark, the Temple, and, until 1948, a Jewish homeland. Al
most gone from earth were the Jewish people. They were stuck into the cracks
of the world like weeds. This section of Wall was the rallying point of the spirit
of Judaism for hundreds of years. The ruin of the Temple symbolized the Jew
ish nation’s ruin in their dispersion and powerlessness. But the Wall remained,
as did a Jewish people, with a longing for unity and home. The Wall was the
touchstone of Jewish sorrow.
When I was a child, it was called the Wailing Wall. Here the tears of a
disbanded nation were shed, and here the Wall, in turn, was said to weep for its
scattered people and its lost glory. Exudation of moisture in the insalubrious
quarter may have accounted for the aqueous phenomenon. The broken Wall
joined the broken-hearted in lamentation.
In 1967, East Jerusalem fell to the Israelis, and the Jewish people were re
united with their Wall. Photographs show soldiers who liberated the Wall lean
ing forward and kissing it with all their heart. Then the Jewish state joined itself
with the Wall, so as never again to endure the separation. The unification of
Jerusalem as the Israeli capital (1980), not recognized by the community of na
tions, is the healing of a separation in the soul of Judaism. The state refuses to
conceive of Israel without the Wall. The ruin of being Jewish has lasted too
long. Now is the time of wholeness. The Wailing Wall weeps no more. Offi
cially, it is the Western Wall. What do Jews have to weep about today?
The Wall is a symbol of holiness and at-homeness, of national sovereign
ty and identity as a people. The boundary marker of the dispersion and the
homecoming. It embodies, but transcends, that long, painful history.
Reasonable arguments are available for the repartition of Jerusalem or for
the internationalization of parts of the city. Dissatisfaction reigns in internation
al circles that Israel should have permanent sovereignty over the entire city, be
cause of the success of its arms. Annexation by conquest is officially frowned
upon. But we must consider the symbolic significance of the ruin to the Israeli
identity, just as we have to consider the meaning of the fragments from the
Acropolis to the Greek nation.
After all they have suffered, the Jews of Israel cannot bear to give up the
Wall again. The Wall existing within the context of the Holy City, made whole
again within a viable Jewish state in the Holy Land, signals the completion of
history. Previous suffering is redeemed. Where had been but ruins will now be
wholeness. The Wall is the answer to Masada. Hence, proposals to divide Jeru
salem threaten the spiritual survival of the nation and exacerbate the Masada
Complex. Would that the Israelis open their hearts to the Palestinian quest for a
homeland, centered in Jerusalem, al-Quds (Arab.: “The Holy”), reuniting their
dispersed and oppressed peoples.
The Wall’s pious humanity is touching. I lean over and touch the Wall. It
is surprisingly soft to the touch, as if I were touching another’s fingers. Such
outgoing energy from the stone makes me feel that the Wall is touching me.
Here millions of fingers have touched. Perhaps they have given this shaping
and texture to the Wall that admits each person’s ten fingers.
The self has come up against a wall. No passing beyond it. We stand
hand-in-hand. The Wall has taken my hand. I have reached an end, but the ter
minus responds to my reaching out. Standing alone, my hands upon the Wall,
facing into the stone, I am not alone. The Wall joins hands with who I am, and
the touch of the million others who have stood here tingles in my finger tips.
Connected to the ground and the Wall by my extremities, I undergo the
flow between my heart and that of the Wall. Being has been reunited. The spirit
is refreshed by the charge. I touch the Wall’s outer surface, but I have entered it
through an opening, just as the prayers and our fellow living things, the vegeta
tion, have found their way in. The Wall’s vitality courses through my being. By
my touch, the Wall has entered and found me human.
In the renewed heartbeat of life, time has ceased. Nowhere to go. We have
come to the end. No path is open before us, no gate, no one. The Wall fills the
entirety of the visual field. The ruin is the whole of our world. We may lean
further forward and kiss it. In this act of intimacy, the final connection is made,
having reached the end, the last free choice of Being, which is love.
The Wall has another side to it, as does everything in the Middle East. We
mount stairs to the right, past a checkpoint, through an archway, and enter the
third holiest site of Islam. Here is the resplendent Dome of the Rock (691 CE),
the oldest Islamic building in the world, a marvel of bright pattern and pure
form capping the summit of Mt. Moriah. Here the Prophet Jesus prayed to the
One God (Allah) who had created him as a human being for a mission on Earth.
Here the Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven, in a night journey on the
back of the donkey Buraq, and entered the Divine Presence.
The summit houses the El-Aksha (Arab.: “furthest [from Mecca]”)
Mosque (710-715 CE), a museum, and spacious grounds occupying the site of
Solomon’s Temple. The Wall was an outer wrapper. From up here, we can only
see the top of it. The Wall loses our interest. Once here, we have no awareness
of any outside, for this is the crowning height, the sacred center, Haram es-
Sharif\ the Noble Sanctuary.
The Muslims limit approach to the East Gate of the city that once entered
this enclosure. Through this Golden Gate, Gate of Mercy, Compassion, or Re
pentance, the Jewish Messiah would presumably enter Jerusalem. To forestall
such a move, a cemetery was planted in front of the gate, since no procession is
permitted through a burial ground. The Turks took the further precaution of
sealing the gate. In 1981, as I approached the gate, thinking to call out, “Open
Sesame!”, a Muslim guard firmly warned me away from it. I will never be
more flattered.
The Palestinians and the Israelis are between a rock and a hard place. A
Wall stands between Muslims and Jews. Coming up against the Wall, each fails
to see through it. The Wall is two-sided and ambivalent. It partakes of the holi
est sites for two world-religions whose peoples may detest one another. These
ruins are the inevitable clash of symbols. Within an hour, you may lay your
hands on the Wall, the Rock, and on the stone on which the Cross stood. Jeru
salem is the world’s center of hands-on holiness and heartfelt hostility.
Access to the summit beyond the Wall, the Temple Mount, is forbidden to
Orthodox Jews by the high rabbinate, because of the terrible holiness of the
inner sanctum that housed the Ark. Here, too, was the rock upon which Abra
ham (ne Abram) was to have sacrificed Isaac (Heb.: “he who laughs”), no
laughing matter. On 28 September 2000, Ariel Sharon, exercising his right to
visit sites within the state of Israel, entered the Temple Mount, accompanied for
his protection by one thousand security agents. All hell broke loose. A few
months later, Sharon became Prime Minister. The War Process continues under
Sharon and President of Palestine, Yasser Arafat (Nobel Prize for Peace, 1994).
The poetics of ruin must have room for the politics of ruin.
Scottish ruins are maintained with exemplary meticulousness. The lawns

are as striking as the ruins. They are graciously green in a country destined to
be gray. Most noteworthy about them is the exceptional smoothness of the
grass and the extremely low, uniform level of its cut. In a climate that assures a
good watering, and in a landscape that adores a rude rockiness, we expect the
countryside ruins to exhibit touches of neglect, overgrowth, even unevenness.
So much care is apparent in the strict maintenance of ruins, as if the edifices
were still in use, that we are made aware of the national pride in ruins.
The perfect state of the lawn of a Scottish ruin is a pleasurable incongrui
ty. No lawn party will be held here. No abbot or laird will cast a discerning eye
upon its condition. The ruin does not need its lawn. Yet there it is, wherever we
go in Scotland. The soil is rolled until it assumes a seamless oneness, then the
grass is cut to barely raise its blades above the ground. The ground that we see
is green. The patterns of the to-and-fro passage of the mower and roller are vis
ible, which makes the lawn yet more formal as if fitted in green stone.
Permanence and perfection are pronounced by the green gesture. The
ruin, we perceive, is valuable, frozen outside of time, held still by its flawless
grounds. The value placed upon it has suspended its destruction.
A cleanliness that abhors scraps of paper lying around assures that the
ruin has a pristine character unmarred by trash. An excellent national system
for the preservation and interpretation of monuments, including ruins, provides
uniform signage, uniformed guardians, standard hours, quality booklets and
postcards, reasonable entrance fees, and useful maps. No double standard exists
whereby ruins receive a lesser treatment than intact edifices. The ruin is kept as
neatly as the inhabited country-house or the complete castle.
Perhaps more so, because the increased activity in active places leads to
trampling of the grass and adaptation of stables or cellars to tea rooms. While
the intact and the occupied has the feel of the used and lived-in, the ruin is
above all that, dwelling in a purer state.
Until the end of the twentieth century, Scotland has lived in suspended
animation/animnation. The long and fiery opposition to its powerful neighbor
to the south, the cause of so many ruins in the borders country, has been quies
cent for over two centuries. In 1707, the two kingdoms of Scotland and Eng
land, then united under a single monarch, took the seemingly irrevocable step
of uniting their parliaments. Thenceforth, the Scottish representation in the
United Kingdom of Great Britain could only be a minority voice. The failed
uprising led by Charles Stewart in 1745 was the grand effort to free Scotland to
follow its destiny. Throughout Scotland, mementos of Bonnie Prince Charlie,
especially locks of his hair, are proudly displayed in museums and country-
houses. These are the talismans of a gallant lost cause.
Something remains unarticulated in the Scottish soul as manifested in its
curious history. That tale of violence and disunion is a series of impressive
fragments unsuccessfully seeking wholeness. Scottish identity had not quite

reached fullness during its subservience to a more comprehensive Britishness.
Yet Scotland held fast to the fragments of its identity, the history and dreams,
language and story, dress and manners, landscape and ruins, awaiting the day
of its revival. Its ruins were reminders of its incompletion. But not all kinds of
ruin are equally valued, as the following story suggests.
The Wall that Emperor Hadrian built (122-128 CE), across a narrow
waist/waste, was intended to keep the barbarians of the north of Britain from
preying upon the civilized world, whose northernmost boundary was therewith
established. The Wall is now entirely within England. Another wall, the Anto-
nine (ca. 142-145 CE), was given a try further north, now entirely within Sco
tland. The purport of a dividing line between civilization and barbarian is clear.
For the Romans, the Scots (and Piets and Saxons) were to be walled out.
Birrens is listed in the guidebooks to Roman Britain as one of the rare
forts north of Hadrian’s Wall, in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, a few miles from Ec-
clefechan. In 1982, in a hired motor car, we followed the instructions to Mid-
dlebie, seeking road signs to Birrens. None existed. I tried, in turn, each branch
road from Middlebie. They curved their way through the hills and fields. No ru
ins, only farms. Once we met a family strolling with their dog, Bobbie. Each
party stopped to let the other pass on the narrow dirt road. They had never
heard of Birrens, although a Roman site was at Burnswark. But for us, Birrens
must come before Burnswark. Each road led us back to Middlebie. In Scotland,
all roads lead to Middlebie, not to Rome.
Surely at Ecclefechan, which possesses Thomas Carlyle’s birthplace as a
national site, information about Birrens must be available. As the most likely
source, I chose the principal pub. The publican knew naught of Birrens, but
“Burnswark . . . . ’’ However, she brought the harried stranger into the lounge
room and called upon the local folk to consider the question. A Roman fort
struck all as vague.
From Scottish: “I have lived here 66 years and have never heard of such a
place,” confessed a resident. I resisted offering as a clue the original name of
Birrens: Blatobulgium.
“Wait a bit,” said another chap, pursuing his memory and pursing his lips,
as he weighed his mug of ale. “Birrens? Ay.” Then followed a description of a
road “to a strath with mickle trees on the right and a wee cottage on the left,” a
passage through a landscape that had been experienced. The good man took me
out into the high street of Ecclefechan and showed me the road to Middlebie.
He then repeated, with eyes closed, the several turnings at roundabouts and the
side roads to be taken. While he could not say that he had seen the ruin at Bir
rens, he appeared to be the only person in Ecclefechan who knew where Bir
rens was, or, at least, where it had been.
Motoring through Middlebie again, I saw the advantage to having strayed
down all the other combinations of road, for now I was less likely to go astray
in following the twists of the authenticated path. After many a new twist, I
greeted the family strolling with Bobbie. They invited us to a cuppa tea when
next we should meet.
After a long time, the mizzle had covered the windscreen, and I decided to
give it up, for we had come to a river bed, railroad, bridge, and major roadway.
But I reflected that to place a fort above the river would be a good thing, and
recalling the description of the big trees on the right and the little cottage on the
left, I surmised that we had just passed the site. Accordingly, I motored up the
hill, looking for a monument. A small, hand-lettered sign at the cottage said,
“Birrens House.”
Beyond it nothing. The site must be just across the road from it. I turned
around once more on the squealing tyres, and rolling past the cottage looked for
the usual carpark or at least a turnout. None. The verge on which I was obliged
to park was the grassy embankment of a field. The mudguard was wedged
against the mud, and bees buzzed about the bonnet. From the boot, I withdraw
my sketchbook. Then I proceeded on foot across the road to Birrens.
It was fenced ’round with barbed wire. No ticket wicket. A set of wooden
steps went over the wire, allowing people to move between fields, while pre
venting livestock and wildlife from doing the same. The top step had rotted
away. Hence, I had to step gingerly from one side of the fence to the other,
arching my crotch as high as I could. I made it. The other side of the fence was
a fiercely overgrown embankment. I crawled up the hillside, for no path or
steps were present, and, breathless, arrived at the top in the ruin of Birrens.
Nothing there. An overgrown field with not a stone visible. No trace of
form, no sign of meaning. Had I been mistaken? It could have been a fallow
pasture. The shape, though, was right. It had the size and levelness of a Roman
fort. The emplacement on the hillside above the river was appropriate. Slowly,
my conviction grew that this had to be it. Whereas ruins are the remains of in
visible originals, Birrens is the invisible ruin. Whereas we are often invited to
imagine the original, at Birrens we are obliged to imagine the ruin.
Here, as elsewhere in Scotland, Rome is not given equal treatment with
the Scottish ruin per se. People choose their ruins as an act of cultural identity.
Edinburgh (Gael.: Duneidean), “the Athens of the North,” is nestled upon
and below bold outcroppings. The old city mounts toward the Castle in an as
tonishing outline that, as seen from the new city, stands out as an Acropolis.
The new city has its own monumental mount available in Calton Hill. A sur
prising assemblage of grand forms here address the city below and invite a lei
surely stroll. The Lord Nelson Monument is in the form of a telescope that
provides a time signal, a witty choice that also refers to the observatory next
door. Monuments to the Scottish national poet, Robert Burns, and to the Scot
tish philosopher, Dugald Stewart, are in the form of ancient tholoi, Greek fu-
nerary markers. Cresting Calton Hill is the dignified parade of columns and lin
tels inspired by the Parthenon.
Edinburgh wears a Greek crown. The choice in ruins is for the Greek, not
the Roman. But the peristyle is unfinished. It is only a facade, though a lovely
one when seen from below. The rest of the columns were not put in place. This
is an unfinished echo of a famous ruin, for the city of Edinburgh, “Auld
Reekie” (“Old Smoky”), ambitious builder of the new town and the new monu
ments, ran out of money. Its Parthenon has been the symbol of the unfinished
character of Scottish national identity.
On 1 July 1999, the Scottish Parliament reconvened in Edinburgh, after
adjournment for 292 years. Devolution, not revolution.
Great ruins are built in replica in other lands to make their glory rub off.
The glory of the Parthenon is communicated to “the Athens of the South,”
Nashville, Tennessee, USA, where it stands in Centennial Park (1920-1931).
Though not on a hill, the replica has an advantage over its original, for its bro
kenness has been overcome by completed pillars, walls, and roof. It contains
replicas of the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles. Soaring above the Danube in Bavaria,
Germany, King Ludwig I’s grandiose dream of the Parthenon is the Germanic
Hall of Fame, Walhalla (1830-1842), that includes Nicholas Copernicus among
its heroes.
The symbolic ruin is transportable in idealized form. In the United States,
a concrete replica of Stonehenge stands on the cliffs above the Columbia River,
in the state of Washington, while Carhenge, created by Jim Reinders, in Al
liance, Nebraska, reproduces the Bronze Age structure by substituting gray-
painted junked automobiles for the megaliths.
I have heard the story that at an exhibition in Paris of the ancient art of
Mexico, Andr6 Malraux, Minister of Cultural Affairs, remarked to Leopoldo
Zea, the Mexican philosopher (from Spanish): “It is well that you Mexicans
have your Mayans and Aztecs, while we Europeans have the Greeks and
Romans.” Zea corrected him: “Yes, we Mexicans have our Mayans and Aztecs,
but we also have the Greeks and Romans.”
The patron of Guadalajara, Mexico’s second city, towers above the monu
mental fountain at the city’s entrance. Attired in the attributes of the Roman
god Minerva, she has the beautiful broad features of the Mexican Indian. Mexi
co’s heritage is transatlantic, a mixture of Indian and Hispanic natures. The In
dian part has a special attachment to the soil, which gives birth to pyramids.
The pyramids of Mexico are the largest on the planet. They rise from the
earth like human mountains. Breasts of nourishing culture that offer modern
Mexicans the maternity of antecedent civilizations. The fixity of the pyramidal
form joins with the immensity of the base and mixes with the context of moun
tains to make an emphatic testimony of permanence. The pyramids are rooted
in Mexicanness. They are congenial to an identity that is largely indigenous.
PI. 42. Schoolchildren, Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan, Mexico, 1964

Here they come! Down the step-front of the Pyramid of the Sun, at Teoti-
huacan, Mexico, from the dazzling view under the clouds, they must watch
their step, holding hands, dressed in their best for the excursion (PI. 42). Their
bodies feel the monumentality of the national monument.
Some of the girls are seated on the steps, as if for safety. A child is lifted
down by two women, another is helped up by two others. The climbers strain
in counterthrust to the downward movement of the schoolgirls, highlighted by
passing the youth in the white dress in the excitement of taking a step. Her
hand is held by a young woman who centers our eye on the scene.
People pass each other on the ruin without noticing one another. But the
ruin relates them in our experience. We stand aside, in 1964, waiting our turn
to mount these levels to what has exhilarated so many young hearts. In Na-
huatl, the Aztec language, “Teotihuacan” means “the home (or city) of the
gods,” though what people built the city (ca. 1250 BCE) is not known. It be
longs to the people of Mexico.
Human beings walk in the valley of the human-made mountains of Mexi
co. Restoration and stabilization have been painstaking. The pebbles inserted
everywhere in the cement filler add a snaking decorative line. We feel the
touch of human hands all about us. We do not experience the monument as
broken. Present in timeless continuity, it is the outgrowth of the earth that is
unmistakably Mexico.
The structures at Mitla, Monte Alban, and Teotihuacdn largely survived
the Conquest, although those in the Yucatecan jungle were made ruins by the
forces of vegetation, weather, and Christian clerics. Modem Mexico points to
its heritage of los Indios (“the Amerindians,” “the indigenous peoples”). The
ancient civilizations of Mexico are not dead. The handicrafts of the past have
been handed down in unbroken tradition. Customs and costumes continue in
their accustomed ways. The ruins uncovered from the earth affirm continuity.
All roads in Mexico lead to Mexico, the city that gives the country its
name. This capital is built upon the ruins of the Aztecs, which have a way of
surfacing. Mexico is a shifting city in which its past comes to light. In the heart
of town, ancient temples are reborn (PI. 30). The nation is proud of ruins which
proclaim civilizations unique to the Americas (Pis. 11, 72, 85, Fig. 1). The
most important museum in Mexico is of anthropology, not of fine art, history,
or technology. Here, in Mexico City, we find the treasures of statues and other
objects, mined or intact, that inhabited the nation’s past and inspire its future.
Ruins are a cultural resource in shaping a taste, a people’s conception of
itself, and a nation’s politics. So are intact edifices; we expect them to be so.
The min has unexpected uses. Visitor and citizen may be subtlety led to see the
ruin within a cultural context with the most wide-ranging significance.
Consider “Zimbabwe,” the name of a great ruin (Bantu: “houses of
stone”; Shona: “venerated houses”), which a new country adopted for its name
in place of “Rhodesia,” the name derived from the British colonist, Cecil
Rhodes. Zimbabwe, Kenya, Sudan, Ethiopia, and all of North Africa proudly
give the lie to Ernest Hemingway’s quip that Africa has no ruins.
A ruin is a success. It has not been destroyed, although its original has
been destroyed. Intact originals may survive, but not because they have been
hit full in the face by destructive force. By emerging from the destroyed origi
nal, the ruin has proved indestructible. A people that as yet has no ruins, but is
well-supplied with intact edifices, may be seriously deprived! (See the Chro
nology, below, for significant moments in national history tied to ruin history.)
Pieces of ruins, spolia (Lat.: “spoils,” “trophies,” “booty”), carry the
weight of their originals, becoming ornaments, souvenirs, relics, talismans,
knickknacks, or gifts. To the victor belongs the spolia. Of William Shake
speare’s mulberry tree in Stratford-upon-Avon, enough artifacts have been sold
that could launch a fleet of ships. In an Istanbul bazaar, in 1965,1 was offered a
rocking chair carved from the remains of Noah’s Ark. It appeared to be occu
pied, in an arkade, by the gently rocking patriarch. The wood from Christ’s
cross (Vera crucis) abounds in many treasured forms since the mission of St.
Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, to recover it (327 CE).
People make ruins by conscientiously helping themselves to pieces of
things. When the body of the much-beloved Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was
lowered into the crowds of Iranian mourners in 1989, they enthusiastically tore
apart his burial shrouds.
An electrifying experience likely occurs in seeing and touching a piece of
a revered original. The piece is a symbol (Gr.: symbolon, “sign,” “mark,”
“token,” “warrant,” “receipt”), a tangible presence of the distant or departed.
More than a reminder, the fragment is an energizer. Holy relics were spiritual
batteries in the Middle Ages. The crumbling bones of saints offered opportuni
ty for the most splendid and costly exercises of art. Charnel ruins were the core
of elaborate reliquaries in precious stone and metal. Artists were blessed with
good fortune when they got their hands on the fingers of saints.
Historical relics are cherished with many of the sanctified sentiments that
attach to holy things. The Star-Spangled Banner, the flag that flew over Fort
McHenry in Baltimore harbor on the night of 13 September 1814, hangs 40
miles (60 kilometers) away in Washington, in the Smithsonian Institution’s
Museum of American History, its bottom edge shot away. The mast, bell, and
anchors of the U.S.S. Maine, sunk by an unknown party in Havana harbor in
1898, have an honored place in the United States National Cemetery in Arling
ton, Virginia. Fittingly, a deck gun from the battleship graces the Washington
Navy Yard. These are remembrances of the war against Spain, in which the
United States generously liberated Cuba, Puerto Rico, and The Philippines, and
then occupied them, emerging as a world power. Remember the Maine!
The staggering Attack upon America of 11 September 2001, when com-
mercial airliners filled with passengers were turned into bombs in New York,
Washington, and Pennsylvania, killing 3,011 people, came to be known by the
date-code “9/11,” as if a name for the event could not be uttered. The trauma’s
designation is peculiarly American. For most of the world, “9-11,” as date,
means the ninth day of November, the eleventh month. Moreover, “911” is the
emergency number in the American telephone system. Much debate occurred
about how to memorialize the victims of the attack in New York. The value of
preserving ruins has been part of that debate.
The railway station in Bologna, Italy, the site of a terrorist bombing on 2
August 1980, retains a jagged section of a marble wall on which the names and
ages of the victims are listed. The destruction gave shape to its own memorial.
On a more cheerful note, stones from Verrazano Castle, Italy, were em
bedded in the foundations of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (1964), strung
across New York Harbor to the design of O. H. Ammann. Giovanni da Verra
zano entered the harbor in 1524. Ellen and I passed under the bridge, still under
construction, as we returned to make our home in America in 1963.
The tradition continues of inserting meaningful objects in cornerstones as
if to build upon their virtues. When such constructions are demolished, sur
vivors have the uncanny experience of finding these little ruins among the ru
ins. Time capsules are assembled with assorted objects to be buried. When a
civilization is destroyed, these fragments speak of its achievement, aspiration,
and humanity. Cornerstone vaults and time capsules are prefabricated ruins.
Our body is a cornerstone; our mind a time capsule.
If we could each leave behind a small package to be preserved forever,
what would you put into yours? What kind of ruin would you be?
The Chicago Tribune Tower, by Raymond Hood (1923), much discussed
for its architectural style, is encrusted with the stones of famous buildings, in
cluding ruins, such as the Parthenon. Powers that made the world are drawn to
gether and held aloft on Michigan Avenue by the home of “The World’s Great
est Newspaper.” Washington Cathedral contains pieces of Mt. Sinai and the
Appian Way. Rollins College is home to a pleasant rock garden, the Walk of
Fame, whose specimens likewise are culled from the world’s four corners. If
we cannot travel to Mt. Moriah, then we can get to a chunk of it in Florida.
Tucked away on the campus of the University of Southern California in
Los Angeles is a broken pillar from ancient Troy, upon which Helen may have
rested her hand, gift of the Turkish government. You see, the football team at
USC is called “The Trojans.” Inset in the cornerstone of the Interchurch Center
in New York (1958) is a block with this message: “This stone is from the Ago
ra in Corinth where many hearing Paul believed.” Upon reading the message
and touching the stone, what are we to believe? In August 1985,1 stood outside
the Agora at Corinth and believed I would die of sunstroke.
Ruin is a symbol of death, but let us save reflection on ruin and death for
later (Section 3 of Chapter Nineteen, “Meditations on Humanity, Self, and the

World as Ruins,” below). First, we need to catch up with life.
We often wish to see the ruin for itself, independently of the associations
of history, place, and nationality. La mine pour la mine! Splendid works of art
in national museums or on national stages can be presented as self-conscious
assertions of cultural heritage. Yet we manage to enjoy them for the works of
art they are. The ruin, too, should be accessible aesthetically beyond these cul
tural contexts.
The difference is between the arts that are transportable and those, along
with ruins, that are not. We may see a painting by Diego de Velazquez in a mu
seum outside of Spain, and we may study it in a book, say, of portraits drawn
from all painting traditions. We may see a work of Moliere on the stage of a
theater anywhere in the world, not just in France, and we may read the text. We
might succeed in analyzing and appreciating the works mentioned as a portrait
and as a comedy, without reference to their Spanishness or Frenchness. No ne
cessity to regard these artworks as expressive of cultural values, although to
evade such considerations may be to lose much of aesthetic interest.
Even if, when abroad, we go to see an artwork that has not yet been trans
ported to our local museum or stage, we may try to forget about the room in
which we encounter it, since museum galleries are much alike, and, in the dark,
so are many theaters. This does not work. We cannot fully detach our aware
ness of being in the Prado in Madrid, to concentrate on the Velazquez purely as
a portrait, regardless of the nationality of the painter, subject, and patron. Not
feasible to see Moliere at the Comedie Frangaise, a national company of which
Moliere was a founder, in a national theater in Paris in which Moliere played,
without being aware of the French cultural contexts. The armchair Moliere
used on stage, and in which he died, is exhibited in the lobby.
Art museums generally mount their works according to country and cen
tury, so that we approach the individual piece through a cultural context. Books
on art and theater are also organized along national traditions.
If these inhibitions exist to shaking off the cultural significance in trans
portable artworks, then greater difficulties occur in that respect with non
transportables, including architecture and ruins. Oddly, architecture is more
transportable than ruin because to study the plan and the photographs of the in
tact edifice to gather something of aesthetic value from the work makes sense,
while to study the ruin this way does not work, since it no longer adheres to a
plan, and it depends on our movement in space for its enjoyment.
The ruin, like the landscape, requires that we go to the site. This is a ripe
opportunity for the culture to attach its meaning to the experience of the work
that we visit. It is also a temptation for us to attach to the work that we have
come to see for its aesthetic worth the complete package of our associations re
garding the culture. The ruin smacks of symbol. It is as symbol as that.
We insist at times upon leaving the baggage at the entrance and forgetting
where we are. The ruin relieves us of responsibility. It does not have to be
greeted as high culture. The ruin is usually the ruin of high culture, not its ful
fillment. While the propaganda of a culture chooses to make use of its ruins,
we do not have to pay attention to such symbol-minded use. The secret of aes
thetic enjoyment of the ruin is to put aside expectations and open ourselves to
discovery. The ruin can be purely delightful despite its symbolic appropriation.
Yet this purity of concentration gives way to awareness of context and
symbolic transformation. We cannot stand at the Wall in Jerusalem and shut
out of mind where we are. The ruin brings this to mind. Nor can we eliminate
from experience the Mexicanness of the Mexican ruins, while Mexicans stroll
about them, their very profiles holding up mirrors to the carvings. At the Co
losseum, we cannot miss the message, “This is Rome.” So the Parthenon is
Greece. Machu Picchu, Peru. The Pyramids of Giza, Egypt. Angkor Wat, Cam
bodia. Persepolis (Gr.: “City of Persia”), Iran. Petra, Jordan. Baalbek, Lebanon.
Palmyra, Syria. Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe.
The celebrated ruins are attired in cultural dress that creates symbolic
meanings. As experiences, we may shift back and forth between detection of
those meanings and exploration of the purity of the ruin as form, matter, or
function. Incongruities emerge between cultural importance and aesthetic inde
pendence. The heavy weight of the symbol may be mocked by the light touch
of the ruin. Or pathos may result from the contrast between what the ruin is
made to be and what the ruin makes itself to be. (On ruin and culture, see Sec
tion 5, “History of Culture,” and Section 7, “Individual Ruins,” in the Biblio
graphical Essay, below.)
The symbolic character of the grand ruins carries over to the experience
of lesser-known ruins in the same country. The ruin is embedded in the culture.
The first rule of aesthetic tourism is,
(1) The visitor shall remain open to pertinent association and enriching
context.
Yet to see things as they are, we need the mode of detachment, despite our as
sociations and expectations, despite national attitudes and arrangements. The
second rule of aesthetic tourism is,
(2) The visitor shall enjoy freedom from burdensome baggage and from
presumptuous packaging.
The shifting between the ruin as complex symbol and simple form, as in
tense meaning and extensive material, as cultural emblem and purposeless
function makes for worthy enjoyment in our aesthetic experience.
Seven
THE RUIN AS AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Hunter of Ruins
Wading at high tide

from the long dhow
through the mangrove swamp,
to Manda Island,
where elephants roam
in the lonely ruins
of Takwa village
on the Swahili Coast
of the Indian Ocean,
I fall into the gray brine,
and mouth stopped with mud,
nearly drown.
Let us review the aesthetic experience of the ruin by analyzing it in a dozen

moments. I use the old technical term, “moment,” for the momentousness of
experience instead of as a unit of time. You will see what I mean, in a moment.
(1) Noteworthy newness or freshness characterizes the experience and
stands in contrast to the presumed oldness and wear of the ruin. The newness is
genuine innovation in the face of the familiar. The ruin invents and not merely
endures. The ruin is not so much a preservation of the past as a presentation of
its own freshness. The original edifice is past. The ruin is present in its original
ity. Ruins, especially Gothic ones, may have the reputation of being musty, ho
ary, dusty, aged, dull, dank, and boring. In such a view, the ruin is outdated, be
longing to a dead past. The ruin, after all, is a ruin of something. Newness is
precisely what we do not expect to experience. Yet it occurs.
The ruin turns out not to be stuck in the past. It need not be overburdened
with age. It has brightness, lightness, sprightliness. While intact architecture
may attract us to its reliable oldness, the ruin reveals its attractions with excep
tional innovation. While the ruin may be of easily recognizable tradition in
style, and its original purpose may also be known, what it offers aesthetically is
the unknown, the innovative that requires participatory receptivity. This fresh
ness in the ruin has been expressed as a springing forth and is related to its in
herent vitality. We discover newness, and it invites exploration. Freedom from
restraints and expectations. The experience of surprising unity. If you ask what
is new in aesthetics, the answer, above all, is the ruin!
(2) In the ruin is new unity and integrity, in contrast to the broken and
fragmented. The ruin unifies. It makes wholes. Not the original whole, but new
unities appear, and these need have no reference to the original. The ruin re
forms itself into a plurality of unities, some at the material level, others at the
formal, still others at the functional. The ruin’s integrity extends in new fashion
to include its site and perhaps its culture.
We expect disunity and scattered unrelatedness in ruin. Much of this ex
ists, but serves as foil to the recognizable riches of fresh relationship and re
markable integrity. In the ruin, things hold together. We think the ruin to be a
part of a whole filled with holes, but the ruin is a whole filled with wholes.
Sometimes, the ruin as a whole has a new unity.
Aesthetic experience seeks wholeness to satisfy strong longings in the
heart. We live in a world of parts, partitions, partiality, partisanship, partings,
apartness, separation, disparateness, compartmentalization. We need to tie up
loose ends, see the pieces picked up and put back together, fit the odds and
ends into the puzzle, make sense out of the unrelated, relate the contiguous, re
store the discontinuous, assimilate the incongruous,
AC-CENT-TCHU-ATE THE POS-I-TIVE, E-lim-my-nate the neg-a-tive,

Latch on to the af-firm-a-tive, Don’t mess with Mis-ter In-be-tween.
(Mercer, 1985, pp. 124-127)
Whereas we usually fail at these efforts in life, we usually succeed at them in

art. The aesthetic realm heals the brokenness of daily life. It gives us the experi
ence we so much need of making whole again. The ruin, though it appears
another part of our broken world, comes within the aesthetic realm. It, like art,
is restorative. In great ruins, great unities.
Such unities are new. “Innovation” and “unification” are names for much
the same moment. Instead of being known and expected, they are discovered
and are subject to exploration. We experience new unity as organic, freed from
the past’s dictates of form, function, and purpose.
(3) The ruin’s aesthetics requires discovery and stimulates exploration,
contrast to the sense of loss and the effort to imagine the invisible. What counts
in the ruin is what we find, not what we miss. The ruin repays us with what it is
instead of depriving us of what it is not. It is not known by study in advance of
a visit. It requires on-the-scene openness. The ruin is a field of happening, un
like the array of archaeological objects in a museum. The beauty of the ruin is
not given. It is found.
One find leads to another. The ruin draws us forward in disclosure. We
need not trace the plan of the invisible edifice, trying to reconstruct the absent.
The ruin structures itself, making itself present. Discovery is of newness in uni
ty. An act of aesthetic refreshment. Exploration requires movement. It is a re
sponsive probing of the vitality of the ruin. Since exploration follows no plan, it
is a free wandering. Discovery is a springing forth from the ordinary.
The Ruin as Aesthetic Experience 157
(4) The springing forth felt in the ruin is its integrated dynamic presence
that contrasts with the sullen receding quality presumed for the ruin. The ruin
does not slink/sink back, making a distance between our presence and its past.
It comes toward us, reaching into our pace/space with tingling alacrity. The
ruin is acrobatic in spirit. Light-hearted and light-footed, it prefers to move, not
stand, sit, or lie. Vibrancy in the ruin strikes sympathetic chords: good vibes.
Sometimes, the ruin startles, staggers, teeters, totters, but does not topple, stulti
fy, stutter, or splutter. It makes vigorous impressions. This energetic outreach
wakes us up. The ruin springs into consciousness. This is refreshing to appre
ciation. New unities, not old fragments, come to the fore.
Springing forward calls forth our further movement. The ruin activates
our explorative presence. The springing frees inhibitions by which we and the
edifice have been bound. The ruin is unbounded in its bounding. Architecture,
on the other foot, often recedes, if the works are old. They huddle within them
selves, pulling back from the viewer. They guard their innerness without resil
ience. The ruin invites the visitor, not the viewer. It comes out to greet us and
makes us suddenly at home. Surprise springs from an irresistible/irrepressible
innerness. The ruin dispatches sadness with a leap.
(5) Freedom and creativity thrive in the ruin rather than destruction and
inhibition. The inhibitions of convention, tradition, servitude, purpose, and ex
pectation have been destroyed. Exhilaration exults. What has been destroyed in
the ruin is not the ruin but the original. This is grounds for the ruin’s fresh orig
inality. The ruin is free to create itself in aesthetic appreciation, matter free of
form, form free of function, function free of purpose. Sight is free to join with
site, symbol to join with culture. The ruin renounces the old and announces the
new. It engages in daring, reaching to the furthest limit of the haphazard to
create moving form or to form embodied meaning. The ruin is positive, because
it posits itself. Destruction is deadly. The ruin is lively. Its creative force is the
innovation of unity.
(6) The soul of the ruin is organic vitality, not dull decay. The ruin comes
alive. It quickens the visitor’s grasp of Being. The ruin has innerness that press
es outward. It is personable and has character. The ruin expresses its vitality by
entering symbiotically with site and nature. The unities form right before our
eyes, an activation of force inherent in ruin and felt in the visitor. The organic
quality of the ruin embraces our lived presence. The ruin invites participation,
not just contemplation. The disclosure of form is a life process. Invention, not
succession. Aesthetic enjoyment increases, because the ruin does not pretend to
be a work of art. It is a work of life, Being-in-process. The ruin sensitizes us to
it, and we respond as if it, too, had feelings. The ruin breathes with vitality in
its immediacy.
(7) The ruin has presence or impressive immediacy, in contrast to the ab
sence of the original edifice and to the exercise of imagination needed to con-
ceive it. By opening its space to our presence, the ruin comes close to us. The
ruin heightens the hereness and nowness of experience, giving substance to
space and time. The ruin catches up the visitor within it and will not permit the
kind of leisure-filled distancing with which we view a picture. Palpable, not
pictorial, the ruin incorporates the participant. The powerful directness of new
unities overwhelms the intellectual act of tracing the invisible. Presence shifts
with vitality and springs forth into awareness.
(8) The ruin shifts or switches aesthetic identity, enriching our enjoyment,
in contrast to the singular fixity of remnants. The ruin changes into itself, as we
explore it, and it changes its mind about itself. Exploration is not the following
of a single lane through arrayed delights. The delight comes from the switching
levels. What was only matter becomes form, form becomes function, function
becomes incongruity, incongruity becomes site, site becomes symbol, then
back again, shedding the levels.
The ruin liberates itself from higher levels yet grows by organic leaps. Al
ways something new to be discovered in the ruin, including the correction of
our previous experience. The experience of ruin is a re-experiencing. The ruin
changes the order of its unities. They emerge and dissolve in our presence. The
ruin is not fickle and capricious. Its metamorphoses are purifications or advanc
es that spring forth out of inherent life-force.
(9) The ruin has movement as an aesthetic element, in contrast to endless
stability. While the ruin has taken movement away from its original, it moves
in directions that may have no overall unity. We feel its liberation from purpose
as movements off, away, out. The ruin requires passage in three-dimensional
space. It moves us to move through it. It leaves no turn unstoned. As we wan
der, burdened with our travel gear, we might stumble. When visiting the ruin,
watch your schlepp! Otherwise, your travels may include an unscheduled trip.
The ruin discloses its new unities by tripping up our expectations. It will
not sit still and show us all. It offers turns, upward Teachings, directions through
walls. The springing forth of aesthetic qualities is a motion that works with vi
tal innemess. The ruin is not once-and-for-all present. It comes into presence
over time and in shifting ways. We sense this, too, as motion. We take a turn,
and a unity moves forward into experience.
(10) The ruin is sited, attached to its grounds, not blindly adrift in a for
eign world. The ruin reshapes its grounds, regrounding itself, and laying claim
to the visitor who enters upon its grounds. The ruin is not transportable as is an
object of art. It exists in a way that museum works do not. Attachment to the
earth intensifies the vitality of its existence. Many contributing elements of na
ture add to its aesthetic force. The ruin is at home under the rain and wind. It
welcomes into its bosom trees and weeds. These are new discoveries for visi
tors accustomed to landscape and architecture.
The ruin proposes a unity between its stones and the stones of the earth,
between its flourishing wild forms and the forms of wildflowers. It does not
sink into the earth in defeat. It leaps forward with lively presence. The ruin re
freshes the earth, rescuing it from solitude and neglect.
(11) The ruin is blessed with enriching incongruity that stands in contrast
to simplicity and regularity. The ruin is at home with the out-of-place. Oddness
becomes interesting, amusing, or moving. The relationship with the grounds
may be strange yet not strained. The shifting levels of aesthetic identity may
bring forward noteworthy contrasts and stimulating incongruities. The ruin en
courages the discovery of unity. Oddity, which does not at first fit unity, may
come to recast that unity. The shifting nature of the ruin may alternate between
purity of function and oddity of purposeless function. Incongruities come to the
fore, insisting on their presence and requiring response. They lend themselves
to symbolic meaning.
(12) Symbolic meaning emerges in the ruin, in contrast to the loss of sig
nificance of broken structures. The ruin joins us in assertion of values. It links
past to a committed future by means of its presence. It is a vital unity within a
culture’s breast. The symbol springs forth out of the materiality of remains. It
has a spiritual identity. It may embody a fundamental incongruity or an arche
typal harmony with site. The symbolic ruin is key to the discovery and explora
tion of the common bonds of a people. The ruin frees a people to follow their
destiny, thanks to the inescapable presence of a symbol.
In three brief paragraphs, let me apply the dozen analytic points to a visit
of a temple at Luxor, Egypt, part of Thebes (PI. 43). While we anticipate an
cientness, the base of the columns greets us with freshness, assisted by smooth
patchwork and a setting that accentuates basic form. Those sitting rounded
forms assemble themselves as a coherent ensemble instead of as servants to
verticality. We move about them, detecting their best alignment with one
another and their best positioning within the space of wall and mountain.
The forward-moving quality of the ruin is helped by the massiveness of
the foremost base and the illumination of desert sun. Released from function,
the remains of the pillars are free to be forms. Decipherment of their imperious
messages, including pharaonic names in cartouches, is no longer imperative.
Instead, the hieroglyphs become visually decorative. Lotus decor is visible on
the forms which build with life, in contrast to the stoniness behind the scene.
The immediacy of these agreeable forms makes us lose account, in 1990, of the
original building and its purpose, the culture and its history.
Yet our experience changes back and forth from the purity of form to the
irony of disrupted function and to the drama of the site. What a site! A forbid
ding mountain overreaches the heavy wall that harbors the organic forms
among which we stand, everything held motionless and timeless. Ironically, the
lotus forms are alive in the dead civilization. Symbolically? The Egyptian quest
for immortality returns to life as a cultural gift to humanity.
You might add to the dozen moments that I have analyzed in this chapter,
combine some, and divide them differently. Several of the analyses come out
much the same. We are not able to talk about unity and newness in the ruin
without also dealing with discovery and springing forth, so these might appear
interchangeable. Presence is another way of referring to what these four in
dicate. Freedom as well is intrinsic to the experience. Vitality has presence or
makes presence. With zest or zetz, the kick or punch, vitality contributes organ
ic quality to unity and makes newness dynamic. Closely related terms are
“springing forth,” “vitality,” “shifting,” and “movement.” Most of the terms of
analysis refer to the simplest quality in the experience of the ruin.
Shifting, movement, and incongruity are at a more complex level, for they
require change among the simpler qualities. Yet these moments are inevitable
because generated by the simpler ones. Still more complex is the level of con
texts for the ruin where site, incongruity, and symbol may transform the totality
of the ruin into another kind of meaning, bridging the aesthetic and the moral
sentiments. We may proceed experientially in the opposite direction, moving
from some total vision to its abandonment (freedom) and enjoyment
(discovery), centered on simple features (newness). The Roman Empire may
vanish in an instant, when we see for the first time the appealing texture of a
Roman brick (PI. 2). This is part of the shifting in the ruin.
These moments are meant as analytical pricks of the bubble of experi
ence, not as temporal succession. Analysis in aesthetics necessarily disrupts
what it tries to pin down. The Fixity of its approach deprives the subject of life
and unity. Hence, we need to send in several probes, even if they turn out to
reach the same point. Our talking is only an approximation of what we are talk
ing about. Theory in aesthetics is a construction. Experience is the reality. We
are presently engaged, therefore, in building a ruin.
We encounter the ruin’s reality in the moment that is the untimed whole
ness of experience: pure duration. The ruin is free from time, more so than any
architecture or garden. Time has been destroyed in the creation of the ruin. The
moment here wells up with unaccustomed fullness. Life may be fuller in the
ruin than on the street or in the building. The ruin facilitates the expansiveness
of that moment as unpressured presence that springs forward with new unity.
Vitality and excitement fill the moment of the ruin. The moments may blend
and transform instead of succeed one another. The moment is expanded, en
riched, filling the whole of our existence. The ruin is bigger than life, grander
than art, wiser than architecture. Yet the moment terminates.
Intervals arise. We get lost, feel hungry, or become fed up with stumbling
around broken things. Rich moments dissolve into unenriched time. Not all is
delightful. The ruin has neutral, uninteresting passages that underwhelm us. It
becomes crowded with tourists, clotted with trash, clouded with storms. Time
fills in the gaps between moments. Against the flow of time, moments foray
forth. Moments are only possible because no time exists for them. They rise,
bubbles free of the stream. Inside the bubble is an interconnectedness, a whole
ness, not ever fully dissected by our cutting probes. The moment seems seam
less and endless. The monad (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz). The moment to
which we are moved is motionless.
(If you need more time for this, see Section 9 of Chapter Eighteen,
“Fragments of a Chapter on Ruin,” below.)
Attention to the aesthetics of ruins throws light on the aesthetics of art and
on aesthetic experience generally. Consider the argument that no such thing as
“aesthetics of ruins” can exist other than the application to broken objects of
the general aesthetics that deals in artworks and aesthetic experience. In this
view, nothing is special about ruins that requires theoretical analysis, other than
their deficiency, their lack of intactness as works of art. We can then suitably
adjust the aesthetics of the standard art-object and its experience to apply to the
secondary case of the ruin. Yet the ruin is a test case that may shatter any pre
fabricated aesthetic theory brought down upon it.
The ruin wreaks havoc with prevalent distinctions between artwork, na
ture, and utilitarian structure. The ruin is not a work of art, utility, or nature. It
comes about by the strange interaction of these sources that converts utilitarian
or artistic structure to nonutilitarian, aesthetic existence. A special aesthetics of
the ruin is in order, and, once sketched, we might apply it to the standard art
work and its experience. We need a comparative aesthetics of ruins in the
several arts, as a complement to the usual comparative studies of their charac
teristic unities. We can learn about an art’s distinctive integrity by studying its
ruins. (See the chapters below on Sculpture and Other Visual Arts [Eleven],
Cinema and Television [Twelve], and Literature [Thirteen], as Ruin.)
Common to the experience of ruin and artwork is the pleasure of unity.
Unity is a quest inherent in human experience. An experience, John Dewey re
minds us, in Art as Experience (1934), is a wholeness, sensed as distinct from
the flux of experience (Dewey, 1958, ch. 3). The aesthetic is the distinctive
quality of our having experiences, whether they are intellectual, practical, or ar
tistic. But a difference is noticeable between the delight in unity that we take in
the ruin and in the work of art, for we have every reason to expect, and de
mand, the unity of the artwork. The surety of that expectation is a reliable con
solation in turning to the realm of art. There, unlike our business activities, our
dealings with people in general, or our development of good character, satisfy
ing wholeness assuredly will be found in works of art.
Art heals the wounds of the soul suffered in a world of fragmentation, in
completeness, and disharmony. The whole in art might be terrifying, as in tra
gedy, yet art may make terror bearable and hence uplift the soul. Wholeness,
the quintessential quest of experience, is best embodied in art. Art is the arche
type of unity. Whatever other things art does, offers, or means, it fulfills this
necessary value of making life bearable for human experience. Artworks prove
that art works. Art, thou art the savior of our humanity from reality!
We cannot count upon the unity in the ruin. The ruin has not been delib
erately shaped by human craft to embody unity. Instead, it may be the remnants
of such embodiment destroyed. No Guarantees! must be stamped on the en
trance ticket. To encounter unity is unlikely in a realm of the fragmented.
Prudence whispers, “The ruin should be shunned as the epitome of the broken
world we experience daily. The ruin is an unhappy reminder of the ruined!”
Despite appearances, unities exist in the ruin. So it does come within the
aesthetic realm. The unities are unexpected discoveries. Discovery occurs in
many works of art, and we may have to actively seek their unity. Work is re
quired by the work. But a reward is built-in. “Seek and ye shall find” is the
credo of every artwork. The discovery of the unity in the artwork is expected
and may come without surprise. A gratification owed. Whereas discovery of
the unity in the ruin is a surprise and comes unexpectedly. A gratification upon
which we could not count.
Although we may work as hard in the ruin, its process of discovery is dif
ferent. In the artwork, we must be attentive to the deliberate structure given the
work by human agency, while putting out of consideration the fortuitous, such
as weathering, local acoustics, or the accumulation of dust. If we were to follow
such a path in the ruin, we would miss the ruin! The fortuitous deals a decisive
blow to deliberate structure. Human agency and natural urgency have been su
perseded by the ruin as the urgent agent of its own existence.
Discovery in art and ruin requires heightened attentiveness to what is
there coupled with willing openness to what may happen. The objective corre
lative (T. S. Eliot’s term) has a subjective colleague (my term). The artwork
might not make such a fuss over discovery. It may be content to lay all its cards
on the table. That all is made evident to begin with can be agreeable. While dis
covery may be dispensed with in art, it is indispensable in ruin.
The ruin would have no unity, unless we came upon it from a perspective.
The unity in the artwork is singular, or, if multiple, then hierarchical. The uni
ties in the ruin are plural, or, if comprehensive, then emergent in extended ex
perience. We discover unities despite the brokenness of the ruin. We discover
unity thanks to the completeness of the artwork. Discovery in art may often be
the method for revealing the qualities of the object. Discovery in ruin is always
the happening of a participation.
Innovation is crucial in great artworks, the secret whereby those works
rise in uniqueness above ordinary art. Yet ordinary art may have little innova
tion. Art is also art that reliably and tastefully fulfills a convention, tradition, or
established form. How well it does not innovate may be remarked in our appre
ciation, though room for newness of expression or spirit might be found in the
performance of the set piece.
Innovation is crucial in ordinary ruins, if we experience them aesthetical

ly. Each moment in the ruin is newness, if by moment we mean the untimed
fullness in experience of discovered unity. The ruin is engaged in inventing it
self, hence of renewing itself in our presence. The newness of even a great art
work may become old-hat. Though once new, it becomes fixed through time
and eventually old. Innovation in the ruin escapes the timebound destiny of art.
Something is always new in the ruin! In art, something is always old. Artworks
belong to a realm of predecessors and contemporaries. Each ruin reigns in its
own realm. Indifferent to the genre, it owes nothing to its fellows.
Exploration of the ruin involves penetration. The ruin enters the experi
ence and is entered. Hence, a dance. The visitor is taken off guard and caught
up in the act. Art also invites two-way movement, but a holding back by the
viewer, listener, or reader permits thorough exploration of the object’s features.
We can enjoy art from an armchair. The ruin necessitates getting into it, off the
standard path, out of the accustomed context. Yet artworks, too, demand a sub
jective involvement, a willing sense of loss, to be fully experienced, though
physical activity is rarely needed on our part.
The quality of springing forth accompanies every complete experience, as
the aesthetic tone of its unity. Something bright and vivid is concomitant to an
experience when we are aware of its unity, even if its content is saddening,
painful, or tragic. When we turn our experience to artworks purely for the sake
of delectable unity, they, too, will have vibrant presence. The artwork comes
forward larger than life, when we see the picture on the wall, hear the music in
the auditorium, attend to the dancers on the stage, and look at the flickering
light on the screen.
Just as distinctness and clarity characterize intuitions (Ren6 Descartes), so
vividness and clarity are hallmarks of aesthetic experience. The aesthetic per se
glows with special being, as concentrated pleasure removed from the cares of
utility and action. The springing forth is more accentuated in the ruin, since it
initially lacks the aesthetic glow. The ruin cannot assure aesthetic experience. It
appears to exist against the tide of such experience, because it is broken, disuni-
fied, and filled with unartistic remnants, among which we must watch our step.
The aesthetic tone of the artwork comes forward to greet us, because it is
a specifically aesthetic contrivance. The ruin’s aesthetic tone springs forward
with suddenness, because it is not intended as an aesthetic contrivance. In dis
closing itself in the space that we occupy, the ruin gives movement to that
space as striking impingement. The ruin comes into its own by jumping into
our space. In gardening, sculpture, and architecture, we have to take into ac
count the space between work and visitor. In these arts, the work may press
upon the space of the visitor, but not every moment need be a springing forth,
as is the case in the ruin. The ruin comes at once, without warning, because its
aesthetic unity is taking place just at that moment in our space.
Art is the perfect realm of freedom. Anything can be made to happen in it.
Art surpasses knowledge and necessity and is as rich as human choice. Art,
therefore, is the blessed home for creativity.
Creativity functions outside of art in almost all human pursuits, including
those of knowledge and action, and freedom is still a value in some domains of
our life. But we must restrict/restrain creativity and freedom and keep them
within a reasonable compass/context, else they become chaos/caprice. We can
grow/go to/too far/fear with creative freedom, such as by mincing/mashing
words, and thereby initiate destruction. Even in art, creativity welcomes re
straint against which to flex itself. Freedom flourishes under form. So that joy
may occur in creativity, art paradoxically practices a prudent adherence to tra
dition. To exercise uniqueness, art might take the accepted path.
The ruin is always unfamiliar and ever exceptional. Freedom is at home in
art, but we are ill-at-home in the ruin. The ruin lacks convention, tradition, and
accepted form. These dissolve. Creativity has a soaring newness in the ruin. It
stands out against absence of form, not against regular form.
Creativity often develops aesthetic freedom in the midst of non-art.
Creativity in the ruin consists in making it into an aesthetic field, whereas the
artwork already is an aesthetic field. The liberties taken by the ruin are multi
ple, successive, and, in principle, unending, whereas the artistic freedoms in an
artwork aim at culmination. The ruin retains the trump card of the suit freedom.
It may be free from final unity, and thus remain forever free to be free. This
lack of completeness is an aesthetic fascination of the ruin.
Paragraph of a conversation with Carl R. Hausman, the creativity scholar,
9 November 1984, Little Tokyo, Los Angeles: The fragment is the given for the
artistic creator, who addresses it with formal development, connectedness, and
unity. The fragment is thus the authentic beginning, the primal magnet for artis
tic making. The fully formed work, quiescent, finished, and complete, is not
creatively stimulating. The ruin brings us back to the creative source. The aes
thetic movement toward form, connection, and unity that we experience in the
ruin parallels the artist’s creative movement in starting with a fragment.
Art experience is familiar with the vitality of the artwork that is an organ
ic whole. We may dissect the anatomy of the artwork along the analogy of a
living organism. Aristotle, the skilled anatomist of the shark, does this in his
Poetics with tragedy, in which he finds an animating spirit (psyche) and several
organic parts.
But we also feel the artwork as finally unanalyzable. More than the sum
of its parts. The autonomy of art assures the artwork’s life, independent of utili
ty, science, and morality. The vitality which we experience in art is simultane
ously the confirmation of our vitality and wholeness, which cannot be fully an
alyzed. I, too, am a body with a soul. For all I know, a je ne sais quoi.
That the ruin is at all vital comes as a surprise, but this is the expectation
we bring to every work of art. The activity of living things, including plants and
people, increases the ruin’s vitality. These share in the unity. We often feel the
vitality in architecture as the imposition of form on material and function on
structure. Life is thereby built-in.
An opposite growth takes place in the ruin, where material takes on life
outside of form, and structure frees itself of function. The vitality of the ruin
springs out of a liberation from the vitality of art. The ruin is a destruction of
one order of things—things ordered for use or art—and the birth of a new order
of experience. More dead passages are in the ruin than in most artworks. Every
detail in art may be touched with the vitalizing hand of the artist. An Alfred
Hitchcock film has not a single wasted frame. Every note of Wolfgang Ama
deus Mozart is noteworthy. Each sentence in Jane Austen is telling. The ruin
may be a hodgepodge, hugger-mugger, higgledy-piggledy, skimble-skamble,
mishmash of a messpot. But the liveliness encountered is more intense.
Artworks have presence. They hold the imagination. They enter an intim
acy with their appreciator. The ruin does this with a push and shove. Its pres
ence is startling. The ruin calls the tune that the visitor is to follow. In the arts,
including much of architecture, the appreciator’s presence remains predomi
nant. The work is allowed into intimacy on the terms of the human being. Yet
we may be swept away by the artwork once entered. The ruin repeatedly
sweeps us up. It asserts itself firmly in consciousness and obliges us to follow
its turnings. The artwork may have a strategy for drawing us into its terms, and
we enjoy giving in to it. The ruin is indifferent to our presence. But in the flash
of a moment, it reveals value in its presence for human sensibility.
The immediacy of the ruin is felt by our several senses, including the de
tection of odor, temperature, dryness, dustiness, gravity, and motion of air. Art
works work upon highly developed appeals to selected senses, while suspend
ing others. Architecture renounces the sense of smell. If we are aware of any
odor in a building, then something is wrong artistically. “This building,’’ we
would say, “stinks.’’ In the ruin, we are free to smell the vegetation, the soil, the
rain, and the rot. We are also free to step into these, putting our foot in the ruin
in ways that we do not in artworks. Even gardens have demarcated paths and
non-visiting zones where the wastes are kept. In the ruin, nothing holds us back
from direct experience. Conventional restraints of buildings, such as walls,
stairs, and doors, no longer restrict our vision or movement. The ruin is open to
our sensory access in ways that no work of fine art tolerates.
Movement in the ruin is shared by several arts, including sculpture, whose
statues too often are thought of as static. The ruin and the statue generate mo
tion in their respective space by their configuration and character. They oblige
the visitor to engage in movement within that same space. Visitor movement
guided by a single piece of sculpture is simple. It occurs around the piece, or in
a semicircle in front of it, with some approach and then retreat.
Visitor movement in the ruin is complicated and defies plotting. I cannot

give you directions for the best visit to a ruin. Nor can you feel secure during
the visit that you are going about it the best way. Architecture and gardens,
which require our movement, carefully set forth directions to follow. Traffic
flow is part of their planning. The ruin is unplanned. The appropriate move
ment is open for discovery. Visitor movement helps give an artwork its full ex
position. In the ruin, the movement is constitutive of the aesthetic experience.
Some works of art are sited and must be appreciated in their setting. The
ruin exerts more power than they in transforming its surroundings. Murals in
chapels, churches on hillsides, statues in front of government buildings follow
conventions in respecting their contexts. The ruin is a smasher of conventions.
It is upsetting/unsettling; hence, it is a resettler/resetter. Though the ruin is not
transportable, it makes its site transformable.
The boundaries of the ruin are not sharply defined as are those of architec
ture. The ruin is spatial and movemental, and this movement in space is part of
where it is and what it is. The ruin is a location. It has its place, though not de
signed for it but taken over by it. The ruin is something more than a work of
art: a home, a realm, a world, a .. ..
Artists usually avoid anachronism and incongruity in their artworks as un
desirable distractions. The chiming of a clock in William Shakespeare’s Julius
Caesar ( 1599) (Act 2, sc. 1), or his sea-scene set in landlocked Bohemia in The
Winter’s Tale (1600-1601) (Act 3, sc. 3), are inadvertently amusing. Some art
works may probe incongruities and thrive on them, as we saw in the second
half of the twentieth century in the drama of Harold Pinter, the painting of Ro
bert Rauschenberg, the music of John Cage, the photography of Diane Arbus,
the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, and the prose of Amos Tutuola.
Some arts, most notably comedy, rely on incongruity for their structure
and development. The ruin as an aesthetic field always makes incongruity
available, sometimes for amusing, though often for pathetic and profound, ef
fect. All ruins smack of the incongruous, because they have been left in place
of what they are not. The arts achieve more in the way of harmony. The ruin
has room for that too. But its harmonies rub shoulders with incongruities.
All artworks have been thought symbols. Without making such a commit
ment, let us concede that the arts can make enormous symbolic investment in
works. Some images, fictional heroes, epics, songs, buildings, and stories func
tion as the heart that pumps life to a people. What, or who, the people are often
requires a symbolic expression. Artistic means are on hand to give that expres
sion and to meld aesthetic pleasure to other strong sentiments. Artworks are
more often and more successfully symbolic than ruins, for the symbolic trans
formation of the ruin may be a late-coming afterthought, while the appropria
tion of outstanding artistry springs early to mind.
The aesthetics of the ruin is not some ruin of the aesthetics of the arts, but
PI. 44. C h ild r en at C o n t r a - A q u in c u m , B u d a p es t, H u n g a r y , 1984

an area of distinctness and overlap. By examining the role of the visitor to the
ruin, we can make the distinctness clearer. “To do” a ruin is fun. We put off
that serious mien that means so much when we go to the museum, concert hall,
or Gothic cathedral. We do not have to be well-dressed, well-composed, and
well-inhibited. No fellow audience is at hand. Other people are just tourists we
can avoid. No set direction of visit. No timing. We are relieved of the burdens
that accompany experience of high culture. We can lean against the ruin, sit
down on it, or lie down in it.
We do not have to bring to it the aesthetic attitude of prepared attentive
ness freed of practical and scientific concerns. We bring the easier attitude of a
simple curiosity and a will to enjoy the day. We are not seeking art, which is
something serious and demanding. We are seeking divertisement, a leisure ac
tivity that relieves us of daily demands. Aside from the symbolic gravity that
can be attached to them, ruins can be light-hearted. Visiting them is playful.
Ruins are playgrounds for the young. In Ardrossan Castle, Scotland, play slides
and climbing bars have been added. The ruin is a good place for playing hide-
and-seek, dungeons and dragons, siege and war.
I spent pleasant hours in 1984 sitting in the recessed park along the Dan
ube at the Elizabeth Bridge in Budapest, Hungary, watching children scamper
over the scant but scalable remains of Roman Contra-Aquincum (PI. 44). One
lad leaps across a gap, while playmates regard his feat. Around and around they
go, on this playground of the fortification. The municipality has arranged the
site as a park with easy access to the ruin. The paving of the plaza harmonizes
with the stabilized top layer of the walls. How much of the material was put
back in place is indicated by the Line of Destruction that has been embedded in
the restoration. The children have taken command of the fort.
Adults too may enjoy the return to the playfulness of movement and
shapes offered in the experience of the ruin. “Return” has the prefixed sense
when the ruin refreshes, restores, and redeems, for these all express coming
back to something once enjoyed. The ruin brings us back to a simpler stage of
mind, and body, with a pleasant purposelessness, an innocence unmixed with
meaning, a lightheartedness and freedom from seriousness. The destruction
which makes the ruin releases these forgotten possibilities.
At the Temple of Aphaia on the Aegean island of Aegina, Greece, the
forms are open to the sky (PI. 45). The complete pillars to right and left frame
this flank above us. The double level of pillars and lintels on the opposite side
are the back screen that retains the space within the site. The structure to the
right stops the space. In 1965, two human beings assist in that function, one of
whom puts his back to the task. On the left, the space climbs, as do the visitors.
The sky inhabits the temple grounds. It enters where the woman stands. A
cloud approaches that entrance. The pillars and lintels frame the sky, as if they
were windows, and they support the sky as well, as if it were the intended roof.
The distribution of pillars, intact or broken, is of geometrical interest, and of in

viting complexity, with outer and inner, upper and lower, ones. The ruin has
been purified into a repetition of a vertical form and the variations on horizon
tal blocks, including lintels, steps, and pieces in the wall.
At the Temple of Aphaia, uplifted space flourishes. We must mount to get
to the floor of the structure. The structure, in turn, mounts to further levels, and
the form opens out and up toward the sky. The energy of the ruin’s upward
thrust is communicated to the activities of its visitors. The man in front springs
upward, doubly framed by the architecture behind him, while bending to the di
agonal of the stepped stones and of the pillars immediately in front of us.
The woman next in line is in alignment with three verticals of pillars and
suggests the tension of their lifting. The two waiting men are framed by the ta
lented ruin as contrasting centers of attention in a shared space. The visitors are
visited by the inward qualities of the ruin which they bring to expression.
When a viewer visits a ruin, the viewer is visited by the ruin. The ruin
frames the viewer in its arches (PI. 94). We take up a position within its space.
Just as we see others as part of the ruin’s configuration, so we sense ourselves
as sentient partners. The ruin looks back upon the onlooker. It sizes us up:
Everyruin’s Welcome to Everyone
Come in!
You who are headed toward death,
in a world soon to be destroyed.
Make yourself at home.
Take pleasure, while you can,
in my destroyed world.
The ruin is strange but welcoming, unusual yet familiar. We usually get to
feel good in the ruin, despite the stumbling it causes and the infringement upon
our space in which it indulges. We become well-at-ease after instants of ma
laise. The ruin surprisingly comes to be the human element. In our world of ru
ination and destruction, the ruin offers peace. We are willing to explore, to risk
stumbling for the sake of finding what is there.
Ruin offers a fine opportunity for pleasant strolling, a light exercise with
frequent pauses, in which the one-directional movement of so much of our
world is forgotten. Walking takes on new meaning, because it is no longer at
tached to meaning. It is in the unreflective, undirected service of the freedom of
Being. The ruin heightens the feeling of Being. Something happens to the visi
tor. Being returns to our presence. (We will return to Being in Chapter Nine
teen, “Meditations,” below.)
In European towns and cities, the ruin is a place to spend a sunny after-
noon, a way of being outdoors, while visiting a monument. A Sunday stroll

along the remains of the town walls is a standard excursion for townsfolk.
Good views are to be had of town and country. The ruin has a valuable point of
view. Apples or oranges may be taken along. Benches will be found. Family or
friends, sightseeing young couples holding hands, children clambering to the
edges, old-timers sitting silently: these are the human contributions we see in
the ruin as a public park. Cameras and radios are trotted out.
In 1979, as I strolled along the walls of Assisi, the mystical Italian hill
town, my soul was preoccupied with the life of its patron, St. Francis. Stigmata,
such as the Saint received, might be generated psychologically. Even I, without
saintliness, could suddenly be marked by the stigmata. Just then, I stepped on
an enormous rusty nail that almost went through my soul.
The ruin has an intimacy for the European that is missing for the Ameri
can, for it is part of European landscape and cityscape. The European is used to
living with ruins. Each town is likely to have its ruin as the old walls, castle,
main gate, church, or watch tower. The ruin is an accustomed furnishing of the
town, just like its fountains, parks, gardens, and monuments. Far from being a
dead remnant of the past, the ruin is part of the life of the people, the unrushed
life. The foreigner who visits the ruin and sees the citizenry enjoying it is made
to feel at home.
Yet the inhabitant’s aesthetic attitude toward the local ruin may be quite
different from that of the itinerant aesthetician whose distinguishing mark is the
freedom from having to live here. The attitude of the citizenry might not be
aesthetic. It is likely to be colored in historical, religious, and political ways not
accessible to the visitor. The local viewer may find difficult seeing the ruin aes
thetically, if it is seen daily. We are better at appreciating other people’s ruins.
The visitor glimpses only fragments of the lives of unknown persons. The
inhabitants add local color to the ruin. The visit is tranquilizing. The visitor’s
rate of breathing and heartbeat in the ruin are diminished. The ruin is an excel
lent prescription for high blood-pressure.
In the ruin, we get away from it all, the business and busywork of life.
The ruin is a blessed corner of the world that suspends the world. Even the
tourist has a busy schedule, sometimes busier than the townsfolk. So many
things to see, so little time. The ruin is the saving grace in the tourist’s itinerary,
if encountered without a guided tour. When weighed down with the burdens of
sightseeing and the obligations that go with being a foreign visitor, head for the
nearest ruin to regain composure, sensitivity, and the taste for simple pleasures.
Musing in the peaceful shelter of the ruin, in this world approaching ruin,
reflect how this experience opens doors to art experience, aesthetic experience,
and, finally, human experience. Let us make the most of our visit.
Eight
VISIT TO A RUIN: ST. ANDREWS

St. Andrews
The beach
the harbour
the cemetery
the houses of the town
the towers
the castle
the ruins
the rocks
the pier
the hills behind
the sky between
and the sea beyond.
Let us visit one set of ruins, at St. Andrews, Scotland, to see how the plurality
of moments make it aesthetically superb.
The town points us to the ruin of the Cathedral. Its principal streets aim to
get us to the site. We move toward the Cathedral with awareness of it. The
stone houses and university buildings introduce us to the ruin’s gray stoniness.
Arriving, in 1982, from the intact and functioning city, we are already familiar
with the spirit in the gaping ruin that occupies the tip of the town, pointing to
the vast, open, North Sea. We are brought up sharply. The space of the ruin is
enormous in contrast to the small structures that line the streets. We must stop,
because the streets end, and a low wall and iron fence cut across our line of
vision. A thoughtful protective measure. The ruin is addressed by the town.
The signpost declares, THE PENDS, short for the ecclesiastical depend
encies. Most weekends, you can depend on the university students to blank out
the curve of the D.
At the entrance to the ruin, the Crazy Tower, so aptly named by Marian
Olin, seizes the imagination (Fig. 5). A dazzling display of forms, the tower’s
upward thrust is vigorously articulated against the sky. The multifaceted shaft
is delicately topped by a pleated cap, itself crowned, incongruously but proud
ly, with a weather vane. The tower celebrates its release from the building with
the celerity of its ascent/assent. Bravo! cry our hearts.
The formal variety associated with the tower is delightful. The arched
empty window points through space on the horizontal, while the flying buttress
comes in from the other side to drive a diagonal into the tower. Three different
directions are thus embedded in the sky. The tower is the central figure in this
performance of forms, appreciating their offer of helping hands, yet rising up
ward on the shoulder of the remaining arch. The spring of an arch above is all
that is left of any further support. Here the tower must keep itself going, resis
ting the tendency of falling to the left, accentuated by the angle of our vision.
The ruin is more than structure. A Line of Destruction projects against the
receptive sky. From the lower right, over the shoulder of the intact arch, the
line rushes toward the tower, only to fling itself out in the broken spring and
then recede to the corrugations of the tower cap. The crowning touch is the
small ball that sits with equanimity. On the left, the line plummets.
If we squint, which invariably happens when looking against the bright
sky, the stones turn to silhouette. Their edgy mass is contributed to the outer
line, and the inner line of the arch comes into play. We open our eyes wide to
catch the details of windows, pennant, and tracery in the arch. Then we under
stand that the tower housed a staircase to the roof. It has a devoted innerness
that we can decipher. In fulfilling its intention with imperturbable persistence
and fruitful futility, the ruin engages in glorious incongruity. No roof remains.
Scant walls. The stairs gives access only to the air.
We have been unconsciously moving about the tower in the effortless ef
fort to detect its relationships to forms. The changes wrought by movement in
tensify first one form, then another, especially as we see them from below,
Visit to a Ruin: St. Andrews 175
swelling up at drastic angles. As we get closer, the towering power increases.

We are aware of our being on the ground, while the structures fly.
Do we circle the tower, or does the tower circle us? William James once
asked such a question about a squirrel and a tree. At St. Andrews, our form has
become associated with the tower’s form, so the pragmatic answer is: Both.
Changes occur in our relationship. The strong unity grows, as we discover the
tower’s attachment to a section of wall lying at right angles to the main config
uration. This gives it a fuller spatial footing. Details enhance the forthright sim
plicity of the forms. Narrow windows in the tower are intensifications of the
substance, reminders of its hollow interior, and confirmations of our presence
below them.
We have had to step down to get close, thereby increasing the structure’s
overhang. We are on an entrance path, but the framing force of the arched door
way draws us involuntarily forward on the horizontal. It picks up the distant
Twin Towers and holds them in a touching setting that displays the vigorous
forms in the towers and the worn edges of the doorway through which the
North Sea winds have whistled.
We cannot keep our eyes on the Crazy Tower without being attracted to
the Twin Towers, for Crazy and Twin are alike towers, though one is singular
and highly irregular, the other double and regular in its contained forms (PI.
46). Crazy Tower and Twin Towers mark the innerness of the invisible church
of which they are the boundaries. The towers signal one another through the in
tervening space. They face each other without the intervention of the church. In
the absence of a roof, the shortest distance between two towers is a line. They
are the guardians still of still space.
Each vertical of the Twin Towers displays bold forms: multifaceted
crowns, arches with long windows, colonnades, parts of long arches. Then the
twins link arms across space to shoulder the responsibility for a towering emp
tiness of arch. All this activity of bold form freed from earthly care takes place
way above our heads.
The perfect lawn, decorated by bases of titanic columns that once support
ed the roof, brings home the enormous distance between the acrobatic Crazy
Tower that hovers above us and the dignified Twin Towers at the far end. We
walk down the aisle, this greensward brightened by sunlight, and lose all time.
Infinite indwelling takes place as we stand with the bases, feeling their lifting
under the heavens. There/their innerness goes on forever. No matter that noth
ing remains above to be lifted. The matter of the base is intent on its being.
Having touched base, we wander alongside the remaining wall that extends
from the Crazy Tower and over to the tombstones, though, imperceptibly, we
have stepped outside the confines of the invisible church.
We are not directed by the aisles of church but attracted to the isles of
tombs, while always keeping eyes on the Twin Towers. A physiognomy flirts
176
'////: aesthetics of ruins
across their forms, a clown’s hat tops a humorous set of features filled to the
brim with blueness. A playful face, light-headed despite its weight/wait.
Our stroll activates the Framing Device of tombstones and communicates
echoes of the pinnacles and arches of the tower to the grave markers. We rec
ognize that we are seeing the exterior of the towers and those portions that
would have been within the building, all the while that we are standing outside,
and what had been the interior is also outside.
We see the Twin Towers at the back of the ruin, but we take pleasure in
going around and behind them. Instead of the end of the edifice, they are an end
in themselves, free standing in a field of tombs. Our form mixes with theirs,
and we share their view on the ruin. The towers are like enlarged tombstones.
After a time, a third tower makes its existence known to us. Not sensa
tional like the others, nor pointed, it does not seem a ruin. On close examina
tion, we find that this St. Regulus Tower, the bell tower, is in ruin, and we wel
come it into our field of enjoyment.
This square tower stands off to the side, out of the line of communication
between the Twin Towers and the Crazy Tower. That gives it a point of view
on both. As we try to discover its character and form, we are led away from it,
such that we see it in contrast first to the one and then to the other of the more
striking towers. The solid geometry and stolid construction of St. Regulus make
sober contrast with the craziness of the single tower and the elevated playful
ness of the twins.
We detect the unity of the ruin at St. Andrews as a field with three foci,
each an organizer of space about it, a magnetic center of attraction, with lines
of force between them. We ramble about the graveyard, trying to get the right
framing of two of them by the third and then the right relationship of all three.
Many framings and relationships occur. The ruin grows larger, more complex,
and more engrossing, a campus of delights in this ancient university town.
We need to rest from the wind and the wonder. Several features offer us
relief: (1) benches, (2) the large secluded space of the former cloister, one of
whose walls leads from the Crazy Tower, while another offers further framing
of the Twin Towers, (3) a small museum, partially underground, filled with
evocative fragments, (4) the tombstones, alive with the human touch, (5) those
tombs in the floor of the ruin, open and empty so that the sun shines into their
comers as if to probe humanity’s bones.
The numerous distractions make the time pass and give us needed rest
from the towers. We are aware of the expansiveness of the grounds. Stone and
lawn are agreeably spread out in a world reserved for them. The ruin is not in
the city. It is a city, with larger spaces and generous inutility.
In our effort to experience the whole of the ruin by seeing the three towers
together, we are led to its edges and then outside it. The cemetery is walled, and
from outside the wall, we see the tops of the towers enter purified relationship.
We discover more towers in those of the walls, so that by being outside we are
still within the plastic possibilities of forms.
If we have left the great ruin, we have entered the site of another, smaller
one, the foundations of St. Mary’s Church. This is the ruin’s ruin, simpler, gen
tler, fully horizontal, and entirely within our visual range. The church is a re
ward for our exertions in its larger, complex neighbor. The wall that holds in
the main ruin borders this fresh ruin. One good ruin serves another.
St. Andrews piles one ruin upon another, for from St. Mary’s, and in sight
of the Cathedral towers, we can see the Castle that had been brought to ruin fol
lowing occupation in the Reformation by John Knox (PI. 47). St. Andrews, the
city of learning, has also been instructed by the school of hard Knox.
The Castle’s splendid openness of stone stands on the sea’s edge and
blends ruggedly into the rock of the cliffs which extend to where we stand,
among ruins. The arc of the shore is abruptly broken at low ebb by the backs of
rigid/ridged rocks, black-draped as if bedecked in widow’s weeds. These ribs
of rock connect the bones of stones in the Castle with the untoppled vertical
masses of the cliffs, some of which is slipping away from St. Mary’s Church.
Castle and cliffs are under the shaping influence of the sea. Stone is returning
to something more primitive in its simple heart: rock.
The Castle ruin is another cliff upon the North Sea. Its stone and the na
tive rock grow together and are carved by the elements. Loose boulders, stria-
tions in stone, penetrating tidal pools, and undermined cliffs reveal nature’s
sculptural power close at hand. The Castle is set above this rugged field of in
terwoven fingers of sea and stone, dotted with birds and clothed in the smatter
ings of algae and seawood. A hazardous, destructive place, yet alive and crea
tive of mighty forms. The Castle crowns this stirring revelation of nature. Its
human identity is affirmed by the mass on the left, poised like a mask, roofless,
with unglazed windows. The houses of the town peer over the ruin as if its con
tinuation, while the sheer cliff-wall of the Castle harbors a sunlit strand dotted
by visitors on this blustery August day.
The sea is slowly freeing St. Andrews. The breaking-down is a release of
vitality. The edges of the Castle, a living being moored on the rocks, have a
loving undulation, the caress of wave, wind, and tide. From the vantage point
of St. Mary’s ruin, we see the Castle without the town. Ruin-to-ruin rumination.
Cliff and sea are the Castle’s parents. To grasp the three towers along with the
Castle, we are urged by this road to descend past the small fishing port, and
away from all the ruins, onto a pier that beckons.
It is a bony finger sticking out from the hand of St. Andrews that we had
studied from the bench in St. Mary’s. The favorite stroll of the students attired
in red robes like migrating birds, the pier takes us straight into the North Sea. A
companion to the ribbed rocks that break up incoming waves. Advancing on
the pier, we must repeatedly turn around to take the view. Here we come to the
PI. 47. T h e C astle, St. A n d r e w s, S co tla n d , U K , 1982

discovery of the union of Castle and Cathedral and of the harmony of the tow
ers. The Castle ruin is a beautiful flank to the Cathedral ruin that presses for
ward onto the promontory from which we have just descended.
We can finally see the towers together, with equality of dignity, in the
same grand space. Distance has been overcome. The ruins are reconciled. They
make sense out of all the rest of the world. The fishing port is harbored by the
lower edge of the cemetery, and we see how it is protected by the pier, the per
fect ruin-viewer. The open sands of the beach are a further consequence of that
protection. Beyond the Castle, we can pick out other beaches and meadows,
down where the Royal and Ancient Golf Club must lie.
At the tip of the pier, as I hold on to the railings of the signal light, the
town at last makes sense. The town-towers, including that of St. Salvator’s
Chapel at the university, greet the ruin-towers. The land and the sea join hands,
accomplices, not opponents, in Being. The town beyond the ruin comes to mind
as having been built out of the stones of the ruin. That is why such a compan
ionable familiarity persists between them. The ruin became a quarry for the
townspeople, who took it into their homes. Made out of the same stones of the
ruin, the pier is the ruin’s projection of consciousness. The pier peers upon ruin
and town in unpretentious self-consciousness. Town, ruins, nature, and mind
unite in a sublime whole, a culminating moment without bounds that transports
me into ecstasy just as a sudden roaring wind sweeps me to my knees and off
ers to toss me head over heels into the churning dark sea.
Return to earth, taking shelter on the pier’s walkway. More is to be done
in the ruin. It has taken on meaning as the town’s heart. The tombstones are
more poignant, for they are the continuity of life with the town, and the dead
sanctify the grounds of the ruin. The gentleness of the tombs contrasts with the
implied violence of the towers that guard a church torn asunder by Reformers
in the middle of the sixteenth century.
We may climb St. Regulus. From its windswept platform, we see all, ex
cept itself. To the world around, it plays omphalos, with plenty of oomph.
There is the pier from whose tip I barely escaped taking a fateful dip. The pier
is the presence of the ruin in the sea. The marriage of town and ruin is certified
from St. Regulus. The rule is union. St. Salvator’s tower, outside the grounds of
the ruin, amicably dwells in the company of the Crazy Tower. We are aware
that the Crazy Tower is a former functioning edifice and that St. Salvator’s
tower is a potential ruin.
The Crazy Tower, which was so exaggeratedly vertical when we were on
the ground, now appears attached to a long wall of moderate height, sharp an
gles, and intense patterning. The tower is willing to play a part in this wall, a
leading part, to be sure. The wall turns in front of us to border the cloister. We
can now enjoy the spaces of the ruin from above (PI. 48).
Less is more in the ruin. Well, more or less. The open spaces are marvels
Visit to a Ruin: St. Andrews 1X1
PI. 48. St. A n d r e w s C a th ed ra l from A b o ve, S co tla n d , U K , 1982

in their own right and serve as borders to the stones whose total mass we see to
be tiny. The shift is between stones delimiting spaces, and spaces delimiting
stones. From above, we are outside it all. We look down on the top of stones
and on the top of heads. Yet we are in the middle of it. The wind reminds us of
our physical vulnerability, the gravity pulls upon us as we lean over the edge.
We hold on to the ruin for dear life.
At an angle, from our perch, we admire the Twin Towers for their free
standing height. Their loveliness of form is enhanced by the foreshortening
from above, whereas from below they had too great a top-heaviness. Lighter
and gayer, the towers screen the Castle ruin, each penetrating the other.
The people below are welcome contributors of motion and color. Ambula
tory centers of sensibility, they entertain the eye with their passage between the
rows of tombs. The spacing of the visitors tells us of their solitary engagement
with the ruin. We can tell apart the passersby from the serious experiences. We
gaze with them upon the towers, rest with them upon the benches, muse with
them among the tombstones. Once, I thought I saw myself down below.
Our sharing with our fellows is a human insight into the ruin and the
ruin’s insight into humanity, for we are still looking at things from the ruin’s
point of view. The ruin examines its visitors and puts them to the test by di
verse exercises. We see them doing what the ruin has set forth for them to do.
They crane their necks and look up at us. We are a tower.
The tombstones are neatly tended and are attended by their afternoon
shadows. People walk through the ruins and the cemetery, going about their
business or play. The floor of the ruin is a gameboard. Benches are pieces in
stalled on the left for relaxation. The sun burns their seats. A line of wall sepa
rates them from the space of the dark tombs. The arches throw their sunlight
onto the board, doubling their enlightening value.
Strange forms serve as counters or passages between the areas marked out
by stone lines. Shadow, sunlight, strollers keep the game going. What a lively
world below! We participate in that world as live players by hanging over the
edge of the windswept top of St. Regulus. A mismovement and we would make
a strong impression on the cemetery.
From our height, we see past the people into the open tombs and their
empty stone coffins. We get to the bottom of things. The ruin has the power of
going beyond the grave. It goes deeper than death to find life. The formal pat
tern of the set of four graves is warm and humane, with just the right proportion
of variation, as one sarcophagus retains its lid. A handsome set, cushioned nice
ly by the green sod, and fit for bishops. The dark shadows and the bright sun
give happy contrasts and accentuate the depth. The living, moving, human form
comes to stop and gaze into the empty containers, the human heart facing the
heart of things. Gentle peace, not terror, informs the scene. A new unity comes
with this aesthetic reconciliation of being human.
PI. 49. S u n d o w n , St. A n d r e w s C a th ed ra l, S co tla n d , U K , 1982
Reluctantly, we descend to become other persons in the field of the ruin.

Every step has possible significance. Our presence is measured by direction to
one of the towers and by a field that extends all around us, has no boundaries,
and exists in the sky and underground. An intoxication of Being occurs, making
no further step necessary, for all that will be experienced is now. The ruin re
veals itself as a sacred garden. Something has changed within our soul. It too
has become a charged field without bounds, full to overflowing. Ready to die
of Being, we are brought back to the world by the sinking sun, howling wind,
elongating shadows, and early onset of evening hunger.
Parting appears impossible, for we have become one with the ruin. In
these hours together, we have imparted to one another our inmostness, our most
innerness. The leveling sunbeams come in, as we start out (PI. 49). They stalk
through the cloister arches, through the narrow window in the Crazy Tower, il
luminated like a jewel upon a wand, over the heads of nodding tombstones, and
through the jowls of the Twin Towers, fleshing them out. We drag a long shad
ow behind us, another tower among towers, another tombstone in the cemetery.
The late hour, the fatigue of our day’s exertion/excursion, the darkening lawn
make the town indefinitely distant. We pass along the remaining wall, among
the eternal bases of the invisible columns, the sun exiting as well. We leave the
ruin to dwell in night, as we reenter the town, this extension of the ruin.
The town can never be the same. The ruin has not ruined it. It has made
the town more hospitable. The town is the ruin brought to the level of daily life
here on the end of the Earth. As we head for our soup and hot potatoes, and
then an evening lecture, the moon enters the ruins.
At sunrise, we are there again. The other face of things is illuminated. The
ruin reorients itself. The church, no longer there, has no need of candles or lan
terns, for the sun, the moon, the stars, and the town shed light upon it. The ruin
is a cosmic encounter. It invites us in under all kinds of weather and in every
season. The wind does wonders with it, winding between tombstones and whip
ping between towers. The wind is the hand of Being. It shapes the ruin and
makes us feel its polishing surfaces. The wind makes us feel we are feelers too.
We are in the wind in the ruin, the wind within us.
The ruin of St. Andrews welcomes rain as its daily bath. Rain keeps the
lawn alive, washes the stones, caresses the towers who playtfully deflect its
downpour. Rain enters the open graves, making them gleam with life under its
wet polish. Drainage holes in the stone coffins allow the rain to find its
soaking/seeking way through them into the earth. The rain plays sounds for the
ruin. The falling of water upon stone is a delicious softness, soothing, delicately
somnolent. Music without time. We have nowhere to go. Just as well to sit in
this sheltered corner and enjoy the rain, this liquid raiment of Being.
The ruins of St. Andrews, preeminent among this planet’s sources of sub
limity, have taught us how we may build our life on ruin.
Nine
BUILDING WITH RUIN

Building-With
Let us save it,

Yet make something
out of it,
That is, make something
out of it
for ourselves;
Hence, make something
of ourselves
out of it.
The ruin may be built upon to enrich art and life. Most ruins became more of a
ruin, thanks to the helping hands of people who sought building-materials.
Builders everywhere have hunted the ruin for their quarry. What can be easily
broken off, lifted up, and carted away finds its way into large-scale public con
struction and small-scale peasant houses. Hadrian’s Wall, which protected Ro
man Britain from the northern barbarians, has lost 90 percent of its 80-mile
(129-kilometer) existence. Where has it gone? Into roadways, farmhouses, and
field dividers. Gone yet present. Life goes on, making use of the useless ruin.
Iznik, the Turkish town that was once Nicaea, has several sad ruins, in
cluding the church in which Emperor Constantine’s Council met in 325 CE to
formulate the Nicene Creed. In this ruin in 1965,1 held a seminar with philoso
phy students on the existence of God. It rained. The ruin did not offer enough
shelter for our deliberations, so we adjourned to the tea house across the road.
More moving than this Christian ruin is the incorporation of its elements
in humble Muslim dwellings and tea houses. Here a marble column serves as
lintel, there an ornate slab from the ecclesiastical edifice is a doorstep. Iznik has
taken Nicaea into its heart/hearth. The stones were not chosen because of a val
ue placed upon the ruin. The value was placed on the stones for use in construc
tion. To aid its proper use, the ruin should have completely fallen to pieces!
Once a ruin is recycled and can no longer be regarded in a utilitarian light,
townspeople may discover the value of having its stones in their private door
ways or humble mangers. Such pieces are a connection with the vaguely signif
icant, a manifestation of roots in the locale. The celebrated ruin is part of our
house, the owner might think, or, our house is part of the celebrated ruin. Even
if the owner takes no pride in owning a structure built upon pieces of ruin, the
community notices these elements scattered throughout its existence. It recog
nizes itself as risen from the ruin. It recognizes the ruin as a fellow inhabitant.
PI. 50. City Wall, Istanbul, Turkey, 1965

Building with Ruin 187
If the ruin should have symbolic value, it becomes more meaningful to the
community that takes communion with its flesh of stone. The ruin enters the
meaning of life, just as we enter the doorway of the house through the ruin. In
these ways, we may keep the ancient vital, while endurance, continuity, and
connection color daily life.
The wall that circles the city of Istanbul has been put to many uses. We
are using it, in 1965, in Plate 50, to frame a minaret. The rude brick and stone
of the wall frame this frame, and its neighbor to the left, blacked out by a struc
ture. The windows in the wall may be the stately apertures of a former palace.
In the arch on the right, a humble adaptation is the squatter’s hut built of cinder
block and restacked brick, with an efficient drainage system and a modest
window. Whoever dwells within the wall assures that it has life.
This is confirmed by the plants that have taken root above and within. Ad
ditional planting has been introduced at the base, where two people seek relief
from the August heat on a bench. They are almost lost to view, as massive
white blocks march across the lower level. The people are located far below the
framed minaret that caught our eye and stopped our circling of the walls. This
wall is the physiognomy of a city with layers of history. A name and date have
been introduced into the right-hand block like the signature to a painting.
A Roman wall has been fixed up to accommodate the university in Llub-
ljana (Emona)y the capital of Slovenia (PI. 51). The ancient structure offers a
fancy entrance, in 1986, to the unremarkable concrete buildings. The architec
tural gesture links history, civilization, and learning. The pyramid that serves as
a genial gate may have been a tomb.
In many European towns and farmhouses, we can spot the encrustations
of Roman and Gothic elements. These have been absorbed into buildings as
sturdy substance. They may appear as inadvertent ornaments, or they may be
enhanced self-consciously as a heritage. Much of Europe is the stuff of ruins.
The city walls, fortresses, gatehouses, palaces, churches, and caserns have not
totally disappeared, even when no ruin stands in their original place. They have
been kept stone-by-stone in the town or countryside, residing in new unities. In
time, these structures may be destroyed, and out of their shabbiness might tum
ble some block of noble stone, a twice-born ruin.
Europe feeds on ruins. Thus, the Piazza Navona in Rome owes its elon
gated shape to the Roman stadium that existed here and of which stones remain
in nearby basements. We gaze at the play of water in Gian (Giovanni) Lorenzo
Bernini’s fountain, “The Rivers’’ (1651), cradled in the accommodating outdoor
space. Our stroll leads inevitably to the “Caffe Tre Scalini” to savor its ice
cream tartuffi. The Piazza is the perfect shape and size to take a passeggiata
and linger over a gelato.
The great cities of Jerusalem, Rome, Istanbul, Paris, and London are con
stantly struggling to live with their heritage, to sustain a modem life freed from
THE AESTHETICS RUINS
PI. 51. R o m a n W a ll, L lu b lja n a , S lo v e n ia , 1986

the restraints of their past, yet to keep alive whatever in that past is worth sav
ing. These cities are paradoxes. They cannot be fully modern; they refuse to re
main antiquarian. They must creatively encounter the ruin of themselves.
Many ways of living with the ruin are possible. We may leave it alone to
follow its life, while we pursue ours. We may carefully preserve the ruin, treat
it as a public monument, and endow it with symbolic significance. We may
also build on the ruin, build with the ruin, or rebuild the ruin. The ingenuities of
architecture, as Stanley M. Sherman has taught me, are many-storied.
Rebuilding is a painstaking undertaking, illustrated by the old Capitol at
Williamsburg, Virginia, United States. The lovely, grand building, so sensuous
ly alive in its curvaceousness and so completely intact down to the last red
brick, is a recreation based on plans and drawings, and set upon the original
foundations. Not the original, nothing about it suggests ruin. It is undestroyed
and perfectly ready to serve as a government building. Inside and outside are
equally complete and in the best of condition. Probably better than when new.
The Capitol is new.
The whole that is the new old Capitol is excellently sited in handsome
grounds and surrounded by a complete Colonial town. Nature is kept under
strict control in this town. No trash is allowed to accumulate. Picket fences
keep order. Everything is freshly painted. Incongruity and anachronism are
studiously suppressed, for the citizenry are dressed in Colonial attire and the
buildings are put to old-fashioned use, such as blacksmithing, baking, and
printing. The modern facilities for telephones, banking machines, and flush toi
lets are discreetly disguised. Williamsburg is altogether a highly efficient,
elaborately detailed, and superbly maintained functioning village. As far from a
ruin as can be imagined. The restoration abhors the ruined. Where today is a lot
with only a trace of foundations, next year will be a milliner’s shoppe. Hats off
to restoration!
Williamsburg plays a persuasive role in American taste. It is first in the
lineage of Disneyland and Disney World, Fantasy Island, theme parks, and
Hollywood Studio tours. Williamsburg puts the question of taste this way to
America: What good is a ruin, when we can rebuild it with ingenuity, accuracy,
safety, and convenience?
The restoration, in this view, is more authentic than the ruin, because it is
the intact whole put back in working order. In the ruin, we have lost the origi
nal. In the restoration, we have lost the ruin, but, supposedly, we do have the
original. Williamsburg gives us the tasteful fantasy, not the reality, of the Colo
nial. Many original intact buildings form part of the fantasy, though we do not
notice which ones they are.
Williamsburg is a time machine that allows us to indulge in an American
specialty, the world of fantasy that we can enter, accompanied by our accus
tomed conveniences. To dine by candlelight in one of the inns and stay over
night in a four-poster bed is a treat. Williamsburg is a history park that offers a

good show to the whole family.
The Disney creations go one step further. They do not need the founda
tions of an original structure or the historical site. Everything can be recreated
afresh in a single location, providing all possible amenities for visitors. Every
thing runs smoothly. Nothing is broken. No ruins, unless they are fabricated
synthetically to add authenticity to the scenery.
But the authenticity of the re-creation or the restoration leads to a loss of
touch with the original and a distaste for the ruin. Consider another mode of
building with (better, building-with) the ruin as the creation of a building in a
modem idiom that allows the associated ruin to speak in its terms. The result:
dialogue. The ruin has not been appropriated into the modern structure, nor has
the modern flattered the old. The two work together, across time, through
space, to build a unity greater than placing them side-by-side.
A modest example of building-with ruin is the church in the provincial
town of San Germdn, Puerto Rico (PI. 52). The ruined part provides dramatic
presence for the new church that declares itself by the even edges of the white-
painted facade reached by the intact stairs. Going up those stairs, in 1985, we
cannot miss the earlier structure with its Line of Destruction, discolored stone,
and wild vegetation. Past and present are hand-in-hand, sharing a low wall.
Three principles are operative in the challenge of building-with ruin.
(1) The ruin must be valued in its integrity. It is not to be restored, but it
should be kept for what it is, a min, with all that goes with its status, in
cluding formal beauty and communal meaning.
(2) But the min should be addressed by contemporary life, not left to it
self. It is to be drawn into the mainstream of the advancing culture.
(3) The advancing culture is not to impose its forms and meanings on the
min but is to pursue its aims and methods while respecting the min.
The consequence of these principles is a mutual taking-account by min

and modem building, each the measure of the other, each the context for the
other. Together, they transform the incongmity of their presence to become at-
home with one another. Partners. The visitor enters a field created by both and
recognizes two sides to the experience. Here is the tme ancient which remains
vital, as given testimony in this modern response. Here is the true modern,
which makes its bold advance with proud relationship to its heritage.
In such a work, the min is overcome; it comes over into creative union.
This is also the min’s apotheosis, its permanent projection into the future. Such
a work befits a culture trying to go forward with its past. A symbolic gesture
that insists the culture live with creativity, not just curatorial concern, it simul
taneously insists that the cultural heritage spring forward into the here and now.
PI. 52. Church, New and Ruined, San German, Puerto Rico, 1985
T H E AES'IHETICS RUINS
192
I»|. 53. Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin, Germany, 1985

Such works are few. Easier to leave the ruins alone and build without ref
erence to them. The older practice of building on top of the ruins is nowadays
discouraged. Historic cities may divide the territory: this for the ruins, that for
old intact works, there for modem construction. This is probably the most prud
ent policy, for it forestalls destruction of what is valuable, though it leaves the
city with divided soul.
The modern city and the ancient city might have nothing in common, as
may be the case with Athens. Alienation can occur in which we are not at home
in the dead ruins or the busy modernism. Sooner or later, world-historical cities
have to face the challenge of bridging themselves, putting together the pieces of
their life into a more viable whole.
War creates many occasions for facing the challenge of new building in
relation to recent ruin. Thus, the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, England,
bombed by the Germans on 14 November 1940, have been retained, and an ad
joining building has been constructed, designed by Basil Spence, with features
contributed from around the world. The Cathedral is a sanctified place of rec
onciliation. Peace wells up in the conjoined ruin and new structure.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin is a superlative example
of the principles of building-with ruin (PI. 53). The tower of the ugly church of
1895, bombed by the Allies in World War II on 23 November 1943, stands
with dignity enhanced by the rightly proportioned new tower, church, and serv
ice building erected from 1959 to 1963 to the plans of Egon Eiermann. The in
tensity of the closed modern forms gives impressive innerness to the mighty
public space. All the forms are on a platform about a meter above the plaza lev
el, which increases their potency in space. The forms do not touch. The plat
form’s circular motif is repeated in the new church’s glazed flooring.
Mass meets mass. The old church is taller, wider, more variegated. It
holds the space. But the new form holds its own. It packs power in its regular
ized cell of a body and crowns itself with a gold cross. Only the top of that tow
er is interesting. It addresses the open top of the old tower just across the space.
Can you top that? The gold cross is answered by nineteenth-century crosses in
the windows across the way. The new tower’s interruptive band occurs at about
the same height as the clock faces on the old tower. The incongruity of anach
ronism. The torn-off sections of the older structure are gently covered by the
shadow of the newer. Between them, trees spring from a common ground. We
can see neither tower on its own. They are a togetherness.
Harmony of mass and form, though the old structure is ragged, while each
of the new ones is smoothly fit together and simplified. The gaping hole of the
old tower’s rose window speaks to the attentive new church, while the entrance
to the new place of worship is placed under the shadow of the ruined tower.
From outside, the modem parts resemble the architecture of public toilets:
anonymous, unattractive, and unwelcoming. But at night, they emit a blue light.
The discrete marks made by shells and shrapnel on the base of the old tower
have been discreetly sanded to dress these wounds, a questionable choice.
The blue windows of the new church’s interior suggest cracked panes
with explosive Hashes of other colors. A reflective interiority. The interior of
the old tower continues its parade of references to royalty, which contrasts with
the genial parade of ordinary people on the Kurfurstendamm, Berlin’s main
drag. The illuminated clock on four sides of the old tower provides the time to
the cosmopolitan nightlife of the city. I repeatedly checked the hour in 1985.
The two towers are power rods in a force field. The new tower is the quin
tessence of modernism in architecture, efficient, with clean lines, bold in its
lack of ornamentation. The only concession to visual entertainment is curls at
the corners created by structural features. The old tower is old-fashioned, knob
by, uneven, even adorned with a gargoyle. The broken form and the complete
form form a new form, unified yet in ruin.
Fig. 6. Silhouette, M em orial C h u rch , B erlin, G erm any, 1985
The Church is a symbol of modern Berlin overcoming its past, including

its own destruction. A center for ethical concern and peace activity. The old
and the new parts display difference of texture, height, material, and age, yet
they share space, respect, and purpose. A forward-looking work, the Church
carries its past forward, while rooted in the suffering and spirit of the past. We
recognize what could have been done:
(1) Restore the old church to give the fantasy of intact originality.
(2) Tear down the ruin as a regrettable loss and build something entirely
for the future.
(3) Leave the ruin alone and put up a new church elsewhere.
(4) Add nondescript rooms for the sake of convenience and let the old
church function as best it can.
The choice made is against these. A different will is at work. The new and the
old face the future. That is building-with.
The oldest wall in Rome (fourth century BCE) is at the railway terminal
completed in 1950 along the plans of Eug. Montuori, Leo Calini, and others
(PI. 54). A grand station, as it must be for a grand European capital. Spacious
ness awaits our arrival. This city takes life seriously, though not ponderously.
The light and airy space opens out into the city. An undulation carries us
forward. Or, if we are headed in the opposite direction, it welcomes us in. The
terminal does much with its mission on behalf of the city in facilitating going
and coming.
The wall too is concerned with going and coming. It announces the city’s
identity to travelers. Like the station, the wall speaks of harboring within,
though now the wall is surrounded by the city. It could have been torn down to
allow Rome to continue its life in modem terms. Or the wall could have been
surrounded with a park and left to itself, an island in a city that directs its crea
tive attention elsewhere.
But the planning of the railway station has taken account of the ruin. Wall
and terminal come together. The wall moves out from the heart of the terminal,
while the terminal proceeds with expansive pride from the encounter, the dyna
mic crossing of an X.
While only the lower legs of the X are visible from the square, we feel the
thrust of the upper arms. Terminal and wall make their way toward a meeting
place. Noble forms come together. The rows of ancient stone come in from the
left, the modem piers march in from the right. Both undulate.
A palm tree flourishes in the vital space of coming together. Access to
that space is controlled, as if a pious place, by the bars of the metal railing,
which also guard the entrance to the subterranean toilets. Ancient Rome is alive
and revered in the modern Rome that we enter at the railway terminal. A pro
tected harmony gives a rare peacefulness to the hurried center of Rome.
The terminal’s undulation is an imaginative free rendition of the wavy
edge of the wall. This movement interprets, not imitates. Wall and terminal are
traveling companions, one in heavy blocks of stones, the other in thin lines of
steel and large surfaces of glass. The simplicity of the material in each is dis
played with admirable candor, a hallmark of Italian taste.
The modern materials are as straightforward and unornamented in their
service as the ancient ones. The modern has learned from the ancient and is
grateful, though not bound in slavish conformity, for it dares to soar with gra
cious, sensuous lines and lofty volumes.
Rising above the terminal and wall is an enormous office building, the
visual terminus to the encounter. It enters the activity as well, catching up for
its surface the lines of the wall’s blocks and the verticals of the terminal’s wall.
These features welcome a fourth player to join their trio: the space in
1% THE AESTHETICS OE RUINS
mm
which we stand, the capacious square that is a central stop for bus and metro.
We face the rail terminal daily in getting about the city. The square is an out
door station, facilitator of going and coming, upon which Rome’s identity is
stamped. The Roman wall and the railway center of Rome mark our passage.
The horizontal stretch of the ground is an equal for the vertical field of the
office building. The building closes the meeting; the ground opens it. The activ
ity of the square shares its life with the three partners. Human life is under
ground and within the rail terminal. The office building catches the interior life
from them. The interiority natural to the wall is just what office buildings need.
The ground brings us closer to the meeting place, if we do not have to rush off
in the terminal or square. The wall welcomes our presence in its stable goodwill
and scale more to the human measure. We accept the invitation.
Our strolling between wall and terminal brings the square into their field.
We feel the charged space with a geometrical increase. This is due to vitality in
the structures, energy in our participation, and geometry in the penetration.
Closer to the vertex, the setting becomes more powerful. We have been trans
ported within the wall, terminal, and office building. New unity happens in
which the site is a whole of energetic parts that come together in striking har
mony. Building-with.
The structures celebrate. We join in their celebration. The single human
form may advance out of the busyness of the square, out of the bustle of the
station, out of the business of the offices, and urged on by the graceful tree
growing in the angle, sound out the forms at first heart. Tranquility resides in
this humane corner of the city, worthy of its ancientness and modernity. For a
moment, before rushing onward, a woman sits on the bench knitting.
But in 1981, every day that I approached this juncture of civilization, it
exuded the unmistakable, inescapable, unforgettable, inexpungable, distinctive
stench of commingled stale and fresh urine. Homeless people sprawled on the
bench. Boxes and trash cluttered the vertex, bicycles were chained to the railing
about the ruin, and the gate was locked. I could not see what happens to the
wall, for its meeting with the terminal was derailed.
The oldest synagogue in Jerusalem, founded by Rabbi Moshe ben Nah-
man (RAMBAN, Nachmanides) in 1267, is a ruin, adjacent to other synagogue
ruins, in a complex disorder. After East Jerusalem had come into Israeli hands
in 1967 and had been reunified with the city, these neglected structures became
of concern. A new synagogue here, incorporating the ruins, was a possibility.
But what synagogue? How design it to respect, not ruin, the ruins? The ruins
could be enhanced by an interpretive arrangement at the site. How enhance
without disrupting?
Many proposals were argued for, as is the case in Israel for all public is
sues. But two strong values stuck their head out of the disagreements: (1) to
save the ruins without denying them; (2) to respond with creative architecture
to the ruins. In 1981, we could experience both values as fulfilled. A simple

arch spans the space of the synagogues (PI. 55). It acknowledges their space by
expressing the volume of their experienced field. Its shape recapitulates the
dome line of all possible synagogues, ancient or modern.
At first, the single structure starkly set against the sky suggests that it is
part of the ruin, as if other materials have fallen away to leave it behind. The
springing forward of the arch enters the spirit of the ruin to bolster our experi
ence of it as ruin. The rounded form puts a cap on the ruin, so that it rises to a
dignified height yet dwells within an expansive space. The ruin increases in
power by this defining finger. The arch is a form of springing openness, not a
roof or enclosure. The ruin is outdoors under the eye of heaven. The arch is not
a surface, but a gesture, say, the gesture of the rainbow, the symbol placed in
the sky as a sign of the covenant between divinity on one hand and humanity
and all terrestrial life on the other hand (Genesis, 9:12-17).
We recognize the arch as a recent construction, as is the stabilizing edge
of the ruin and entrance stairs. These are perfectly fit stone. Their material is
the same as the ruin’s, but they are above having been ruined. Clean and fresh,
they are reborn as the youth hidden in the old stones. The modem choice of ma
terial is no replication or restoration of the past but an interpretive act, asserting
its relationship yet confidant in its modernity.
The arch’s thinness testifies to the restraint that refuses to cover the min.
It echoes an arch visible toward the right. The new arch is an affirmation of the
willingness to reanimate the ancient, instead of leaving it alone in the past. This
bridge unites modem Jerusalem and ancient Jerusalem, living and dead Jews.
Building-with.
The arch’s simplicity is staggering. A thousand other ways were at hand
to modernize. This way offers the gentle understatement of mass coupled with
the far-reaching vigor of form. In its leap, it is free; in its symmetry and
grounding, disciplined. By its form and placement against the sky, the arch
must spring. Laying claim to the life of the min, it is the gesture of an encom
passing arm that draws the arc of its protectiveness.
The five planters on the terrace are counter-notes to the arch. Careful at
tention has been given to the approach, railing, and facade. Building material
lies near the steps. The min has been packaged for us with simple elegance, be
low, on left and right, and above. Behind, it has the intact building. The min is
embraced, though not overwhelmed, by caring.
The modem constmction reestablishes the min. But it grows out of the
min, which rebuilds its spirit after long suffering and neglect. The min reenters
Jerusalem with this bubbling up of life. Between the past that lies in ruin and
the future that is open to freedom is the bridge filled with presence. We step
forward to mount the steps, pass beyond the edge, and enter between the arch
against the sky and the mins upon the earth.
Building with Ruin
PI. 55. Arch, Synagogue, Past Jerusalem, Israel, 1981

In Coventry, Berlin, Rome, and Jerusalem, we have seen the rare art of
building-with ruin to make something more than ruin and more than modernity.
In creative leaps, the abyss of loss is overcome by newfound meaning. The
moral message is clear.
With-Building
We may carry on
what they left behind.
They are not lost,
and we are not alone.
Faced with building-with, we enjoy more than an act of benign preserva

tion or inventive appropriation. We applaud an innovation that preserves, a be
nevolence that innovates. The culture offers the symbol of itself as having val
ues, valuing what it has, and giving itself new value. Thanks to the ruin, the
culture transcends the nature of the ruin.
Yet nature, considered in itself, may turn out to be ruin.
Ten
NATURE AS RUIN
The Origins of Sand
Of shores and farm fields,

the flecks.
Of cliffs and mountains,
the grains.
Of shells and skeletons,
the specks.
Of ships and dwellings,
the remains.
We have considered the place of nature in the ruin, and the place of the ruin in
nature. Now let us consider nature as ruin. We may experience nature in ruin
analogously to the experience of ruins, including those in nature. The dead tree,
broken seashell, split rock are available as aesthetic objects whose new unity
differs from their intact originals, which may have been of little aesthetic inter
est. The natural ruin jumps to our attention, as we wander the Earth.
The forests are filled with trees that tend to blend. We pick out one now
and then, more for visual relief than in search of individuality. For excellence
of form, we might stop at every tree in our path. Each specimen is unique. Each
arboreal being might be a treat to the aesthetic sensibility. We could study one
for an afternoon, including each leaf and limb and their movement in the wind.
But we have become habituated to not seeing the trees for the forest.
The ruin brings us back to individuality. The dead tree has singularity (PI.
56). It throws off the protective cloak of the forest and stands teetering in its
bare bones. The dead tree in the foliate forest has been relieved of its leaves.
Those tender twigs that are the live fingers of trees are also gone. The bark has
fallen. Big branches snapped. The tree has been simplified, clarified, and uni
fied. It has a more compact energy, now that it is less extended. The material,
wood, draws back into itself. When the tree reached out with life, we missed its
innerness. Ironically, the dead tree has more life, when it has ceased to be bio
logical and turned to inanimacy. It turns inward as complex object.
That object is abstractly appealing. Our initial response may be displeas
ure at meeting a blight among the living. We feel regret concerning death. We
may have a distaste for the destroyed: “Chop it down and plant a new one!” But
the lines, masses, texture, and character of the former tree occupy our attention.
“Former tree” because now something different. We experience something
found, not lost. The new unity is a purification of form detached from the realm
of the living. Unexpectedly, the dead tree is a live aesthetic object.
PL 56. Dead Trees, Florida, USA, 2002

Nature as Ruin 203
It can be enhanced by the surrounding life that cushions it upon a back

drop of greenery. The fineness of the intact forest may be the setting needed for
deeper appreciation of the former tree’s starkness. But often the dead tree
stands solitary in a clearing, among the dunes, overhanging the river, or atop
the cliff. It cuts its lines upon the sky, that blue cushion for natural jewels.
The tree as ruin meets with sympathetic response from the human visitor.
For it stands upon the same ground as we do, raises its tired arms as we might,
patiently endures the gnawing of the elements, yet ignores its coming collapse.
The ruin, though dead, still stands. We, though alive, stand still, facing it, our
bones destined to hang lifeless.
A one-to-one relationship of human being and tree. We may share the
same lifespan. The human being recognizes in the tree a noble creature in the
plant realm comparable to our status in the animal kingdom. The deciduous tree
is decidedly humanlike, for its change of season echoes the ages of human life.
While the tree is stable, and we are mobile, both of us stand and extend our
limbs. The tree dresses itself in foliage. We clothe ourselves in clothes. We rec
ognize in the tree what we would be if we were plants.
Dead trees were once planted in Kensington Gardens, London, to mimic
the traditional features of landscape painting. Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) had
taught the eye to study the landscape from the Framing Device of a blasted tree.
Moving about within a landscape, we are drawn to those blasted trees!
Remarkable for its form, the dead tree is also memorable for its reflection
of our life. The tree brings to mind dignity in death. It refuses to fall. The
weighty trunk remains vertical, rooted to the spot. The tree may incline slightly
in the direction in which someday it will fall, but it is indifferent to having died.
That dead tree standing in the forest, which we come upon, eyes us as ru
ins. We and it, or I-and-thou, coexist in the dark forest of the world, this selva
oscura (Dante). The tree as noble ruin addresses us as potential noble ruin. We
meet heart to heart. We are not saddened by the recognition. The aesthetic
meeting reveals something deeper about Being.
The standing dead tree has framing power, because it is freed of the bur
den of leaves and graced with emphatic limbs. These two features make its
stark and sudden hold on our attention. The tree has good control of the space
around and above it. It energizes that space, which in turn causes it to spring
forward. Consequently, we see things through the presence of the tree, includ
ing the forest, birds whirling overhead, clouds, or distant mountains. The tree is
a station for reception of the rest of the world.
Dead trees may be encountered laid out upon the ground, their roots rising
in the air the height of a person, their limbs broken under the weight of their
fall, and their trunks transforming themselves into rich rottenness. If no one had
been present when they fell, did the trees make a sound? That depends on the
timbre, I suppose. But we retroactively sense the arc and crash of their final
tumble. They cleared their way through the foliage and brush with jagged limbs
and irresistible torso. In the silence of the forest, we listen for the echo of fall
ing trees.
A fallen tree is like a fallen column. A gap in the forest’s roof results from
its fall. It lies at our feet defeated, for it was meant to stand higher than human
reach. Yet the trunk, like the column, is newly accessible to our sensibility, as
we tower over it. The surface of the tree, with its adhering growths and deep
wounds, may be lichened to the overgrown and weathered column. Both forms
are impressive when extended upon the ground. A series of fallen trees creates
an absorbing pattern, as do a set of columns brought to earth (PI. 5).
If the column brings down the ornate Corinthian capital that adorned it, a
wealth of vigorous detail is available at eye level. Similarly, the uprooted tree
exposes close at hand the intriguing complexity of its rooted growth, penetrated
by clods of earth, slivers of seedlings, and glimmers of sky. We stand as if be
low the roots. This perspective is similar to what we experience in temple ruins.
The dead tree gives life. Little creatures scurry over, and burrow under, it.
Its decomposition accompanies the spreading of new vegetation. The tree is be
coming absorbed into its site. The earth reclaims it. The foliage knits together
in the forest’s canopy. The brush springs up around the trunk and takes steps
upon it. We are present at the moment of dissolution of the object’s unity as
dead tree and its transformation into organic union with the earth.
This moment teaches us to look for traces of what were once dead trees.
We find their lines upon the floor of the forest. They have decorated their burial
grounds with fresh flora, due to a good sense of humus. The fully decomposed
tree adds composition, and compost, to its grounds. An invisible guiding hand
underlies the surgent life. The forest feeds on death. Wood has turned to nutri
ment and soil. We can see the tree that is no longer a tree, only because we
have looked for it, following our exploration of the fallen tree as ruin.
Every step might touch a ruin of nature underfoot. The leaves, these end
less gestures of still-standing trees, crackle beneath our feet, each a ruin of
functioning form. Each leaf is left as the calling card of ruin. Leaves, twigs,
branches, stems, petals, sepals, tendrils, bark, roots, husks, fur, bones, turds,
feathers, and cigarette butts cover the ground. We have tried to shut all these
out of our view, purifying the forest by imagination. By a self-dictated fiction,
we do not see the death and decay in nature, just as we blink the trash on the
sidewalks and the peeling paint on the buildings of a beautiful city.
We may awaken to nature as filled with valuable ruins, for the broken,
dead, and rotting are as much the forest as the whole, live, and flourishing. The
unity is larger than we expected. Decay does not detract. While we gaze at the
display of foliage, play of massed colors, and pattern of repeated living-forms,
we may note what lies lifeless at our feet: the odds and ends of life, bits and
bobs, nuts and bolts, leaves and seeds, soil and sticks. In their midst are crawl
Nature as Ruin 205
ing things, moss and lichen, and the tiniest green seedlings springing to life.
Why look up at the forest, when the world lies at our feet?
Let us drop to our knees to enter the microcosm. Insects are the active in
habitants. They haul materials, hunt food, beat trails. Their forest is a realm of
formidable obstacles, a twig the equivalent of a fallen tree, a dead leaf a fallen
roof, a dead tree a mountain range. The world is filled with ruins for the insect.
We move closer still to the earth and take a handful of its substance. The
world in our hand contains remnants of dead vegetation. The soil is filled with
organic matter which may enter living things or into which living things enter.
Life in our hand. Some of it crawling. Life shakes our hand. Ginsberg meets
Ginsbug. Our hands to the earth, kneeling, we are part of the living and dying
in the forest. The soil in my hand does not soil my hand. From Hebrew:
Thou shalt return to dust, for thou art but dust. (Genesis, 3:19; see p. 389,
below)
Dost thou not sense union with the Earth in appreciating its ruins?
Elephants revere the bones of their deceased as relics. They are reminded
of the poignancy of life by touching the remains. These touching remains, in
1991, in the Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania, are also reminders to human beings
(PI. 57). Though we try not to be thick-skinned about it, we are sharers in the
loneliness caused by death, including our death. In the Crater, vultures, hyenas,
flies, ants, and microbes have picked clean every kilogram, every ounce, of
flesh, leaving pure white form, elevated to sculptural dignity.
Decomposition + Composition
Rest in pieces.
The broken seashell, like the dead tree, may strike us with the beauty of
its newfound unity, which is different than its original intactness. In one sense,
every seashell we find, no matter how perfect, is a ruin, because the animal in
side has died. The shell, which grew at a snail’s pace, as the accreted harbor of
the living being, is now detached, nonfunctioning, and totally lifeless.
Rarely do we think of the shell with a feeling of loss. Ordinarily, we re
gard the shell as the principal, a jewel of nature cast up from the sea, whereas
we are better off without whatever may have been inside it. We wash shells off
to further admire them. How displeased we would be to find the squishy animal
still inhabiting its architecture. Solely the shell of the poor creature interests us
aesthetically. Admirers of seashells are already appreciators of ruins.
Though the shell is a ruin, most collectors seek it only when intact. The
carryover of a scientific interest into an aesthetic hobby. A good specimen for a
collection requires an unbroken shell. But after we have found a good specimen
PI. 57. R em a in s o f E le p h a n t, N g o r o n g o r o C r a te r , T a n z a n ia , 1991

Nature as Ruin 207
for each kind, why look further? A good specimen closes out experience of any
subsequent particulars in that species. Unless we have access to other species,
such shell-collecting is condemned to become uninteresting.
Another way to go about seashelling, this ancient human activity, is to
look for the unique individuals instead of the species-type. The unique individ
uals are the broken and worn shells. They are interesting as forms and textures,
independent of their kind. A shell of a common type, for which we have perfect
specimens, may totally absorb us with its unusual holes and tenderly smooth
touch made possible by years of being beaten upon the beach by the sea.
The sea throws up its hands at the land and flings the pieces of things on
shore. The beach flexes its mussels and shells out its treasures. The ruins wash
in with each wave, which in going out takes the trouble to rake the objects over
and give them a tumble for our eye in the splashing water and jagged sunlight.
Here each shell is potentially valuable to aesthetic experience. What they
were—the solid covering for a marine creature—no longer matters. The shells
go to wrack and ruin. The few perfect ones have a different aesthetic interest as
the unaltered original, minus the inhabitant. Their unity is recognizably intact.
These works of nature do not strike us as having been ruined.
The partial shells have been reborn/reborne in the creative sea. They are
remade by nature, the patient jeweler, as objects to catch the eye. The gems are
found amid the dross, the flotsam/floatsome and jetsam/jetsome. Dried foam,
driftwood, decaying seaweed, seagull feathers, ground glass, and torn netting
are the setting for beautiful ruins of seashells. Driftwood finds its way into bou
tiques and onto mantelpieces as natural carvings. Fresh handfuls of objets
trouves are laid at our feet. We have only to stand here, and the planet will
bring its aesthetic riches to us.
We, too, are present on the beach, having brought ourselves to the en
counter. We feel the waves, sand, salt air, and bright sun. Shaped by nature, we
are being worn down by the elements. Soon the dissolution of our organic unity
will occur. Then, if not for burial or cremation, we would be worked over by
the sea and turned into glistering pieces of polished bone. The exoskeleton of
seashell greets the fleshed presence of the human being who knowingly bears
its skeleton within.
Morbid thoughts ebb and swell but are finally washed out to sea by the
excitement of the treasure troves, the vivacity with which the broken things are
brought to discovery in their aesthetic charms. The beach is filled with life. The
beat of sea rebounds in the beat of heart. New wholeness holds us between the
smashed pieces and the crashing waves. Not what nature has taken away, but
what it restores to us is the predominate theme of our natural reflection. The re
shaped seashell touches the toes and teaches the soul to love its loveliness.
Shell and person are fellow voyagers. Thanks to the shell, now tumbling head
over heels with the out-rushing sea, we enjoy the voyage.
Site is crucial to the aesthetics of beachcombing. The human being, as

subject, does not detect the properties of the Other, the object, through neutral
space. Space in nature is the experience of being-in-nature. Nature’s space is an
existential field in which we participate. The field treats the human being as
subject and object. The seashell is subject too. The separateness of the broken
shell lying unknown in the sand and the separateness of the bent person kneel
ing unknown in the sand have been brought together. Intersubjectivity.
Fig. 7. Seashell, Assateague Island National Seashore, USA, 2001
The shell jumps out of the sea and sand, and we have come to the edge of
the world to discover it. The shell and the person meet heart to heart, not eye to
thing. I hold the shell to my ear and hear the singing of my heart. Thou shell,
Nature as Ruin 209
thou person, are one-to-one, without intermediary. Thereby our partialness is

overcome, as each fills the presence of the other to overflowing. Rapture envel
opes the beach to the pounding of the sea.
The shell plucked from the sand, washed and pocketed, taken home, and
reexamined, loses this power of union. Removed to our civilized world, it has
become an object of curiosity, a curio, perhaps of formal charm, while we have
fallen back into the isolation of being viewers, perhaps still seekers of beauty.
What the shell taken home from the beach lacks is the beach. What we who
have come home from the beach also lack is the beach. Shell and person fall
back into their separate existences, their respective fragments of being.
The ruined tree and the ruined shell are the remains of dead creatures that
markedly diverge from the standard living specimen. In the case of a rock for
mation experienced as ruin, an analogous divergence occurs from a presumed
standard state, although it is inanimate. The tumbled boulders that teach to the
seas from the heights are felt as remnants of an intact cliff. “Intact cliff’ is a no
tion that we impose upon nature, not a neutral/natural category. Nature is indif
ferent whether the boulders are tumbled down or arranged in an even cliff. That
cliff may even be thought of as formerly an intact mountain, whereas the bould
ers might be taken as boldly intact. Take it or leave it! Naturally, you have a
choice in the matter.
On the Danish island of M0ns, the trees at cliffs edge become ruins about
to go over the chalk cliff to turn into driftwood (PI. 58). But the entire cliff sug
gests ruins of fortified walls, over which we are about to fall, in 1991, in this
cliffhanger. In turn, the island is a fragment, and Denmark . . . .
If nature is indifferent to its inanimate arrangements, we are not. Natural
forms take their life in us. The grasp of nature is a part of our humanity. So we
sense the fallen rocks as the ruin of a once-intact cliff. The analogy with build
ing is persuasive: a large regular structure is destroyed and releases its pieces
which tumble down freely. The building’s stones and the cliffs rocks may ap
pear with fresh unity to please the wanderer.
The pieces fit together into a whole that differs from the original whole.
We recognize them at first as pieces that we do not expect to fit together. Then
unity happens. We enjoy the ruin in nature, although nature has no reason to
think of it as a ruin. Nature does not think up categories, definitions, and expla
nations. And Nature, as far as nature is concerned, doesn’t even exist!
We children of nature, in effect, create nature. Thanks to us, we can en
counter nature in ruin and unity. The natural is accessible to our experience,
and that experience owes its elements and some of its shaping to nature. We
may reword Terence, the Roman playwright (163 BCE) (from Latin):
I am a human being; I consider that nothing [natural] is foreign to me,

(cf The Self-Tormentor, Terence, no date, p. 26).
210 THEAESTHETICS OF RUINS
Nature as Ruin 211
We expect nature to feature formations such as cliffs, mountains, forests,

and riverbeds, and we detect a falling away from the regular form into a ruined
state. Nature naturally tends to the ruin, so we think. Erosion is its reliable sim
plifier. Taking out the soft dispensable matter, it gives striking shape to the
harder enduring substance. At Yehliu, outside of Taipei, on the northern tip of
Taiwan, Republic of China, the weatherbeaten stone, in 1995, has become
sculpture (PI. 59). I wonder, if we stand here long enough in the swirling wind,
whether we will be beaten into bones.
Erosion is nature’s etching. Its deep lines penetrate the surface and bring
out color. Nature frees itself from the dullness of ordinary plane/plain surface
and simple form. It investigates complexity by probing within.
Bryce Canyon, Utah, USA, is a paradise of erosion. Each column of sand
stone has been whipped and whirled in the lathe of wind to become finely-
carved posts, individuated figures, configurated groupings. The fanciful forms
are testimony to nature’s large-scale playfulness. They stimulate our fancy, as
we stroll among them in the orange dust that soon covers our clothes and makes
of us ambulatory columns. The canyon, now a National Park, is a perfect home
for human delight. Ebenezer Bryce, its discoverer, is reputed to have ex
claimed, “What a helluva place to lose a cow!”
Aesthetically, we can appreciate nature, the destroyer, as creator. Erosion
is graceful sculpting. Tumbled rocks are monumental piles. The natural config
uration identified as “The Old Man of the Mountains” (gender intended) was
celebrated as the emblem of the state of New Hampshire, USA. But when the
stony face lost its jaw and nose in 2003 to natural shifting, the result was la
mented as a ruin caused by nature. The heartbroken citizens are considering re
storing the visage whose permanence they had taken for granite.
The earth shows signs of being a ruin in rivers that eat away banks, hill
sides that have worn and cracked, and mountains that have quaked and erupted.
Leonardo da Vinci, in the Codex Hammer (ca. 1506-1508), sees the world as
battered by tremendous forces of water, wind, and moving earth. Nature is a
tester of materials, ours, as well as its own. Nature lays claim to all materials.
What we have is its. What it has, we use. Natural ruins are the reassertion of
nature as the grounds of our world and our being. What nature does to nature is
the analogue of what nature does to human-made structures. The boulders that
have fallen from what was once a cliff remind us of stones fallen from a castle.
If the boulders have a life once freed from the cliff, then each rock may be
of independent interest, having taken shape in the course of its fall and in sub
sequent weathering and battering. Like an egg, the boulder opens to disclose
life from within. Great boulders give birth to little rocks. One strikes my atten
tion. It is a world, appealing by its handy size. Within my grasp, its texture
tactfully invites touch. A touching stone. Smooth and rough at the same time, it
has struggled to express its form. It contains the flow of plasticity and the jag-
PI. 59. R ock F o r m a tio n s, Y eh liu , T a iw a n , R e p u b lic o f C h in a , 1995

Nature as Ruin 213
gedness of shatter. It sits silently in my palm under the sinking sun. I am

pleased to make its acquaintance. The boulders have fallen into further ruin,
which are these rocks. They, in turn, turn into pebbles. Thence, sand.
What was a cliff has been brought to its knees at my feet beside the sea.
Bits of shell join pulverized rock and remnants of plant and animal. I take into
my hand the tiniest visible fragments that glint in the fading light. This handful
of sand is a world of glittering ruins, the smallest graspable fragments of things
in organic and inorganic origin. This is what the world is ground down into.
“This world, this grain” (John Milton). The sand flows through my fingers. It is
the dust of things. Dust unto dust.
The sand, this condensed cemetery of the world, is no sad system. It
courses through our fingers and between our toes. It gives way to our weight
and is given shape by the waves. As the sands of time run out, we take pleasure
on the beach, for its sands are the atoms of the world.
What is the ultimate ruin of nature, the smallest unity that remains after
destruction? For this, the Greeks had a word: the unsplittable (a-tom). This in
visible necessity assured that the universe would not disappear, for if every
thing were splittable, then Being would so finely dissolve as to be over
whelmed by nothingness. To be and not to be, would be the regrettable answer.
The atomists already conceded a large place in the universe for nothing
ness or the vacuum, which occurs as the interstices of things. Much ado about
nothing, if Being is to be. Motion and change are only possible, if such empti
ness is available for the solid atoms to move into.
All and Nothing
If all were void,

there would be
nothing.
If all were solid,
nothing
could happen.
So that things
can happen,
and things
will be,
All is void
and solid
ity.
The atom is a deduction from the observed phenomena of change. It is

then set forward as an axiom for the systematic account of nature. Because ru-
ins occur in nature, but the universe continues to exist, the unruinable must ex
ist at the foundation of things, along with eternal nonexistence. A reassuring
vision. Nothing ultimately is lost. No real destruction, only change, occurs.
Death loses its terror, for no frightful realm of punishment awaits us. This
world is all, though it too may bum out and fuel another. Death and dissolution
occur to all things throughout endless time. We are but moments in the eternal.
At this moment, we are self-consciously the thoughtfulness of Being. Though
each identity is destroyed in nature, nature remains. Our atoms will recombine
in soil, nutrients, sedimentary rocks, seashells, trees, and perhaps people. Every
living being dies, but Being survives death. In this sense only, we are immortal.
Atoms, not gods, are the guarantors of our immortality.
By an aesthetic consolation, Lucretius lifts the readers of his sublime phil
osophic poem De Rerum Natura (55 BCE) out of fright. The picture of the Na
ture of Things has been changed from constant ruination and loss to eternal per-
durance and creativity. All that is lost is our life as individual consciousness
and animate body. That cannot be avoided, only slightly delayed. Hence, it is
not worth our worry. Nor do we have anything to fear about death, since no evil
can befall us, once we are dead. We would no longer exist as selves. Nothing
we can do about it, even by prayer. Death does us in. G'est la vie.
But life has all the more value for us. Released from worry over death, we
are free to live more fully this one life, which is all that we have. Life truly
comes alive in its inestimable value when we recognize it as the unique if pass
ing unity in the eternal flux of ruination. These moments are worth it.
The dance of atoms is everlasting. That pleases our thirst for the eternal. It
means that the universe is endlessly imaginative, by chance, in creating new
unities of unsplittable elements. We participate in that continuity. These atoms
which underlie our tired and sagging flesh will live forever, joining with others
to form countless things. My atoms chant the song of the universe.
Though we will decompose as corpses and be ourselves no more, we will
always be part of Being. March to the final ruination with light hearts, for new
unity will ever spring forth. We are part of the eternal nature of things. We are
not left out when we die. Lucretius extends an invitation to joyous life by
means of a physics that answers to the problem of ruination. He understood that
every physics as vision of nature has consequences for our moral status.
We find repugnant that elaborate intelligible structures, including we be
ings of value and purpose, have arisen purely by chance, such as the random
swirl of atoms, for that appears an insult to intelligence. The refusal of Albert
Einstein (1879-1955) to believe that God played dice with the universe human
izes the universe, and God. A universe given over to chance is not in keeping
with our sense of dignity. We may better understand Einstein’s confession as
meaning that he would not play dice with the universe.
To be human is to insist on some freedom within the chains of determina
Nature as Ruin 215
tion or the chaos of chance. If no chance of such freedom exists, then we are
only living machines. We take responsibility, deliberate, make decisions, and
initiate actions. But if these faculties arose without purpose that would be pain
fully paradoxical. To what purpose, in that case, would be purposiveness? I ask
the question on purpose to perplex you.
A universe that cares nothing for what we are threatens the authenticity of
our being. To see us, as did Alexander Pope, connected by a great chain of Be
ing to a great plan is a great comfort. We are united with, not opposed to, the
universe. To sever the chain is to make a missing link of us, a purposeful being
in a purposeless universe. Disenchainted. What a sinking feeling.
But it need not be of despair, for admirable values exist in our new unity.
To be the being that means something in a universe that means nothing is to
lead a heroic existence. The universe can only count on us to be anything but
blind determinism or deaf chaos. The human mind cries out:
Order! Order! We refuse to play dice with ourselves. Do you hear that,
universe? You had better learn from us and shape up, or we will leave
town and have nothing more to do with you!
The discomfort about ignoble origins is a veiled fear concerning future di
rections. What does human freedom and purpose come to, if they arise from
mere accident? Everything we do is wasted. Everything we are is doomed. How
much better to have been an unfree animal and die without knowing this much.
To insist on purpose and yet be aware that we are doomed, to have a point
in living and yet see that the universe is pointless, is a terrifying fate. Of all be
ings, the human may most value Being and be most disappointed in it. Being, I
am obliged to report, is not the way it ought to be. To us is reserved the greatest
discovery and with it the greatest sadness. Humanity is destined to be a ruin.
We are the absurdity of meaning lost in the endless sea of the meaningless.
So be it. As ruins, we may exult in that precious unity that is ours alone.
Against the universe, doomed, originating by chance, we may step forward
with fullness of life, insisting on making sense. Our absurdity can be joyful.
When I studied natural science in college at the University of Chicago in
1952, our experimental laboratory occupied the former squash courts that were
part of the athletic facilities at Stagg Field, the disused football stadium. The
odd place for physical experiment bore a plaque on the gruff, gray exterior of
the squat building with castellated towers and crenelated edgings. This was the
site, on 2 December 1942, at 3:36 PM, of the first self-sustained atomic chain
reaction, which initiated the Atomic Age. Subsequently, the historic building
had to be tom down, having been contaminated with radioactivity. How many
of the undergraduates had also been contaminated was not disclosed. The
plaque was reattached to a chain link fence, and Henry Moore was commis
21 6 THE AESTHETICS OF RUINS
sioned to create a statue to keep it company. The bulbous form of the work,
dedicated in 1967, exactly twenty-five years after the world-changing event,
rises like a giant mushroom.
The Atomic Age is the age of splitting the atom. What a cruel disservice
to language, among other things. If the ancient atomists held the atom to be un-
splittable, then we modems apparently have proved them wrong. We, the atom-
smashers, make ruins of old theories, and old cities. But a shift of terms has oc
curred. If the atom is the smallest unsplittable particle of matter, then what we
have split, along with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is not the atom. It is something
else, which, upon being split, is reduced to smaller particles.
More is to this matter than a misplaced term. It is no splitting of hairs. For
modem atomic theory recognizes the net loss of matter into energy, which, in
turn, degenerates from tremendous power to lesser states. In the atomic explo
sion, the allegedly unsplittable is blasted on its terrible way to nothingness. The
permanent building-blocks of the universe crumble under our hands. No ul
timately unruinable particle or energy-state may exist. Being expends itself.
Everything goes down the drain. Nothing remains. The terror of nothingness
that each mortal must face is increased when we face the fate of the universe.
The universe is hostile to human life, to life as a whole, even to Being.
The Stars Tonight
The very stars

we see tonight
are the lingering
beams of light
of bursting suns,
long ago extinct.
And these constel
lations, my dear,
that dance above us
in such ecstasies
are nothing more
than galaxies
of silent
ruin.
Entropy is destiny. We may exercise the destructive force that reduces

matter to energy. Intimately part of the natural destruction, we can detonate de
vices to destroy the world, in the name of deterrence and self-defense. Like the
stars, Being is burning out and becoming a has-been. Only nothingness is etern
al, infinite, immortal. It is swallowing Being. All is for naught.
Nature as Ruin 217
This vision is offensive to the aesthetic sense. It disheartens the human

being with recognition of irrevocable loss. All unities are doomed. Creativity is
overcome. Being bites the dust. In the end, nothing. Silence forever more, for
evermore silence. Terror invades the heart. We tremble to be alive in these few
moments, our fingers poised over the release buttons. We have outgrown the
Atomic Age, maturing through the Nuclear Age and the Age of the Hydrogen
Bomb, to reach the senior years of humanity in this Final Age.
Consolations may be proposed. The old atomists may have been right that
something ultimately indestructible underlies matter, energy, or light. One day
soon, we may bump up against it and reclaim the universe as eternal. A one
way universe that goes out of existence is offensive to logic and good taste. If
we do not find the unsplittable, we may have to posit it in order to keep our sci
entific and moral sanity. Change the axioms and make life bearable.
To balance the entropy that leads the universe to disappear, some theorists
claim that new Being interjects itself out of nothing in the closets of the black
holes. This neatly serves our aesthetic sense. Yet it leads to new puzzlement. If
Being dissolves into nothing and pops right out of it, is nothing something else
after all? Does new Being always arrive in the same quantity as Being that is
lost? When we are running short, could we telephone our order for more Be
ing? But if popping into Being is unregulated, then the delivery of an equival
ent amount is unlikely. Sorry, not enough Being will pop up to keep the uni
verse going, as the rest of Being disappears. Or can Being come to be, even af
ter the universe has disappeared? But this would lead any surviving philoso
phers to throw a fit: ex nihilo nihil fit (Lat.: “out of nothing, nothing comes”).
The creation of new Being opens the door to the role of a Creator in the
universe. And if the Creator intervenes among the stars, then the Creator might
also take a hand in human affairs. But a Creator sounds too much like a crea
ture of our desperate imagination, a supreme vision of wholeness, the ever-
living Absolute, created by the insatiable longing of a mortal being lost among
ruins and soon to disappear from the universe.
Another consolation consists in asserting a divine realm apart from nature
in which the Creator eternally resides and to which we may find admittance
once we have shuffled off this mortal coil. Nature is a ruin compared to heaven.
This life is worthless compared to the eternal life that awaits us. Nature teaches
us the lesson of incompleteness and destruction. The human being yearns for a
home elsewhere. Abandon the creation for the Creator, the stricture of San Juan
de la Cruz. (Let us return to these philosophical reflections about Being and
Nothingness in Section 5, “The Meaning of Existence,” of the “Meditations on
Humanity, Self, and the World as Ruins,” Chapter Nineteen, below.)
Do other alternatives exist to console us as we envision nature as ruin?
Sitting on the boulders at the base of the cliff, we reflect that between the ruin
of the smallest thing and the ruin of the universe is the ruin that is the Earth.
Plasmaphysical
All
solid things
are slow-moving liquids,
imperceptibly
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooozing away.
This
solid Earth,
on which we stand
in solid trust,
is a molten ball
with the
thinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnest crust.
Whichever way I move, the Earth stands still, but whenever I stand still, the
Earth moves. “Eppur se remove!” (Galileo). The mountains are wearing down.
The hills become plains, the plains valleys. That is the plain truth. The rivers
cart away the land on their backs. The universal solvent of the sea drinks away
the earth. The forests are cut down or left to burn. The animal life is killed,
skinned, and eaten. The waterways are filled with fertilizers, detergents, and
excrement. The air is turned to noxious gas.
Human beings once lived in a natural Earth, grouped together like a string
of islands, the archipelago of humanity. We could set out on land or sea and
make new settlements. New unities were possible for people who traversed wil
derness or natural barriers. We could get away from humanity. Communities
could turn to nature lying just outside to utilize its riches. Nature then was inex
haustible and self-sustaining. It replenished itself while supplying us. Its forests
and stone allowed human beings to build our world. Its minerals, plants, and
animals gave fuel, food, fodder, and commodities. We could press beyond the
neighboring nature and lose ourselves in the untouched nature.
The globe that I had as a child in my bedroom in Brooklyn contained
blank areas. Only nature dwelt in those spaces unknown to humanity. Terra in
cognita held no terror for me. How I miss that world! To these blanks, I turned
my mind before turning off the light to dream of worlds to explore.
Sitting near the muffled sea, I realize that nature has become a ruin in our
world. It is broken up into the islands that lie between our centers of settlement
and exploitation. Precious islands these, rare and far apart. Nature is what has
been reserved, pieces saved. The Earth is fully transformed into the world. The
planet has been domesticated. The limits of its exploitation have been sounded.
The world is known. Whatever is unexplored is trivial. No new world is left on
Nature as Ruin 219
Earth for us to discover. What remains of nature is what we have chosen. Na
ture, then, is artificial, the greatest artifice of humanity.
Why do we preserve it? It is a remembrance of our past. Nature is monu
ment to our conquest of the Earth. Nature makes pleasing parks where we may
refresh ourselves away from our world, though the world enters with us, shap
ing the trails and treading upon them. The National Parks Movement, meant to
save nature, began with Yellowstone in the United States in 1877. Several ruins
are themselves protected as national parks, including Mesa Verde (USA), Tikal
(Guatemala), Gedi (Kenya), Petra (Jordan), and Tulum (Mexico). We save na
ture, out of the flattering illusion that we live in harmony between the human-
made and the natural. But we have fenced in or out the natural. We live totally
within the human world. Zoon politikon, Aristotle called us: the creature that
dwells in polities, the political, not the natural, state.
The human animal is civilized. The return to nature is also artifice. With
our L.L. Bean hiking boots, we cross the boulders to the base of the former cliff
and light our Coleman cooker to heat our tin of camper’s stew. The return to
nature, where we intend to get into the thicket of things, is a turning away from
how we live, a needed escape from beating around the bush. But we may be
barking up the wrong tree.
Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away,.. . (Wordsworth, 2002, pp. 515-516)
We get our words worth from this verse (1807).

Our joy in nature leads us sooner or later to delight in the ruins of nature,
which in turn leads us to reflect on the ruin that is nature, the ruin that we have
made of it. This exposes the artifice of our joy in nature. Nature is always the
ingenuous invention of human sentiment. In this circularity, we bump into our
selves. We need nature and crave it, just as the indoor cat longs to step outside.
So great is our desire to enjoy nature, away from civilization, that we create it
and supply it with all the conveniences of civilization. Access, safety, interpre
tation, accommodation, souvenirs are priorities in the human arrangement of
nature. National parks become parks for people, not nature. The natural is pack
aged within a human frame. Just as the ruin is treated to ticket booths, custo
dians, postcards, food counters, waste baskets, signs, and toilets, so is nature.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) lived in nature at Walden Pond, thor-
eauly self-sufficient, yet within walking distance of town. He went to live with
the animals, but he went to jail for refusing to pay taxes that supported slavery
and unjust war. In Thoreau’s world, one honest person might start a peaceable
revolution in the name of justice, but the same person could march to a differ
ent drummer and go off to the woods in the name of freedom.
We have lost Thoreau’s world. We can no longer live within walking dis-
tance of the town jail and the wooded pond. Walden Pond is a now a public
park, preserved but not inhabited. Our jails are maintained for raping inmates.
Our ponds are drained for developing shopping malls. The individual has lost
direct access to justice and nature. We are alienated from the Earth, though we
rule the world. At home, we are exiles.
The Earth is not long for this world. Nature is a ruin that we have carved
out of our humanity.
Naturally
Sitting
under the broken
cliff,
upon a dead tree,
my feet
stuck in the chill
sand,
I listen,
as the sea
bemoans
the moonless
night,
heaving shells
upon the disheveled
strand.
Far off,
the rain bursts
upon the fog-clotted
stones,
and in the raging
dark,
the tide takes a turn
for the worse,
but the dust of
stars
stirs
in my aging
bones.
Eleven
SCULPTURE AND OTHER VISUAL ARTS

AS RUIN
Vision in Marble
Venus, though disarmed,

disarms us still,
with undiminished charms,
as if unharmed.
Though the ruin is preeminently architectural in origin, ruins may exist within
the several visual arts. Sculpture is second to architecture as source of the ruin
and deserves our gratitude for this. Ruins may have done more to shape the
conventions and sensitize the responses in the art of sculpture than intact
works. In its way, the history of sculpture is a history of the aesthetics of ruins.
Yet the sculptor aims at perfection in the material which allows fullness,
above all in the treatment of the human form, and which may be made available
for examination on all sides by the viewer. Who would make a ruin to exhibit?
And who would go to see broken statues?
We do. The ancient practice of the art has been available mostly in the
form of broken statues. Though the artist may have created a completeness cor
responding to the exterior features of the human body, so that we could say this
form is intact and healthy, what reaches posterity often has lost its limbs, pri
vate parts, and head. The integrity of the statue as an imitation of the human
body is thereby broken. This could not be said of the torso. So lifelike a repre
sentation of the human body, it might well come alive and step off its pedestal.
The broken statue has been killed as the artful illusion of the real or as the
perfect representation of the ideal. Real and ideal are dashed with the smashing
of the whole. Broken statues, you would think, were to be discarded, if they
could not be repaired.
Yet the Romans treasured the fragments of the Greeks, and the Renais
sance treasured the fragments of the Romans. We, in turn, treasure the sculptur
al fragments of everyone in the past, including the Medieval and Renaissance
periods in the West and all the traditions of the East.
Galleries of old sculpture in any art museum are mostly inhabited by the
maimed. How strange, for the paintings, jewelry, and other artifacts on display
in the same building are mostly intact. The art museum is a temple of complete
ness, quite unlike the rest of the buildings in our world, which are filled with
disparate contents and unresolved conflicts. Work after work in the museum is
its original unity and satisfies our need for wholeness, until we reach the sculp
ture section. Is this the territory of non-art because mostly remnants and
few whole originals are displayed? Do we shift attitude from the aesthetic to
the historical or the antiquarian? Does broken sculpture belong instead to the
anthropological museum?
These puzzles raised by theory have nothing to do with our practice, for
we enjoy the broken statues as works of art. By imagination, we can restore the
missing parts, if we have studied the conventions and experienced similar piec
es. For our assistance, some museums sketch the work in its presumed integri
ty. But in ruins, the power of the visible and present is greater than the imagina
tion of the invisible and evocation of the absent. We experience the jagged neck
and the broken arm, not the missing head and the completed arm, though the
ruin suggests the weight of the head and thrust of the arm. These are among its
inner strengths. The statue has life, but its life is independent of the one-to-one
correspondence with a model.
Museums turn ruined statues to put their best foot forward. This is an af
firmation of the aesthetic value of the present object, as if it runs the risk of be
ing taken for a former work of art. Intact statues may also be positioned to greet
the viewer with their best face, yet the curator places more confidence in what
is intact to engage our explorative experience of how best to view it. For the ru
ined work, the museum does much of our work for us. Entering a sculpture gal
lery, we likely proceed first to the intact pieces, which are likely to be given
prominence, before we turn to the broken ones.
The broken statue reformulates its being and offers us a new aesthetic uni
ty. We forget what, where, why, it was, and we enjoy what, where, because, it
is. No guarantee that the sculptural ruin will have unity, though we expect that
it will, like the intact originals in the museum. The presumption that the ruin is
aesthetically valuable is the challenge to its exploration. This requires active
participation in the discovery/disclosure. We and the ruin engage in the bout of
creativity, as we circle it and bob in and out.
The intact pieces down the hall in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century
galleries do not require such fancy footwork and agile sparring. They still bear
the artist’s original stamp, guaranteeing aesthetic wholeness. The principles of
the work and its organization are clear enough, though they might not succeed.
The intact work likely has been planned for reception of the viewer coming to it
from a chosen direction and specific height. The statue directs our movement.
Its shape and content hand us on, so that we participate thanks to the guiding
hand of the sculpture. Sculpture is a scenario, not an image.
The ruin has surrendered these sculptural arts. The plan of approach may
not be evident from the ruin. The museum personnel decide upon our initial en
counter in placement of the broken work. Undoubtedly, we get closer to sculp
tural ruins than the ancients did to the originals. What may have adorned a
pediment, facade, or pedestal is conveniently brought down below eye-level to
a glass case. What hands us on from one face of the ruin to another is our will
Sculpture and Other Visual Arts as Ruin 223
ing curiosity and skill at detection, and the ruin’s indefatigable energy for aes
thetic innovation.
The ruin does not operate smoothly like the intact piece. Gaps occur in
our tour of the sculptural object in motion and time, just as physical gaps are
evident. The ruin has dull passages that the original avoids. Indeed, the ruin
may mostly be dull, with only short passages of aesthetic light.
The seamless flow of experience that seems to go with the intact statue
does not occur in its ruin. The ruin may be a series of aesthetic moments, not a
continuity. The broken statue may discourage any movement, denying its tem
poral spatiality to fix our attention upon its single significant facade. This can
also be done by intact statues, notably those planned for fixed positions in high
places with their backs to the wall. Salvaged from a multi-faceted original, the
single-image ruin displays its oneness of being. In other words, unity.
The ruin of discontinuous moments may exist as several unrelated unities,
or the multiple experiences may finally come together in the oneness of the
work. Often, a major aesthetic unity appears worthy of all our attention, and we
need not dwell upon the other disunited unities. These possibilities occur in in
tact works, but usually everything is intended to fit together under one identifi
able unifying principle. The sculptural ruin is a new realm of art.
We still regard it as art, though a ruin, whereas we no longer approach the
architectural ruin as a work of art, but as a ruin. Nature moves the ruin of a
building into another category. The sculptural ruin, though it too may have
been caused by nature, changes state in the art-domain yet does not leave for
the new territory under the co-dominion of nature and artifice. The sculptural
ruin, once it is removed to the museum, public square, or private house, is art.
If it remains on site, it is more likely to be experienced as non-art, though it
may be aesthetically endowed like the architectural ruin.
Strange, that ruins of artworks left in-site cease to be art, while we experi
ence the same ruins moved to the art museum as works of art, though different
ly from their originals. The change of site removes the visitor from the grounds
of the ruin and places us instead in the territory where aesthetic objects are dis
played. Nature is not active in the museum, even if potted palms are placed
here and there. Nature is present in the ruin in-site, even if it is an urban site,
for the open sky rescues things from being objects for display. The ruin culti
vates a relationship with its site. We lose site of this in the museum. An awk
wardness of exploration occurs in the ruin where we may stub our toe or tumble
off a wall, whereas the art museum takes such care that we need have no practi
cal concern for our safety.
Fragments of the architectural ruin moved to the museum may be appreci
ated as pieces with their own unity; hence, sculpture. Statuary becomes sculp
ture when broken off buildings for which it was ornament. The broken statues
moved indoors are not the same sculpture they were. In the one case, we are
aware of going to see the ruins of a building in the museum. In the other case,
we are not aware of going to see the ruins of sculpture. Instead, we are going to
see works of sculpture!
We are pleasantly surprised to find aesthetic unities in the architectural ru
ins, as, say, at the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem. We are
not surprised to find the statues in the museum broken, and this does not inter
fere with our aesthetic pleasure in their unities. We do not hear, “What a
shame!”, when viewers face an armless Aphrodite. We have become accus
tomed to what amounts to a convention of incomplete figures. Only a child’s
enjoyment is spoiled by noticing that parts are missing.
Just as the dead tree’s loss of limbs, and of their fingers, the twigs, give
the tree greater intensity with a concentration of mass and bold simplification
of form (PI. 56), so the loss of the statue’s extremities can strengthen it with so
lidity and springing innemess. Textural change reinforces the sculptural meta
morphosis. The pure smoothness of Greek marble proves to be only skin deep.
The ruin is pitted, and the cleavage of its edges refuses to conceal brokenness.
The gain is a feeling of depth. The surface is no longer the exterior sheath
molded to the inner life. The innemess is now on the outside, having broken the
defining limits. The roughened character of the min further removes it from the
status of flawless imitation. The stone’s faults and the form’s fate enter into
pleasing experience, freed from reference to the subject depicted or the mastery
of treatment.
The mined sculpture required an artist, but that artistry alone is not suffi
cient to make a beautiful ruin. The intervening destmctive activity, whether
caused by nature, accident, or malicious intention, is the remaking of the art
work without a thought for the artist. Happenstance completes the piece by
breaking it. In this way, beautiful originals are rendered indifferent, while indif
ferent originals are made beautiful. The Roman bronze gapes with gashes that
reveal its hollow interior. That darkness can be exciting, when it highlights the
fragility of the cmsted exterior and the rough, nervous edge of metal. Gone is
the oil-smooth, uniformly dark, unseamed bronze of the original. Present is the
flaked, uneven, abraded, multi-hued patina of the min.
While happenstance mles over the completion of the min, artistry is pres
ent, due to the nature of sculpted human form. The mining does its work first at
the extremities, thereby saving the basic form of the torso. Of the head, it keeps
the expression and usually the eye sockets and mouth, while taking off the ears
and nose. It does not hesitate to redo the hair and headgear. Props that stick out,
such as spears, swords, flagstaffs, trophies, drinking vessels, and ceremonial
garb, are eliminated. Such objects may have been striking in the original, be
cause of their spatial prominence and easily grasped meaning.
The ruin gets down to the basics of form and character. It reforms form
and changes character. When not detail or ornament, those outstretched arms
and accompanying objects were crucial to the original form and meaning of the
statue. The statue that lacks these is a different statue. The loss of the original
artistry is a gain of that other statue that lies within, the artwork despite the
plans and efforts of the artist.
The torso emerges as the work. The bust. Or just the head. Many bruised
heads long separated from their bodies are sublime unities. In 1960, I chanced
upon a row of saintly and royal heads sitting in the upper storeroom at Senlis
Cathedral in France (PI. 60). Not quite in site, not yet in museum, they were
filled with life, profiting/propheting from the occasional sunlight, at home
among the dust, and engaged in pious dialogue. Hushed, I listened.
They sit on the workbench, gazing into the darkness as the sun warms
their cheeks. They are no longer part of the church or visible to the public.
They have ceased to exist as architectural statuary with ecclesiastical function.
They live nonetheless, and they will continue to do so, even when night falls
and they remain forgotten in the storeroom. Each is only a head but far more
than a head. The full embodiment of the spirit is present. Each head is the
crowning vessel of an innemess.
They take no notice of the light that falls upon them, allowing it to natu
rally take to their faces, yet other light that they possess glows from within.
Each is liberated from its body. They stand on their own innemess. One leans
against a brick and gazes upward. Each turns his eyes in a different direction.
The space they face belongs to them.
Infinite tenderness dwells upon the visage of the right-most figure,
couched in a dark corner, a long line of light upon his elongated features. We
attribute the same sensitivity to his lookalike on the left, who is missing a nose.
The silent heads create a discourse of space. Haphazardly, they live together.
The unconscious human touch is evident. Someone has let them stand in
this communal independence. They have been placed standing near light, in
stead of being piled in a corner. Yet this is not a statuary display. Other frag
ments are lying around. Though without signs of recent activity, the table might
be used for cleaning or restoring the appealing objects. Its covering is peeling.
We have looked so strongly within the faces that we have missed the
metal pins on their surface: measuring marks for the sculptor. Are the heads old
pieces that are being used to make replicas? Have the replicas already been
made and installed on the church, while these are the useless originals? Are
these not the originals but replicas awaiting Finishing?
A close examination may reveal the answers, but for that we would have
to appear in the sunlight and touch the heads. We are content to stand where we
are, among the blessed. The surrounding textures are the most mundane: the
wired window not meant to be opened, but which has leaked and been resealed,
the dull stonework in which initials have been scratched, the darkened wall, the
patchy table. A place without charm and dead to the world. But filled with life.
PI. 60. Gothic Heads, Cathedral Storeroom, Senlis, France, 1960

Thanks to sculptural ruins, “the busted,” we have developed a taste for the
bust, the armless statue that unifies head with neck, shoulders, and upper thor
ax, rescuing the person from the body. This genre of statue cannot stand on its
own two feet. It calls for the artifice of pedestal or alcove. The bust is an object
with its own existence instead of the representation in full of human form.
The broken statue stimulates our taste for the non-representational life of
material and form. We appreciate the marble, bronze, clay, and wood for their
patterns, texture, cleavage, and color. While human figures remain and may
even predominate, the ruin suggests and sketches them, abstracting and incom-
pleting. The broken statue has given us a taste for partial representation, gaps in
form, and interplay of unfinished material with represented form. A human sta
tue need not have two arms, two legs, two ears. The taste enhanced by the anci
ent ruin frees modem sculpture to explore the plasticity of form and the expres
siveness of material in statues that might recognize the human being without
depicting it, and even statues that dispense with all recognition and representa
tion. The sculpted object need not have a subject.
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) pioneered with the possibilities of the partial
figure, and he carefully worked the unfinished marble into the sculpted whole.
His marble gives birth to figures: the driving metaphor of the sculptor. The
stone harbors life. It has a shimmer and palpitation, just as do the figures, and
they have organic verve, even if incomplete. A hand may surge from the stone
to become the universe. We experience no discomfort, because this is a de
tached member. Sensuousness and passionate interiority dwell in Rodin’s par
tial figures. Even in the pieces without erotic subjects, a diffuse eroticism is
present, though without piquant stimulus.
The viewer’s eyes sense the feel of Rodin’s figures without touching
them, a high achievement of sculptural art. Their areas of incompleteness give
entrance. Yet we do not experience the pieces as incomplete. They are wholes
as works of art. The whole is excellent without provision of all the standard
parts of the human form.
The most daring of Rodin’s partial figures, celebrated by Henry Miller, is
the unforgettable “Iris, Messenger of the Gods” (1890-1891). The headless,
bronze figure strikes a unique sculptural pose, holding her bent leg out to ex
pose the wonder of her genitals. The restrained limb and the intense balance of
the whole figure upon one foot endow the piece with dynamic tension/torsion,
which is increased by the vigorous cutout it makes in space.
The genitals, treated with noble clarity, are the center of focus, for no
head is present upon which to read the message. This is a startling ambiguity in
affirmation of feminine integrity and power that nonetheless beheads sexuali
ty’s messenger.
Rodin is the turning point. Many twentieth-century sculptors continue de
velopment of partial figures and unfinished materials. Constantin Brancusi
(1876-1957) wipes away everything that can be dispensed with in the figura
tive to arrive at the wonderfilled core, the reality beyond figuration. The high
polish of his astonishingly simple forms suggests an eternal process of wearing
down. In his representational work, the representational is attenuated to its final
limits. The “bird” is about to take flight in pure undetailed stone, nothing but
stone. The “person” has virtually walked away and left behind naught but a col
umn. Brancusi creates down in the ruins of everything figurative, shaping
forms that are abstract and occasionally symbolic.
The broken statue has given us a taste for the head as sculpted object, and
Brancusi’s bronze, “Mile. Pogany” (1913), is the extreme simplification of de
light in that possibility. The elongated head is a single form resting on the stand
of hands. Body is unnecessary to head. When we come nearer to the highly pol
ished, gleaming yellow metal, we pick up the flashes of color from our clothes,
and, closing in, we see our reflected face, disembodied.
Henry Moore (1898-1986) simplifies massive human forms, freely invit
ing immaterial spaces into their shaping. Wholes are full of holes. Holes are
fuel of wholes. Moore is a titanic humanizer of space. His representational fig
ures live in heroic scale. Arms have been transformed into sweeping masses.
Gaps swell at the heart.
Yet we do not experience Moore’s pieces as fragmentary. They have full
ness, thanks to their impressive size, welcome smoothness, and invigorated
turning in space. Moore might be thought to magnify, purify, and abstract anci
ent ruins to make them live as monuments for the modem world.
Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) is the supreme artist of scrap wood, ar
ranged with high formality. Each of her compositions grows in harmony
with the addition of the bits and pieces.
Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) characteristically elongates his figura
tive works, bluring the arms into the torso and projecting the torso into legs that
merge to function as a stand. Genitals, buttocks, and clothing are smoothed
away. Giacometti’s pieces speak of taking-away and compression in their crea
tion, not of construction. Space rushes in upon them, heightening their verticali-
ty and keeping us at a standoff.
Solitude is Giacometti’s constant outcome, touching on alienation. The
roughcast surface obviates the search for figurative detail and adds to the char
acter of the reductive, as contrasted with the constructive. Giacometti’s works
have the flavor of being dug up from long burial that has shaped and textured
them. They appear ancient ruins that reflect upon modem social ruins.
David Smith (1906-1965) welds/wields scraps of things and irregularly-
cut sheets into sculpture. He fastens together odds and ends of ruinlike ele
ments into personable ensembles. If pieces stick out here and there, the whole
has a comfortable spatiality at the scale of the human being. Though his ele
ments may be cold and impersonal, their assemblage is warm and humane.
The greater part of a Smith work is likely to subsist immaterially, for he is

one of the great artists of space. Seen from a distance or in subdued lighting, as
is appropriate for outdoor pieces, Smith’s works emit an inner glow against the
field of space they touch. They are charged. The dynamo is within. Smith etch
es against sky and white wall. He forces ruins to unite for human delectation in
a world where pieces of metal threaten people.
Jean Tinguely (1925-1991) makes motorized sculpture out of odds and
ends, unrelated broken stuff. Motorization gives motion, light, sound, and the
emergent unities in incongruity. Some of his works are self-destructive: sculp
ture as non-repeatable performance.
Sculptural ruins have developed our taste for unpainted sculptural surface
that allows the material to shine through in its richness. Today, we would re
gard as an absurdity for the woodcarver to cover the grain and its natural tone
with polychrome. We would find just as objectionable for the stoneworker to
conceal the qualities of the material, so painstakingly shaped, under the easily
applied rich coloration of paint. These acts, we feel, are untrue to the art.
Sculpture should honor, not disguise, its material. At the last moment, the
artist would be abandoning the art and opting for quite another one: the repre
sentation of human features and things by colored paint. Why, if the artist were
going to paint over the work, then it does not matter in what matter it was
worked. Plastic wood is as good as wood, plaster more serviceable than marble,
plastic better than granite.
Such practice would be a contradiction in the artist’s terms, and it breaks
faith with viewers. We are unable to respond to the daring or difficulty of the
statue, if we cannot see of what it is made. We are tempted to see it as a three-
dimensional painting, not as a work of sculpture. But in such a category, it
sticks out like a sore thumb. The paint on the statue is not modulated, as it may
be in a painting on the wall. One is only a statue painted. The other is an au
thentic painting.
We are accustomed to the clutter of non-art works, such as elfin lawn or
naments, advertising figures, clothing mannequins, and endless knickknacks,
brick-a-brack, gimcracks, gewgaws, thingamajigs, hotch-potches, flimflams,
and flapdoodles that are cheap substance painted garishly. They are disposable
and dispensable. The bad taste that experience of these leaves in our mouth
would carry over to the encounter of sculpture that intends to be serious art yet
paints itself with many colors. Those ancient broken statues have habituated us
to look at statuary without paint.
But the ancient statues were painted. Without pigment, the marble figures
were naked, even if they were nude. We cannot totally ignore the traces of col
or on the survivors. The tinge of tint is in the eyes, the lips, the hair, the nipples,
the drapery, the jewelry, and the ornaments. Color completed the imitation.
The Medieval saints and Holy Family carved so lovingly in wood were
plastered over and painted. Gessoed just so. The fresh, pink cheek of the Vir
gin, not the old grain of wood, was visible. The carving was the underbody to
the statue. The surface was the life. It gave meaning, not ornamentation. The
blue was necessary for the Virgin’s garb. The stars painted on it were not indi
cated in the carving.
The gilding of statues in Europe and Asia contributed more than color: su
perhuman radiance and pious preciousness. Paint and gilding is still present on
many such statues in wood and stone, though often it has so faded, peeled, or
flaked that it takes second place to the material underneath which announces its
distinguished presence.
We are not displeased that the paint lacks completeness and vigor. We
would protest a restoration that planned to repaint the statues, just as we would
protest adding plastic noses and limbs to the broken statues. We are better off
without the original paint. To put it all back is a net aesthetic loss. We might be
better off with a thoroughly restored ruin, though it would not be the original,
and it would also cease to be the ruin. Neither work of value would be on hand.
To see how awkward the painting of three-dimensional figures strikes the mod
ern eye, take a look at the colorful heroic frieze above the Greek temple on the
Acropolis of Fairmount Park that is the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1928).
We are far more interested in what wood grain does for expression, pat
tern, and movement, than what the pigments would do for verisimilitude and
identification. The happenstance of grain in the ruin has a relationship to artis
tic control. The sculptor faced these suggestive lines in carving/curving the
cheek. The face took form from the material, and from the artist. The artwork is
an interface.
But if the ruin restores the artist’s vision of the original, as long as the fal
len paint is not restored, we do not have the original in the sense of the com
plete work meant for display. Let’s face it, that work was envisaged as painted.
We are gazing at the ruin. Splits in the wood go against the grain, and
worm holes bore within. These need not be blemishes, but beauty marks valu
able to our experience. These appear to occur so that the woodiness of the
wood would make its way to us. Would it be so. Innerness excites. The figure
has a heart which is wood and therefore warm and organic. The statue unlocks
its heart. It takes down protective barriers between itself and us.
The statue’s three-dimensionality grows from something that occupies
space to something that has depth within space. It is no longer an exterior. Or
the exterior grows as interplay between representational and material surface.
The cheek is wood; the wood is cheek. The statue turns the other cheek.
The ruin has taught us this love of the material, so when we turn to intact
modem works we do not mind exploring the material in those sections of repre
sentational figures that do not function representationally. We empathize with
the material to experience the emergence of the form and figure from it. How
different from the older notion of imposing a given figure and a desired form
upon a neutral material whose chief virtue was to obey and whose chief reward
was to be totally concealed. The ruin has brought us to enjoy the interplay of
the material left bare by the artist with the form and figure. Greater life is in
that representation whose material is transparent and contributory to shape and
expression. The accidents of matter are incidents for creativity.
Rarely do we see ancient works with their full color, and only some Me
dieval pieces possess the perfect coating that keeps out their material. When we
do see such works, we tolerate them. We can enjoy them, despite their devia
tion from what has operated as convention in our experience of statuary.
A notable case of fully-painted Medieval stone-carving accessible to the
modern visitor is the Sainte-Chapelle (1239-1248) on the lie de la Cite, Paris.
The carving’s gorgeous foliage is kept up in vivid hues. Here and there, we de
tect acorns and birds. This brightly colored world scarce reflects that it is made
of stone. To be made of wood would make more sense, you might think. The
substance is immaterial. What matters is the illusion of delicate living forms.
The Chapel succeeds in making life out of stone and glass, for the exceedingly
thin columns are fenestrated by dazzling jewels of illumination. In this magic
forest, the color and vitality of the stained glass make natural that the stone bird
on a capital is painted. Often, I have listened for its song.
A pious colleague tells me that in any American town, you are likely to
find churches filled with immaculately painted statues. You cannot tell of what
the statue is made, unless revealed by a mark on the base. My colleague feels
that these are plaster/plastic casts ordered out of catalogues. Overly sentimen
talized and embarrassingly idealized, they have no touch of independent artis
try. Schlocking taste.
Yet these are not meant to be works of art! They are articles of service, I
explain, part of the imagery of the cult. Perhaps to the believer they have aes
thetic power that assists religious activity. But, to my colleague, they are pre
tentious junk that speaks against religious activity. “Pious people, you would
think, should know better than to display such stuff in a holy place.’’
Were not the Medieval painted-figures similar in their day? No. A loving
care went into their individual carving. Mass-produced trash did not clutter the
culture. No museums existed in which Medieval pieces that had lost their paint
could be appreciated as art.
Sometimes, the woodiness of a statue comes to the fore with aging and
the dissolution of coatings applied to the body. The drapery and ornaments may
retain their thick polychroming, while the flesh bares itself in the true color of
the wood. Some Black Madonnas are venerated in countries of dark-skinned
people, and these images technically may be ruins. The gradual transformation
of the statue gives it symbolic meaning and suggests its special power. In Mexi
co in 1964, and in Italy in 1981,1 was engulfed by hundreds of people in ecstat
ic devotion of such Black Virgins, carried in procession through the streets, as

if in celebration of a miracle.
Incongruity arises in the enjoyment of the sculptural ruin. We become
aware that a part is missing. The spear that the spear-thrower is hurtling is not
in hand, although the figure is at the spring point. Furthermore, the hand is
gone, though this does not interfere with the tension of the expected throw. Fi
nally, the eyes are blind, mere sockets out of which the inset pupils have fallen,
so that the figure takes deadly aim unseeingly. We enjoy the ironies in the loss.
They make up for the missing parts.
In other figures, the role of broken-off features adds poignancy. Statues of
Aphrodite posed in the attitude of modesty ( Venus Pudica) may be missing the
arm that shaded the bare pubic delta from view. The shoulder, neck, angle of
head, and the remains of the upper arm still suggest the gesture, so that we have
simultaneously the effort at concealment and the naked truth. This surely diff
ers from the experience of the original, where the intimate charms could only
be visually entered through the screening of the unsuccessful concealment. The
Greek statue was likely to be more erotic in experience, while the bolder piece
that remains in our museum is less so, though more naked.
Incongruity arises as we follow the lead of the material and suddenly crop
up against the figure. Those worm holes in wood make an interesting pattern
because of a regularity in spacing of the foragers, blackness of the circles on a
brown surface, and blending of the pointed penetrations with grain, splits, and
whatknot. All these fascinating details may take place on the face of the Bud
dha. Material and figure, surface and content, presence and absence shift back
and forth in awareness. Such shifts occur in appreciation of intact statuary. Ex
perience of the ruin assists enjoyment of what is not yet in ruin.
Broken statues may become symbolic. A tradition in Rome is that wed
ding parties, upon completion of the civil ceremony at the City Hall on the
Capitoline Hill, pose for photographs next to the colossal fragments of Con
stantine’s statue, in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori. Standing
awkwardly beside the hand or head, the couple may be receiving the imperial
blessing. A sign of the magnitude of the event, couple after couple are marched
in by the photographers. Here is Grandfather, at age 90, having trouble keeping
his peasant’s arms in the new sports coat. The photographer moves him around
the family group like a stage prop. His arms finally have to be placed into posi
tion. Then the image is made. Grandfather’s presence in it on the mantelpiece
or bedroom wall will make it historic.
Countless icons composed the same way, with different people, attest that
the ruins were present at the wedding. The ruins make it official. They are the
godlike pieces that must be touched and invited to join the party which is aus
piciously, if awkwardly, united. You might think that no matter what objects
were available in the courtyard they would be used to similar purpose. Yet an
cient ruins are special for modem Romans, the people who live with them. This
part of the ceremony may be an affirmation of a specifically Roman union. The
city—the civilization—joins the couple by this gesture in which parts from the
past tower over the freshest form of union on the planet. A capitol event.
Architecture and sculpture are the two great visual arts for the occurrence
of ruins (for sculptural pieces in architectural ruins, see Pis. 34, 35, 39). Little
place is available in the other visual arts for ruins. Mosaic ruins in site increase
in interest because of the scattering of the tesserae, those chips off the old
block. The composition reveals its elements and threatens to disappear into
them. Some of the pieces, as at Pompeii or Ostia, have been completely sepa
rated and are tossed about with the rain. They do not recombine. They lie in
limbo, making no figures or forms.
Then we come to the edge of the mosaic where empty spaces are visible.
Elements have freed themselves from long attachment and flown off. In their
place is space. Space is given shape between the chips in place. The mosaic is
not the surface of the floor but a layer with depth. The depth is only 2.5 cen
timeters (about an inch), but that is more than a surface skin-deep. The depth of
the mosaic rises between its pieces. Three-dimensionality is emphasized, wher
eas the perfectly formed original held its vertical dimension in restraint.
In 1986, while motoring along the Gulf of Kotor in Montenegro, then
part of Yugoslavia, Ellen and I saw a hand-lettered sign in Serbo-Croat an
nouncing “Roman Mosaics.” We stopped abruptly at Risan to see the recently
discovered flooring. Unfortunately, large areas were covered with sand to pro
tect them. While pretending to study the opaque sand, I shuffled here and there
to see what might lie underneath. An observant and conscientious guard came
to my rescue. Pointing to the sand, he shouted for our benefit, “Mozaik!
Mozaik!” Then he obligingly swept aside a large patch of sand with his arms,
and with generous hospitality, that I cannot forget, took up a big handful of tes
serae from the exposed mosaic and gave it to me.
Painting is the great visual art that scarce admits of ruins. Puzzling, given
the large number of paintings in the world and their distribution in houses, of
fices, palaces, churches, and museums. We would expect paintings to be com
monly available as ruins, but we do not have a taste for ruins in this medium.
As we move from medium to medium, the status of ruin changes.
Worm holes and wood surface are visible in some painted panels. Gener
ally, we ignore these, for they do not contribute artistically. The work remains a
painted surface. Reminders that wood is underneath do not aid enjoyment.
While the painted sculpture might profit from showing the wood below its sur
face, because that art is more than surface, traditional painting resists disclosure
of its three-dimensionality. Many statues encourage viewers to walk around
and see the back. Paintings never invite us to do that. Well, hardly ever. Some
paintings are two-sided, though their images may be unrelated.
Even altar panels are independent in treatment of their two sides. The al-
tarpiece takes on the terms of architectural structure. Its ruining is not appreci
ated like that of genuine architecture. When separate panels of a triptych are
shown as works of art, we could say that we are dealing with a ruin. The partic
ular panel leaves the whole, an elaborate ecclesiastical structure, and enters the
art museum in its new unity. Yet the feeling that this is a ruin rarely occurs. The
exhibited work shows no signs of destructive activity and no visible break from
a whole. It strikes us as the original. It is likely to be framed, which emphasizes
its completeness, even if the shape of the frame is irregular.
If the panel’s content points outward, to be matched by a missing panel,
this does not detract from its impression of completeness, for independent
works do this too. Each panel may stand alone. What makes the separate
panels ruins is a retrospective judgment upon encountering the altarpiece as an
ensemble with missing parts. Oddly, the relationship is not mutual. From the
viewpoint of the altarpiece as whole, the panel is a part, and its absence causes
the whole to be a ruin, while from the point of view of the panel, it is a whole,
in the absence of the altarpiece.
Large paintings have been cut down to smaller ones, say, to extract indi
vidual portraits, though generally no sign is left in the new work that it is a ruin.
Framing affirms completeness. Repainting at the edges disguises manipulation.
That such ruining is not commonplace is surprising, for some fine pieces may
be cut out of many mediocre paintings and made into aesthetic objects that ap
pear perfectly intact. One large second-rate canvas might provide two or three
first-rate unities.
If we launched an international program of making such ruins of paint
ings, it would cause good art to multiply and not-so-good art to diminish. The
crowding of storerooms and gallery walls with dubious achievements would be
alleviated. The technique recommended for redeeming painting is the one that
photography uses daily in cropping the image.
This project, I reluctantly admit, will not be put into action, because of the
widespread cultural commitment not to tamper with originals, for we would be
ruining them. Even if works are second-rate, they ought to be kept intact. The
art object is an inviolable body. We could not rely on the taste of curators or
marketers to reform the unity endowed by the artist. Since tastes change, to
day’s salvaged pieces may turn into tomorrow’s second-rate works, while the
intact original might become appreciated for its excellence. Thus, good reasons
and strong feelings oppose the proposal. Yet we will see that the Ruining Eye
puts it into practice (Chapter Seventeen, below).
Unfinished works exist in which, for one reason or another, the painter
did not get to complete the surface. And finished works exist, which, while
complete, leave unfinished surfaces to show through. We experience neither of
these categories as ruin. No destructive event has brought the play of chance to
contribute. The work is indefinitely in process of becoming a whole, or it is, in

effect, a whole. In neither case has it been transformed by damage from the ar
tist’s original work.
Vandals have attacked paintings, though not to create new aesthetic
wholes. Their aim is to deface or destroy. We greet such acts with horror as
morally reprehensible and aesthetically abominable. Anti-art terrorists assault
cultural values in cowardly fashion. Works so damaged are swiftly removed for
restoration. A year or so later, they may be back on public display, with no
signs of discoloration or scars, though with increased security. To leave the
work with slashed canvas or acid-stained pigment is unthinkable. We do not
want ruins of painting.
A few valuable painting-ruins exist. Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917)
mixed strange things, including wax, with his oils, and the result is a cracking
of the surface and darkening of the canvas. Often, the effect is an unfortunate
loss, for the figures sink into obscurity from which they never will return.
Sometimes, the darkening furthers Ryder’s simplification of form and eeriness
of content. If we lose the clarity of the original, we gain a movement into the
mystery of the scene/seen.
To compare the present state of the Ryder paintings to photographs of the
originals is disheartening. If we forget about the originals and just attend to
what is present, then the darkness offers much enjoyment. While the loss of
clarity weighs more on the negative than the positive scale, overriding Ryder’s
artistry, the crackled surface is almost always aesthetically beneficial. The
cracks give the works an arcane character that befits their content and style.
They have become aged icons. The play of surface splittings makes up for the
darkness of coloration. We are caught in their cobwebs. Uncanny appropriate
ness brings the cracks into clouds, waves, or mist. The cracking and fading en
dow the canvas with a strange innemess and mysterious life. The image chang
es, recedes, and glimmers before our eyes. The works of Ryder are all that they
are cracked up to be.
We experience Ryder’s works as ruins insofar as we recognize the split
ting of surface to be happenstance destruction of the smooth original. This un
invited and undesirable intervention occurs in the work that had been created
by the artist. We might also greet this as the long-range effects of the artist’s
original treatment with odd materials. The splitting is not the ruin of the artistry
in that case. It is the artistry.
Ruins of pottery and bronze vessels are not greatly appreciated. Viewers
prefer intact pieces. Is this because utensils, more mundane than paintings and
statuary, should be available in such quantity that whole works can be dis
played? We are accustomed to throw away our jars and pots when broken and
unmendable. To display their pieces amid the brick-a-brack in our den would
be odd. We do place there ancient fragments for their antiquarian flavor.
Museum cases of fine-art glassware give preference to the intact. Incom

plete pieces are likely to be put together in one case, too valuable to keep in
storage, yet too lacking in artistic value to be individually highlighted. Modem
culture has an understandable distaste for broken glass.
We appreciate fragments of jewelry as new unities. The power of what is
there overcomes the loss. We need not worry about what is missing, while we
take pleasure in what is before us. The preciousness of jewelry serves to retain
its value for us, even when incomplete. Half a tiara is better than none. Under
tones of rarity and costliness may stimulate our discovery of aesthetic value in
the fragments. The case filled with jeweled ruins brings forth smiles and excla
mations that is not caused by the case of broken glass. Distinguishing between
the place of ruins in each plastic art often means getting down to cases.
What of the portrayal of ruins in visual works of art? That is another story
(see “Art History,” Section 2, and “Individual Artists,” Section 3, in the Biblio
graphical Essay, below). The aesthetics of ruins is often taken to be the study
of artistic visions of ruin. As you have seen, this book is a different kind of the
oretical enterprise.
With all due respect to the discipline of art history, I will mention two vis
ual works that portray ruins. The first is by Hubert Robert (1733-1808), who
was acknowledged on his death certificate as “Robert des Ruines.” I have been
a pretender to the title of “Robert II des Ruines.” In Hubert’s oil, “The Old
Bridge” (ca. 1775), National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Col
lection, the min fills the picture, bulging out of the frame into visual conscious
ness and knocking us back a step. The min is not in a landscape. The min is the
landscape. This minscape is occupied with a lot of activity, involving people,
cattle, a cat, a boat, and plenty of vegetation.
A persuasive twentieth-century visual commentary on the painting’s su
perabundance has been offered by the long-time Disney animator, Ward Kim
ball, in his little book, Art Afterpieces (Kimball, 1980, unpaginated). Kimball
“improves” Robert’s painting by transforming the busy broken bridge into a
highway overpass of the California freeway system, with directional signs,
“San Francisco” and “Downtown.” An art-hysterical contribution that shows
we cannot expect painters to give us the unvarnished tmth about mins.
From pictures, let us move on to motion pictures.
Twelve
CINEMA AND TELEVISION AS RUIN
By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently, its
cell—the shot?
By collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each oth-
er. By conflict. By collision.
Sergei Eisenstein, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideo-
gram" (1929), Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans, from
Russian by Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, "A
Harvest/HBJ Book," 1949), p. 37.
Cinematic ruins are of several types. Remnants exist of films lost in their inte-
grity, though screening of such incomplete reels is rare. A treasure trove of old
films was unearthed in the 1970s from the permafrost in Dawson City, Yukon
Territory, Canada. Among the items was an incomplete early Douglas Fair-
banks film with provocative racial themes. It was shown at the American Film
Institute in Washington as a curiosity significant in the history of cinema and as
a performance of high quality.
In dealing with ruined films, institutions emphasize the need for preserva-
tion, and they urge searching for missing items instead of taking pleasure in the
fragments. The Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibit in the
1950s of stills from missing or incomplete pictures. Whatever integrity these
shots may have had, they were displaced by the pathos of deprivation. The
viewer was tantalized for rhetorical purposes. The result was not an aesthetic
pleasure in what was displayed but a distaste/dissatisfaction.
Dogged search has turned up sizable fragments edited from celebrated
films, so that reconstitution in large part may be possible. Abel Gance's Napo-
léon (1927), patched together thanks to heroic endeavors of Kevin Brownlow,
and outfitted with giant multiple-screen and live orchestra, played in 1981 as a
world event in cinema. While the entire film was not at hand, the editing, re-
photographing, and persuasive presentation produced a work with only hints of
remaining a ruin. I persisted in viewing this masterpiece as a whole instead of
an assemblage of ruins. Other incomplete works are shown without disguising
the major gaps, and we cannot evade awareness of experiencing a ruin.
Unfinished films have provided artistic challenges to subsequent direc-
tors. Several versions exist of the materials that Eisenstein left uncompleted for
his 1930s film, ¡Que Viva México! (Mitchell, 1983, pp. 53-58). Peter Bogdano-
vich built his first film. Targets (1968) about material he acquired starring
Boris Karloff which he supplemented with fresh footage of the actor and other
kinds of material.
Cinematic ruins appear as excerpts in the compilation film. This genre is
popular as a packaging of comedy; it guarantees a thousand laughs. The com-
piler serves the audience by presenting only the best, including episodes rarely
seen or embedded in otherwise tedious material. A whole epoch, genre, or
œuvre can be epitomized in a single enjoyable film. Pauses and pathos can be
inserted for relief in the uproarious highlights. . •
The editor has the resource of narration at command. This is a way of get-
ting modern audiences through.the non-talking films. It gives background, and
it sets context, usually for the sake of enjoying the excerpt instead of grasping
the invisible whole. The narration can he a counterpoint to the visual, partici-
pating in the joke. The pieces are highlighted for their qualities as gag, scene,
or incident. These unities are spliced together in the editor's conception of the
unity of the film artist's career that generally takes this form:
Early Efforts
GREATEST TRIUMPHS !
S l o w D e c l i n e
Sad Neglect.
We owe to compilation films the revival of neglected artists and the res-
cue of obscure footage. Occasionally, the editor succeeds in presenting a valu-
able interpretation of the artistry. But compilation films court the danger of
oversimplification. They dispose of the motion pictures, in exposing the frag-
ments plucked from them. They cut into the artistry that constituted the films as
wholes. They make things too easy for the audience. We do not have to invest
our attention and judgment, as when we see complete films for ourselves. The
compilation assures us that the best moments will be provided.
Cinematic time changes in the compilation. A minute or two of footage
can constitute the whole excerpt taken from a film that required an hour or two
in which we dwelt in its world. We usually do not enter the world of the ex-
cerpt. It is detached from its world/whole and from us. We see it objectively, as
something removed from somewhere else and placed before us for pleasurable
examination. But the film world is one we have to slide into, finding our space
in the film. The excerpted piece is pressed for time. The film feels endless.
In making excerpts of Stan Laurel (1890-1965) and Oliver Hardy
(1892-1957), the editor may cut short the subtle build-up, the slow and quiet
interaction that leads to the first absurdity. The excerpt focuses on the escala-
tion of absurdities marked with violence. Slapstick is the stamp the compilation
puts upon the comedy of Laurel and Hardy. Lost are the gentleness of charac-
ter, ingenuity of transition, and painstaking development of incident.
The compilation genre tempts us to view the complete films we see as
candidates for excerpting. Thus, while we sit through a full-length Laurel and
Hardy film, waiting for the highlights, we function as imaginary editors. If we
Cinema and Television as Ruin 239
chance upon an old comedy film in progress on television, in the community

center, or at the local pizza parlor, we stop to enjoy what we regard as excerpt-
able. That it is incomplete matters not, nor are we troubled aesthetically when
we have to skip the conclusion, because we have to move on to another channel
or take our pizza home. In this way, in 1986, while strolling along Skadarlija,
Belgrade's street for artists and students, I caught excerpts of Laurel and Hardy,
Flying Deuces (1939), screened outdoors at a café. Each evening, a different
episode. I saw the conclusion before the beginning.
Excerpts are worked into documentaries on cinema artists, such as James
Cagney (1899-1986) and Luis Bunuel (1900-1983), which may involve inter-
views with the artists and others. The whole of a career is sketched. The format
throws light on the films which the excerpts illustrate. Excerpts show variations
of a treatment or a theme. For instance, Cagney's several encounters on screen
with Pat O'Brien (1899-1983) can be edited to display the interplay of their tal-
ents and their varied characterizations in the same kind of movies.
Films are regularly produced with accompanying trailers, presumed to be
extracts from the work. Like the poster and the lobby card, they are meant to
drum up interest in seeing the film. Such materials can scarcely represent the
unity of the original or provide satisfactory unity of their own. Instead, they
suggest the tone of the work, its glamor, excitement, mystery, or comedy. Trail-
ers assure the potential customer of the genre. The highlights are recognizable
as fitting patterns, say, for the Western, detective movie, or musical comedy.
Trailers put forward what is sure to sell: the stars, subject matter, and spe-
cial effects. These forms of advertising are not mistaken for what is left as the
originals. Not meant to be appreciated for themselves, trailers point outside
themselves to the film which invites our attendance. These teasers are not ruins.
Yet they contribute to a taste for mins in cinematic experience and in cul-
ture generally. The trailer that announces the coming attraction has few mo-
ments to work on viewers who have come to the theater to see a full-length
film. The trailer is fast-moving in content and editing. Dynamic action, excla-
matory dialogue, and loud sound hit hard. We want more. The voiceover narra-
tion and splashy titles insist that we desire to see the movie.
The trailer, made after the film is completed, is a misnomer from the audi-
ence's point of view, because it is shown before the screening occurs. Hence, it
is a preview. When I was a child, Saturday afternoon at the movies meant a
double bill, five cartoons, a chapter from a serial, a newsreel ("The March of
Time"), and the "Coming Attractions" (the trailers). At the Flatbush Theatre in
Brooklyn in the 1940s, flve acts of live vaudeville were added.
The trailer seen within the context of a theater's program is a divertise-
ment. It wakes up the senses without taxing the mind. It stimulates interest
without leading to participation. We might as well enjoy it while waiting for
what we have come to see. Trailers are fun as fragments. We may have no in-
tention of seeing next week's "attraction," because it does not address our taste,
yet we can enjoy its sales pitch. The trailer is a freebie whereby we sample
what we will not get to see. It informs us of what others will be seeing. But the
trailer also gives us a taste for a cinema of splashy action, sudden movement,
surprising spectacle, and, above all, violence. The trailer contributes to a cul-
ture of quick condensation.
Film trailers lack unity. The highlights are meant to titilate without giving
satisfaction. They are likely to consist of loose ends which explode rather than
hold together. But a trailer can be carefully crafted as a small film of
detectable/delectable integrity that refers to the principal film. Alfred Hitch-
cock's trailers for Psycho (1960, not commercially used) and The Birds (1963,
commercially used) are gems of macabre wit that go beyond the evocative and
informative to the hair-raising. They are works of art.
The movie trailer has a second life in television for advertising the new
films shown at theaters and those, new or old, to be shown on television. These
trailers must be even swifter and more striking, because they reach for an audi-
ence capable of switching channels or looking away. Scant seconds are avail-
able on the small box to win a commitment. Gone is the theatrical context. The
film trailer on television competes with a flow of messages/massages emanat-
ing from many channels into our living room. It must make its presence felt
quickly, sharply, memorably. Its strongest techniques are the shouted dialogue,
the booming music, the exploding car, the tearing dress, the smash to the kisser,
the close-up of the weeping face.
Television promises. The trailers for films intervene between programs
and interrupt them, as do commercials for products and services. Television
programs that are filmed or videotaped provide a preview-trailer to encourage
the audience to see the show. This is a thumbnail sketch of what tbe program
will be, similar to a listing in a TV guide, though it gives its information by di-
rect experience. The trailers are not effective as indices of content for decision-
making, any more than commercials can be used for prudent purchasing. The
trailers principally confirm the character of the program. They authenticate its
known identity.
The television trailer in the function of preview may immediately precede
the program as the appetizer that assures us what will be dished out. The high-
lights are meant to grab and bold that channel-changer in the decisive opening
moments. They are usually more exciting than the hour that follows. From the
high pitch of the preview, which may blend into the program by means of title
superimposition and theme music, the program winds down. We expect to see
the scenes we were promised at the beginning. This keeps us watching.
Those scenes do occur, confirming the preview. While the television film
or other program is true to its preview, we have forgotten the details of the
movie trailer when we get to see the promised attraction at the theater. Yet for
the television program to confirm its preview, it, too, relies on the content of
violence, titillation, fast action, and extreme emotion. Television is a self-
fulfilling prophecy/profitry.
Still photographs are posted on theater walls as publicity shots to interest
us in what is showing or coming next. They are released for publication in
newspapers and magazines. They find their way into scholafly and popular
books on the movies. The still is a different medium than cinema, which, in a
word, is moving (Gr.: kinema).
Cinema is motion picture with sound. The still is a silent photograph.
Compared to the big screen, the still is a miniature. The film is seen in the dark
in its world. The photograph is seen on a wall or a page that makes up a larger
world. Though the still may be made from a frame of the film, it is not thought
of as the ruin of the film, except in those cases where the film no longer exists.
The still is derivative yet still something different from the film. Like the trail-
er, it shows highlights, but only ones that appeal to fixed visual composition.
Stills are neither moving nor talking advertisements for sound motion-pictures.
Good stills are not easy to create. Stills tend not to make visual sense,
when they have been plucked out of the stream of motion. We want the stars in
moments of highly-pitched action, but their inclusion in the same frame may be
awkward. While the trailer works best with the spirited action of the film, the
still does its best with the tableau of ensembles, the frozen group shot. The pho-
tograph is visually studied across its surface. It can be packed with content for
the viewer to absorb in time. The trailer is a moving Gestalt with no time for
study of content, though with considerable energy for impression.
The still.that invited us to see the film subsequently becomes a mode of
reference to the film. It is the established way for illustrating a film that we talk
about in the print medium. Memories of great films that we have seen become
re-formed about the standard stills of those films which we have also seen. The
visual item is invested with the weight of the visual memory, even though these
visualities exist in different media. By looking at the stills, we reorganize tbat
memory as well. We begin to remember the film as the stills, even though we
did not remember the stills as frames in the film.
In most cases, we could not remember the single frame because we have
never seen it, since its rapidly-timed presence on the screen is below the
threshold of perception. Only in the rare case where a single shot is held for
many frames, with no subject movement, can we say that we saw the still in the
film. Stills, though they may be made from frames, are what we do not see.
Nonetheless, the image of the photograph exercises crystallizing powers
upon memory. What do we recall from a fine film seen several years ago?
Some scenes. These seem to be what is seen in the mind's eye as pictures. Cin-
ema distills stills. Film commentators believe in the images they include with
their text. The work before them is the photograph, not the movie. Movies are
susceptible of being conceived as images. What does not fit photographic com-
position may slip from reflection and remembrance. Stills threaten to make ru-
ins of movies by structuring cinematic experience about their pictorial unity.
What makes this distortive power of the photograph still more troubling is
that in many cases the stills are not made from the frames of the film. They fre-
quently are studio photographs made on the set, and sometimes they are taken
from discarded footage. More visual unity is likely to occur in the posed shot
than in the frames made by the motion-picture camera. In truth, despite the
double service of the English word, the eye of the movie camera (Fr.: le cam-
era; Ger.: die Kamera) is not the same eye as the photographic camera (Fr.:
l'appareil photographique; Ger.: der Fotoapparat). An eye for an eye, and a
truth for a truth.
One eye is directed to making motion pictures. The other aims at perma-
nently fixing a single configuration. Studio photographs are better photographs
than stills made from the film's frames. But these photographs further distort
our image of the film. Looking at the studio shots after having viewed the film,
we remember the film in terms of these shots.
Studio stills are not identified as such in theater lobbies, film-distribution
catalogues, or newspaper illustrations. They would lose their marketing effec-
tiveness if so identified. These stills are used in picture books and scholarly
volumes without identification of their curious status. Authenticity is thereby
ruined. Though the scholar or chronicler may not analyze the photograph, pro-
vided courtesy of the distributor or studio, it is a persuasive presence for
someone reading about the film. Pictures are greater shapers of imagination
than language. We have been led to systematically misconceive movies.
The film poster generally utilizes photographic images, which the viewer
presumes are from the film, though these are given an artistic rendering, juxta-
posed, provided lurid backgrounds, and joined by phrases, including title cred-
its. The poster as a whole is not a piece taken from the film. It puts together ele-
ments from it. Tone and genre are represented in the poster by color and the
styling of lettering. A detective story will be dark, a Western movie will have
rusticated script. The stars are highlighted. Following ancient conventions, they
are represented larger than the other figures, who are likely to be caricatures.
The poster, unlike the still made from the frame, is free to compose. Un-
like the studio-posed still, the poster is not restricted to photographic composi-
tion. The movie poster can move over into art from its mission to advertise. At
its best, the poster is emblematic of its movie, composed to stimulate interest.
The poster is not a ruin. But its inclusion of images, or apparent images, from
the film reinforces the taste for the still.
Still and poster are distortive references to the film that we wish to recall,
study, or discuss. More reliable modes of having the film at hand for the sake
of reference are the published screenplay and the scene-by-scene photoplay.
Markets exist for both. The screenplay is the film's text. It makes dialogue
loom large in the conception of the film, since we are engaged in reading. The
script tells us what is to be seen, although we do not see it. Missing from the
screenplay is the movie medium. To remedy this, stills are included. Given the
influence these images have upon the mind, the editor of the book, who is usu-
ally not the filmmaker, chooses how we conceive and perceive the film.
An illustrated script reads like an illustrated play or novel. We appreciate
the literary unity of the screenplay, instead of using it as an aid to imagining the
invisible. To confound matters, screenplays that are published as originally
written or as used during shooting need not correspond exactly to the film that
was produced and screened.
The photoplay book remedies the distortion created by selective stills, for
it aspires to provide each shot in the film. In principle, this could not be done
without offering a print of every frame. Even the photoplay is selective, though
it gives us much more than a handful of celebrated stills. Many stills are fuzzy,
awkward, off-balance, or ambiguous. A film as experienced is not constituted
of individual shots. No matter how many of the frames are printed in succes-
sion, the photoplay lacks the essential dimension of motion.
The photoplay takes its revenge on the screenplay by giving the lion's
share of the re-experienced film to the visual. All the dialogue may be present,
placed under the photographs, just like photo essays and news photography.
The dialogue provides the captions for the action depicted. But some spoken
words may be ovedooked, as the editor works on the visual elements. Music
and other sounds are left out.
Photoplay and screenplay are handy study-aids for referring to the order
of scenes, the on-screen presence of characters, and the exact wording of dia-
logue. They encourage us to look and listen closer the next time for things we
missed. Thus, from the photoplay of Jean Renoir's La Grande illusion (1937),
we can identify the author of a book lying among the dressing articles on Erich
von Stroheim's night table: Casanova. That book rounds out the character of
the gallant German officer who is so appreciative of French culture. The cos-
mopolitan Italian adventurer, Giovanni Giacomo (Jacques) Casanova de Sein-
galt (1725-1798), composed his extensive memoirs of romance, intrigue, and
diplomacy in stylish French. "CASANOVA" is unmistakably exposed on the
printed page of the photoplay (La Grande illusion, 1974, p. 111). But did we
see it in the film print projected on the screen? Can we see it next time?
When I tested this matter by sitting close to the screen in 1989 during a
screening for my class, I detected for the first time another volume on the table,
hy Heinrich Heine. I had to start re-reading the works of the Romantic German
poet, so that I could reinterpret the film in this new light. The excuse for my pe-
dantry was that von Stroheim, or Renoir, or both, had put the book on the table
to be seen, even if in eariier screenings I had not seen it. What we have missed
seeing in film has no limit. Nowadays, by means of a Digital Video Disc

(DVD), you can stop the film on a frame and enlarge the image. One day, by
means of Reification Projecto-Vision (RPV), which I am building in my base-
ment, you will be able to pick up the books on the table and open them.
The photoplay betrays the fleeting nature of the visual material and tells
us more than we are meant to dwell upon. Screenplay and photoplay are decep-
tive as representation of the film's essence. They ruin cinema by tuming it back
into what went into it but which it no longer is: script and pictures.
The contribution of scriptwriter and photographer to the film is finally
subject to the exercise of another artist in the process, the editor. Every feature
film has an editor. The notable exception is Hitchcock's Rope (1948), ingeni-
ously planned by the master to take place in continuous segments measured to
the time of each roll of cinema ñlm. The film, having been shot, was thereby
finished. Unfortunately, the acting is stilted and the movement stagy, because
the players had to be kept within the bounds of the reel.
All other films are filmed in greater abundance than can be incorporated
into the final work. Multiple filmings are usually made of the same scenes, de-
manding the services of an editor. Scenes may be filmed for which no room
will be available in the final fllm, if it is to be kept within designated length. To
have more film on hand than is needed is preferable to having less. Deletion is
a thousand times easier than reshooting. Given budgetary and contractual limi-
tations, adding further footage may be impossible.
Film is unusual as an art that deliberately does far more than is needed for
the final product. But unused footage is being made available to the audience as
an added attraction to the DVD version of a film. What we finally were not in-
tended to see, we finally can get to see!
The film requires being put together after it has been filmed. Unity arrives
in the last touch. The editor may proceed with the script as guide or act under
the close direction of the director. The editor may be the director. Every direc-
tor has buried within an editor.
The editor may follow the orders of the producers and marketers of the
film. Previews may lead to cuts. Film review-boards may require deletions be-
fore giving approval. While the director tries to draw the best out of the per-
formers and camera-operators for capturing on film, the editor tries to draw the
best out of what the director has caused to be captured on ñlm. What is on fllm
limits the editor, assuming no further shooting is feasible.
A film, looked at from the creative process, is a min made with seamless
unity from a superabundant mass of sophisticated materials created by the prior
labors of performers and director as captured by the cinematographer. From the
viewer's point of view, the film is likely to have a unity appropriate to it in
which at times we are aware of the artistry of the performers, cinematographer,
and even director, though we may be unaware of the contribution of the editor.
A few different films could result from turning over copies of all the footage to
several independent editors, an experiment well worth trying.
Montage, according to Eisenstein (1898-1948), is a juxtaposition of disp-
arate elements in such a way that a new affective image springs into the view-
er's mind (Eisenstein, 1975). The act of synthesis occurs in the mind, the true
locus of the film. Such mental activity follows the laws of perception and psy-
chology. A science is possible of selecting and combining elements to induce a
desired effect in the viewer. The elements are discontinuities, fragments, piec-
es, for they are bits of film that need to be taped together (Fr.: montage). Thus,
ruins. The experience of the whole is generated by their antithetical proximity.
A film is an extended mental activity wherein mins are successively overcome
by the springing forth of new unities.
The dialectical structure of film experience is extended by Eisenstein to
include sound and color. The activity of the editor constructs, and finishes, the
film. While film must be shot, the film must be put together ("montage"). By
looking to that last activity, editing, Eisenstein lays the grounds for the activity
of the director in planning the film. The shooting script is a guide to capturing
ruins. Wholeness is not captured. That must be contributed by the experiencer
of the elements. Film is not cumulative, adding shot to shot to build a continui-
ty (V. I. Pudovkin's tbeory). It is contrapuntal, causing unity to surge between
its gaps (Eisenstein's theory).
This dynamics of film art—or film science—is the same as that in the oth-
er arts. Eisenstein adduces his most telling examples from Guy de Maupass-
ant's fictional descriptions and from Leonardo da Vinci's account of an intend-
ed heroic painting that he never executed. Eisenstein is not urging that one art
borrow from another. Instead, he is exposing the operations of human imagina-
tion. We naturally feel the connections between discontinuities perceived. We
are inveterate unifiers in a realm of conflicting fragments. The laws of imagina-
tion spring from biology. Life, in turn, is an overcoming of disparities. The hu-
man process on Earth and in history is dialectical.
The final synthesis proposed by Eisenstein is between art, which finds its
most effective imaginative exercise in cinema, and reality, which is moving
forward in socially reorganized relationships in the Soviet Union. Cinema con-
tributes to Communism. This is not accomplished by ideational content. The
cinema assists the audience to bridge in experience the reality they brougbt to
the theater with the reality that lies outside and ahead. Movies make people bet-
ter equipped for the further socialization of reality.
Eisenstein's brilliant theory is the quest for unity by means of a dialectical
process purportedly inherent in human nature and essential to art. Reality is in-
complete, broken up, contradictory. It will be made whole only by social ac-
tion, which art assists through the life of the imagination. Art marches on to-
ward the inevitable triumph over the mins of human existence.
Other filmmakers appeal to cinematic principles that revise or supersede

montage. Cinema outside of the "socialist republics" induces reality's further
fragmentation. Art in the service of limited goals, such as sensuous pleasure,
controlled by parties aiming for profit, and unconcerned for social transforma-
tion of reality, may produce alienation and disorientation. Throughout much of
the world, cinema is not a mode of healing or a preparation for progress. Leav-
ing the movie theater, we step back into a realm of ruins.
But we also step back into a cinematic experience of life. We respond to
life, as if we are caught up in the episodes of an incomplete scenario without a
director. As we go about our activities in the real world, scenes pop into mind
from the reel world (see, for example, this book). Cinema keeps us reeling.
When a work of cinematic art arrives on television, it may be subjected to
several forms of ruination. Bowdlerization keeps objectionable materials from
the audience. Profanity, which can be pungently effective when used profusely
in film, has little place on commercial television, and sexuality, in many coun-
tries, is rendered by the medium as promise, never as performance.
The film may be shortened to fit the broadcast hour. In the early days of
American television, films were broken up into suspended segments for inser-
tion of commercial messages and station announcements. When a boy in New
York, I spent my late hours watching The Late Show, and then The Late, Late
Show, in which old movies were endlessly extended by a spieler touting a com-
bined vegetable peeler, sheer, and shredder. He made a salad ten times a night.
In recent years, the commercials are designed with greater intensity than
the feature-length film they penetrate. They are magnets of attention that reor-
ganize the cinematic experience about regular intervals. The film is the wel-
come relief between commercials. We relax from the intensity of experience by
watching the film which builds up to a break for advertising. The timing of the
breaks confirms and shapes our recognition of significance. On television, the
coming attractions are advertised in the middle of a film.
A film as commercially televised is a series of pieces, each with some
suggested unity of thrust or dramatic movement, but fitting together in the loos-
est way in attenuated time. On television, the film that has been shortened is
then lengthened. Breaks may be inserted every few minutes, benumbing cine-
matic time, so that film is a potentially endless vehicle for the highlights of ad-
vertising. The breaks are conveniences for the viewers, allowing them to get up
from experiencing the film and attend to other comforts.
At the film theater, we may go out into the lobby, while the screening is in
process, to obtain refreshments, make a phone call, or go to the toilet (Amer.:
"bathroom"), but we would miss part of the film. To attend to these functions
before the feature is more desirable. At home, we need not miss anything, be-
cause we are given the break in which to take care of these other matters. The
screening ceases, while we open a beer, get dessert, check the mail, put on paja-
mas, or urinate. We count on the climax of the commercials to warn us when to

get back to the film.
We keep one ear to the messages, while occupied elsewhere. That ear is
sufficient for the advertiser's marketing strategy. A break has unity to which
we become accustomed/a customer: selling an appetizing product that stimu-
lates hunger, hawking a brand name that stimulates subsequent recognition,
identifying the station to assure us we are watching a quality channel, flashing
news to sustain the illusion we are experiencing up-to-the-moment access to the
worid, self-advertising by the station in the form of previews of other programs,
including the next film in the series, and calling us to return to the film. A
mighty package that shapes our experience, whether we sit through it or keep
an ear on it from another room. Television is the medium of the missing.
Whereas cinema demands unbroken continuity of experience, often with
unblinking attention, television is easygoing in its disconnectedness, winking at
our diluted attentiveness. The breaks in a cinema theater are meant to get us in
and out of the theater and to the candy counter. The breaks on television in the
midst of programs, and the programs themselves, are meant to keep us tuned to
that channel throughout the day, whether we are in front of the screen or not.
Further ruination of the film by television occurs by placing the control
over sound in the hands of the audience. We can diminish the sound at will,
even silencing it completely. Remote controls facilitate this power. At the thea-
ter, we are seated in an enormous sound box whose volume we cannot alter.
The television-viewer's revenge, exacted upon the ruination of the film by
commercialization, is to silence the messages. This is not the unruining of the
ruin, for the film is still broken up visually. But in the next step of technology,
the viewers may record full-length films or rent them for uninterrupted screen-
ing on their television sets. Thereby the cinema theater is shucked away from
cinema. The viewer now has the power to interrupt the film, rerun scenes, leap
forward to other scenes, and adjust the volume. Video-cinema is the democratic
medium of ruining films at will.
Theater-viewing of cinema and home-viewing of films on television are
different media. The brightness and contrast of films is manipulable by the
home-viewer, and daylight or lamplight may be allowed to play on the screen's
surface. The television image is made up of lines which lose that luminosity of
the image projected on a reflecting surface. Though we speak of the "screen" in
both media, they are different in operation.
Finally, the film meant for the large screen of the theater is reduced to the
small screen at home. Larger-than-life figures of cinema become puppets in the
box, grand natural scenery sinks into miniaturized pictures, stampeding horses
and runaway trains turn into moving toys. If the Great/Greta Garbo's face had
irresistible magic when it filled the entire silver screen, what power can it have
on the smaller surface of the television screen?
Cinema televised is no longer cinema. It is video. Broken up, reduced,

transformed, and reunified. Television has restructured the movie industry.
Films are made with an eye to their eventual release/real-ease on television.
The audience for whom they are constmcted has been acculturated to video ex-
perience. One art redirects the practice and conception of another art.
Films are now released on vidéocassette (videotape) for home consump-
tion. The work may be screened in its unedited entirety without interruption.
When the American Film Institute issued its list of the Hundred Best American
Movies of All Time, in 1998, it arranged for the public to purchase copies of
the works on vidéocassette. Video rescues the cinematic from television. But
we can arrest the screening at any point to take those breaks that commercials
have provided. The film remains video.
In the United States, home access to complete cinematic works via tele-
vision is spreading through cable and satellite networks that multiply the
number of channels, including some that are reserved just for films shown
without intermption. The size of screens has been increasing in the American
dream of having a home theater, while the size of theatrical screening rooms
has been decreasing, so that multiplex theaters can offer many films at the same
time, much like television.
A popular instrument for controlling the transformation of cinema into
video is the vidéocassette recorder, whose very name is edited to VCR. We can
direct this magic electronic box automatically to record films shown on tele-
vision when we are absent. Having extracted the cinema from the television, we
play it back at will on our television set. The VCR, or VCP (player), also plays
the rental films we check out of the shop in the mail. The new generation of
VCRs will allow editing, so that we can make compilation videos, delete com-
mercials or insert our own, and otherwise practice montage. The gadgets make
each of us feel like a VIP (Very Imperial Person).
In the twenty-first century, we can easily study a film by renting or pur-
chasing it as an electronic version on Digital Video Disc, which allows us to
stop the motion at any frame, replay a sequence, even magnify a detail. The
DVD version of a great movie typically will contain deleted scenes, the trailer,
stills, posters, and interviews with the artists, all of which were not part of the
film when released for cinematic screening, hut which get blended into our
home experience of the film. The unity is the disc, not the film.
The DVD mode allows us to replay a scene in its original language. I had
to do this twenty-seven times with a scene in Ingmar Bergman's Det sjunde in-
seglet to transcribe a speech (see pp. 407^08, below).
DVD recorders will soon accompany DVD players. As video cameras
(camcorders) become more popular for home use, we can integrate our tapes
with rented, borrowed, and broadcast ones. We can also "burn" (make) DVD
versions. In sum, we are able to turn everything into video.
Television thrives on screening what were once cinematic works, but it

also does its own thing by electronically taping its programs, whether in studio
or on location. Such taping offers a large opportunity for editing to bring pro-
grams into allotted time, to pace them for commercials, and to trim their awk-
wardnesses. Producers can mine the taped program for previews to insert in the
breaks of other programs.
Live programs are also recorded. This allows producers to replay them in
addition to the pretaped shows. Television, despite appearances, is not a live
medium in which the transitory happens before our eyes before it is gone. It is a
recorded and recordable kind of experiencing. It stops happenings from being
transitory by capturing them permanently.
Even the newscasts that emphasize their immediacy with loud tickertapes
and glimpses of working reporters in busy newsrooms show us snatches of film
and video. If you miss the news event at 6:00 PM, you can catch it again at
10:00 PM. We get not the news, as substance, but the newness, as impression.
This news is touted as eyewitness, but it is mostly recorded. Television news is
a mixture of dash, flash, trash, and rehash. The Video Eye selects, transforms,
packages, stores, edits, and replays.
Live entertainment shows include taped sections. Tapes are made for
broadcast of live entertainment before a studio audience. We can occasionally
see a preview, necessarily on tape, of a live performance to be offered later in
the week, a bit of magic that might not puzzle the viewer.
To take one British classic of television. The Benny Hill Show opens and
closes with Benny (1925-1992) speaking to a studio audience. This is taped. In
the course of the program, skits are performed on-stage with audience response.
Other portions are taped outdoors, though the same audience responses are
present. Several skits rely on disclosing to the video-viewer what is off-screen
but would be visible to the studio audience, yet that audience does not laugh
until the disclosure. The laughter of the invisible studio audience is an element
in the composition of the show intended for the invisible home audience.
What is live, when it was live, where it was live, and when it is taped are
unclear. But this befits Benny's artistry in composing ludicrous skits and laugh-
able snippets. His work is superior to its music-hall origins, because of the mas-
tery of the video techniques—taping, disclosure, rapid motion, and editing—as
opposed to the vaudevillian stage-techniques, as mastered, say, by the earlier
American classic comedian, Milton Berle (1908-2002). "Uncle Miltie" depend-
ed upon interaction with a live audience.
Television is the editable medium par excellence. It may shorten pro-
grams for reruns or lengthen them by a heavy dose of commercials. It may
make compilation programs, "The Best of . . . ," for any old program or per-
former. Compilation previews may be put together for advertising at breaks or,
as in the case of my old favorites, Mannix and the original Star Trek, for use in
each program during showing of credits. This teaser sustains the viewer's inter-
est in the series. With the power to select passages from taped programs, tele-
vision makes much of an aesthetics of ruins. It serves up a parade of fragments,
attention-grabbing slices of taped experience.
We encounter video as incomplete. More is to come. We are not encour-
aged to conclude the viewing and go home, as at the cinema, the concert hall,
or the playhouse. With video, we are already at home. No need to even turn the
thing off. We can fall asleep in front of it. It will keep an eye on us.
The insistence of each channel upon our staying with it until we are un-
conscious is counterbalanced by our power of instantly changing channels. This
is central to the aesthetics of television. We switch about from program to pro-
gram, seeing if anything interesting is on. The switching occurs at the houriy
breaks between programs, and it takes place in the middle of programs during
the commercial breaks.
Whenever we turn on the set, we are likely to spin the dial or flip tbe
channels. With a flick of the wrist or the touch of a remote button, we can ban-
ish a program that is not remotely interesting. We are used to encountering tele-
vision on the wing. We break in and out of things in process. They are consti-
tuted of sections and breaks, selections and replays. We experience simultanei-
ty of disparate incompletions.
The soap opera is television's quaintessential fictional form, for it has no
beginning and no end. It consists of parallel fragments, like programs on differ-
ent channels, whose discontinuity urges us continuously to tune in, although
nothing is lost if we miss any segment, for we will catch up to its impact in sub-
sequent episodes, and we will hear of the developments from our neighbors.
Soap operas blow bubbles of expanding interest out of their capacious bucket
of muddy waters.
Movies, in turn, cater to a soap-opera taste. Godfather II (1974) and
Terms of Endearment (1983) succeed in the moving use of the episodic to
which their audiences have grown accustomed as television-watchers. A major
film is looked at as a potential mini-series for television. Francis Ford Coppo-
la's first two Godfather films were reedited for a four-part telecast in 1977, re-
organized chronologically. Films are also conceived as episodic contributions
to a series that will appear over the decade as I, II, III, IV, and more. I am look-
ing forward to Godfather X, which, undoubtedly, will be an X-rated film.
The commercials give the rare achievement of televisual completeness.
We gratefully greet the artful ones that we have seen dozens of times, for in a
few seconds they contribute recognized wholeness. Yet the commercials are
slices and images, music and slogans jammed together and rapidly changed. Ei-
senstein's visionary theory of montage is put to its most daring use here in the
sudden collision of diverse but vigorous elements. The commercial packs more
punch than any film or live program seen on television, because it obliges the
greatest effort of imagination in bridging its discontinuities. The locus of the

commercial, unlike the rest of television, is the viewer's mind. The box of
foaming soap is left in our head. Yet we resist commercials, dismiss them, tune
them down, switch them off in favor of other channels, or leave the room to
them while we accomplish a simple biological function.
As we switch our way through the video world, equal status extends to
real event, live performance, taped performance, edited film, commercial fanta-
sy, and programmatic preview.. They become interchangeable. We catch a
beautiful head on the screen: is it film, play, interview, preview, advertisement?
Television makes ruins out of films, life, art, and marketing, thanks to its
editing of film and tape. Thus, television has transformed spectator sports. The
highlights of the game are shown immediately after the game and later in the
evening. We can enjoy excerpts from all the notable games that day. During the
telecast of the game, the highlights are available for instant replay. If we missed
the stolen base in the baseball game, it is rerun a moment after in slow motion,
and then again from another camera's angle.
Televised sport endows us with the privileges of the gods. We cannot
miss anything worthwhile, since it will assuredly be called to our attention by
the replay. The regular intervals in the game are occasions for the television
breaks. While the fans in the arena remain on the scene, we remain in our living
room. The fans confront the field, but the televiewer's field has nothing to do
with the game, since we go about our at-home business during commercials.
The television commentators on the game do not communicate it to the
listener, as is necessarily the case on radio. Instead, they interpret, explain, or-
nament, and emphasize. They make sure that we get the highlights. Their artis-
try consists in building a context for the emergence of those highlights. The
commentators and their assistants also provide an enormous amount of infor-
mation, sometimes flashed on the screen by a computer. Most of this informa-
tion is unavailable at the arena. For the home-viewer, this background builds a
context of achievements and challenges around the single contest at hand.
The game viewed as video is instantly converted into statistical happen-
ing. Despite its zoom shots and multiple cameras, the telecast does not capture
the life of the game as a unique event in passing moments involving human
performers. As viewers at home or at the field, we look for the highlights, hav-
ing been trained by television to excerpt from the flow of experience.
At the start of the twenty-first century, television is the universal cultural
omnivore. It chews up everything. Art and reality are ingested, intestinalized,
and moved through its voluminous bowels as the ruins of the world. Television
is the magical junkbox. It functions by turning films, events, products, and peo-
ple into so much junk, recorded fragments, "clips," caught intermittently and
incompletely by inattentive consciousness. The process of television produces a
perpetually fresh garbage-heap of the world in our living room.
I remember when television was heralded as the greatest instrument for

democratic education. It would provide everyone with information for which
they could trust their eyes. While replacing reading about the world, televsion
would sensitize us to the complexity of the world. But the world has changed.
In my childhood in America, cinema was the most popular art-form. It
had eclipsed the novel and radio. In my youth, I saw television absorb cinema.
In my years of maturity, I saw television, in turn, transformed into the larger
medium of video. In my advanced years, I am witnessing the flourishing of
electronic media that digest all the preceding media.
Thus, I sit before another kind of screen, a monitor, which keeps its eye
on me as I watch it, on which these words appear as I compose them, and on
which I can play a movie, downloaded from a provider or activated by a disc.
Photographs can be entered in this electronic thing by digital camera, edited on-
screen, transmitted over the ocean, and printed-out. I can have the box play mu-
sic to me, and I can compose music with it. I receive and send words across the
world. A microphone allows voice communication.
This thing, which I resist calling a machine, because it is mental, not me-
chanical, encompasses cinema, television, radio, sound-player, camera, art gal-
lery, telephone, typewriter, printer, newspaper, calculator, financial account,
pornographer, dictionary, encyclopedia, library, translator, gameboard, weather
station, address book, filing cabinet, and alarm clock. It does not make coffee.
The next stage is just around the comer. It may be worthy of the name.
Portable
Instantaneous
Supersensitive
Hospitable
Organic
Creative
Holistic
Servant.
You will be able to take it anywhere, and it will do everything for, and to, you.
Still to be included in it are medical services, sexual functions, and the brewing
of coffee. The lap-top computer and the in-palm communicator are early ver-
sions. The design now being developed is a light-weight permanent mask sown
over the face, covering the sensory organs, and wired into the brain.
When everything, no matter its dimension or medium, is immediately pro-
cessable, everything is grist for montage. Each of us will be a walking universal
ruiner. Or ruin. Science friction? We live in, and likely will die in, the electron-
ic world, about whose marvels of entertainment, education, and international
cooperation we once read with skeptical amusement.
Thirteen
LITERATURE AS RUIN
To every completed work, as a rule, we may make an excerption.
Literary ruins exist. Many old texts have minor lacunae where a phrase has
dropped out. These holes do not noticeably affect the whole. The reader loses
little, probably less than when we nod in the reading. The editor may signal the
ellipsis and suggest a filler. Such things are of interest to the scholar, not to the
general reader. The general reader is willing to put up with an enormous
number of holes, while the scholar may pounce upon any minuscule gap as a
profound challenge, or, at least, a professional challenge. Literary scholars of-
ten are searchers for ruins. To detect that something is missing, to speculate
upon what it was, and to find it are intellectual joys.
Works also exist without sizable parts, such as stanzas, scenes, even
chapters. In longer works, these may not greatly affect the whole. Readers go
forward without paying attention to the gaps, just the way we skim pages. The
unity does not change, nor do we encounter a ruinedness in the work.
Yet we might experience some of these works as ruined. The gaps may
stimulate imagination to bridge parts. The scholar may speculate about what is
not there, and the general reader may enjoy the conjunction of the discontinui-
ties. Authors need not write with continuity, transition, and conclusion. We can
enjoy the open-ended, and, open-middle, novel. Gaps invite synapse, the
springing forward of energy.
The reader of Henry James (1843-1916) must work between, and during,
the chapters. Sophisticated modem works, such as those of Alain Robbe-Grillet
(1922-), provide the choice pieces that require the reader's integration into the
whole. The novel has been transformed from seamless world, and the reader
has heen transformed from calm observer. Yet we cannot lay the credit for
these aesthetic developments at the foot of ruined literary works, for such
works are not given much currency. While we are accustomed to the mined sta-
tue, we are not familiar with the ruined novel.
Some literary works are nothing but fragments. The most inattentive read-
er could not miss the fact that much of importance is missing. These pieces
have no unity, save as the reader continues to conceive it. In the other artistic
categories, the whole was missing a part and might have gotten along without
it. In this literary category, the part is missing a whole and can only get along
aesthetically by being taken as a new whole. But reading ruins is not a frequent
practice, beyond the study of the specialist. Thanks to the printing press, we
possess several centuries of literature that have not been fragmented. No in-
centive to bother with fragments, when so much is whole.
Intact writings are no longer subject to ruin, even if they are old works.
for print sees that everything is preserved. Because literature is of a substance

that allows unlimited multiples, a damaged book or manuscript can be repaired
so that the original is made intact. Words have this gift of invulnerability. Now
we can store and reproduce them electronically for instant worldwide access.
Statues in wood or stone are unique. Lose one, and it is permanently lost.
Ruin one, and it is no longer the original. Restore it, and it is no longer the
original. The original lives only once in carving and architecture. But if made
of words, the original may come back to life as it was. Bronzes may be cast in
multiples, and several houses may be built to the same blueprints, yet resorting
to extant versions to repair a ruined copy is manipulation of the substance in
physically altering the work. Adding the missing chapter is not a physical act.
The substance of literature is the words themselves, not the print on the page.
Words, aesthetically speaking, are not physical. You have my word for that!
Ruin-hunting in literature is profitable to scholars. Despite the magical
protection against ruination provided by printing, many printed books have left
out or altered something in the author's text. That is the operative assumption I
use in studying texts. The typographical error, the printing option, the editorial
choice change texts slightly. The establishment of the best text, usually the ver-
sion as originally issued, or as finally approved by the author, is a task for
scholars who consult manuscripts, proofs, editions, marginalia, and correspon-
dence. We can salvage the literary work from the stages of damage to which it
is subject. Literary researchers are rescue-workers.
Sometimes, scholarship can raise a work to the temporary status of a min
when we locate a suppressed chapter or deleted section, as in the case of Ste-
phen Crane's Red Badge of Courage (1894) and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Pos-
sessed (1871-1872). The scholar's triumph is to turn what unbeknownst to us
had been a min back into a more complete original.
These are special instances of literary ruin. But a major form of literary
ruin is so prevalent and so accepted by taste that we miss calling it to mind as
ruin, though it is a fact of literature. The excerpt is the deliberate ruining of lit-
erature for the sake of a unit that may be intended as representative of the
lengthy whole yet which the reader can experience as a whole in itself
The art of excerpting consists in discovering the piece in the original that
we can reproduce with unity to fit available length for the purposes of the read-
er. The reader is not offered the original. Editors must take care, for moral, aes-
thetic, and legal reasons, not to lead the reader into believing that the full origi-
nal is in hand.
An excerpt from a work of fiction may make it accessible as a contribu-
tion to another field, such as philosophy or history. Consider the chapter on the
Grand Inquisitor that has frequently been extracted from Dostoevsky's The
Brothers Karamazov (1880). It contains the most shocking and compelling Ex-
istentialist argument against the role of divinity in human life and for the validi-
Literature as Ruin 255
ty of all human acts, no matter how evil. But this is the invention of a character,
Ivan Karamazov, who relates it to his brother, Alyosha, who greets the tale with
a symbolic kiss that echoes the sole answer of Christ to the Inquisitor in Ivan's
story. Just as we must reexamine the-Inquisitor's speech, in conjunction with
Christ's response, so we must reexamine Ivan's speech in conjunction with
Alyosha's response.
The argument, which professional philosophers have seized upon in their
studies and teaching, takes place within a dialectics of beings—the articulate
Grand Inquisitor and the silent Jesus Christ. We must view this dialectics in
turn as a haunting fantasy of Ivan, symptomatic of the excessive intellectualism
that will drive him mad. In another layer of the onion, we must examine the di-
alectical context between Ivan and the loving Alyosha.
These scant twenty pages are wrapped in yet other layers that require the
whole of the novel's 600 pages to identify, for Ivan and Alyosha are involved
with other brothers Karamazov. This novel is only the first volume of a project-
ed trilogy left unfinished by Dostoevsky at his death in 1881. But the deceased
novelist and the living reader enter the dizzying outermost layer of dialectics in
which we might find the meaning of being human in the universality of our kin-
ship. While the chapter on the Grand Inquisitor is the core of the novel, even of
Dostoevsky's osuvre, the excerpt leaves out that artistry by which we are ines-
capably tied to the core. Brother, what a loss!
Yet this excerpt can stand alone as a work of profound philosophizing and
striking unity. Once we are given its argument, we might say, with the Turkish
play on words, "Like a brother? More like a bother!" (Arkadash markadash).
The literary excerpt is often intended as a reducing mirror of the whole,
and editors may explain its connections. Yet in literature, as in other fields, the
ruin that is present looms in imagination with such force that we forget about
what is absent, even if informed about it. Experience is more formative than in-
formation. The reader usually uses the editorial commentary as preface to that
whole which is the excerpt, not as introduction to the original whole.
Length is of major concem to editor, publisher, and reader. This might not
be of any concem to tbe author. The excerpt, we may argue, has its principal
justification in making several works available between covers which otherwise
would be difficult or expensive for the reader to obtain. Put briefly, the excerpt
saves the reader's time and probably money. This is not to cheat the reader of
riches in reading but to introduce that reader to experiences manageable in brief
time. The excerpt liberates us to explore reading of our choice. An agreeable
facilitator, it does not pretend to be a substitute for the original.
Because the excerpt is presumably true to the original, it can stimulate the
reader's interest in picking up the full-length work when time is available.
Sometimes, the reader will not want to do that, even if time were available, be-
cause a distaste for the excerpt warns us against an unpleasant longer acquaint-
anee. Or, having thoroughly enjoyed the excerpt, we feel no need to tackle the
longer original. Quit while we are ahead!
The excerpt may succeed in presenting a better work than the original.
This sounds absurd in the case of masterpieces, but it is feasible in the broader
realm of second-rate writing. The excerpter can salvage the best from a work of
little worth as a whole. Under such midwifery, a novel not worth reading may
give birth to a well-told incident, a page of artful description, a line worth quot-
ing, or a memorable phrase.
Here is a positive need for tbe talents of the professional excerpter. The
world is filled to overfiowing with books not worth reading. The junk heap of
literature increases in height daily. You are holding a load of such material in
your hands. The bane of printing is that the world keeps bad books forever, and
more bad books are made to join them. We become lost among the heaps. We
may turn our backs on anything that has not received the stamp First Rate ap-
plied by the quality-control board of professors, critics, and textbooks. We
miss much, yet blind reading threatens enormous waste of time. We need help.
Enter the excerpter. This person is qualified to read excerptional junk.
With scissors in hand, the excerpter embarks upon a journey of discovery,
plucking gems from the trash. The excerpter is an artist, for aesthetic unities
must be seized from the inert material. Sometimes, a case may be made for re-
taining the entirety of a neglected work as a whole worth our reading. In such
cases, the excerpter is a scholar and critic, not an artist or excerpter.
More often, only the pieces stand to be saved. These must be cut just
right. Fragments that have no unity are not enjoyable, even if representative of
the original. An excerpt should not require much introduction and connection to
the whole from which it has been rescued. It must stand on its own two feet.
Shortness of the excerpt is a bonus, lengthiness an onus.
The context in which excerpters set excerpts is aesthetically significant.
The immediate context is the arrangement of introduction, commentary, and
notes in which the excerpter relates the part to the whole instead of emphasiz-
ing the wholeness of the former part. The information may be useful as back-
ground, though it might distract us with its talk of what is absent. The larger
context is the book in which the excerpt now appears. The excerpter gives the
piece a place historically or thematically among other excerpts and, perhaps,
short complete originals. The excerpt dwells no longer in the original but in a
fresh volume.
Comparisons suggest themselves when someone gathers literary works
under the same covers, and comparisons may be drawn by the excerpter who
exercises the art of book-editing. As ruins sit among ruins, their original attach-
ments recede further, while their independence is sharpened. The intermixture
of short complete works encourages us further to regard the ruins as wholes.
The complete original is likely to have its introduction and notes, but
these have no connection to establish with a former whole. Though they may
make the connections with history, genres, or other works by the author, they
are background information that still permits the literary piece to speak on its
terms. This is how we may regard the connections proposed for the ruins.
Excerpting is a standard method in teaching literature. The survey course
in college is outfitted with a massive volume that might cover centuries of
work, ranging from lyric poetry to novel. We rely upon ruins in the academic
world. The demands of comprehensiveness within the brief span of a semester
call for an excerpter's skills. The more that is packed in for the price, the more
likely will the volume find use by teachers of varying preferences. The volume
must have some obligatory classics, else its rivals will displace it. It does have
room for exercise of editorial and excerptorial choice. What makes it preferable
to its rivals is the skill of its choices, including its ruins, and the usefulness of
its contextual material.
The celebrated survey-anthologies are looked upon professionally as mas-
terly treatments of entire epochs or genres, not as grab-bags of scraps and piec-
es. These volumes are periodically revised and marketed with unstinting vigor.
They can last a generation. New teachers assign their students the same surveys
they studied as students. As I glance at my shelves, I am greeted by old friends
who shaped the architectonics of their literary disciplines and stocked the ar-
senals of teaching with their formidable canons:
John Hollander and Frank Kermode, The Literature of Renaissance Eng-

land {191?,)
George Benjamin Woods, English Poetry and Prose of the Romantic
Movement (2nd ed., 1950)
Louis Wann, The Rise of Realism: American Literature from I860 to
1900 (2nd ed., 1949)
Harold Hooper Blanchard, Prose and Poetry of the Continental Renais-
sance (1949)
These titles have been superseded by a panoply of brand-new anthologies, es-

pecially those which make room for women as authors, multi-cultural perspec-
tives, illustrations, and tie-ins with computer programs.
While a taste for the whole original, and nothing but the original, may
come into its own and be strengthened by scholarly attitudes, scholarly practic-
es reinforce the strong taste for the excerpt. The original and the ruin are in, the
expurgated and condensed are out. Reliance upon the excerpt in other fields of
higher education reinforces habituation to the excerpt in literature. The "book
of readings" is a standard as textbook in the humanities and social sciences. In
it, we find excerpts from longer works accompanying complete essays. The
scissors and paste are in the hands of the historian, sociologist, and philosopher.
as they put together the proud offspring of their fertile teaching. What counts is
content. Yet taste is exercised in the shaping of the pieces. A sharp sense is de-
veloped of where to make the cut. Elegance occurs in editing, even in the case
of readings in business.
College students, graduate students, and those in the professional schools
are fed a regular diet of tastefully-hewn pieces and small intact originals. Stud-
ents rarely inquire whether what they are reading is whole or excerpt. What the
editor has done matters naught to them, as long as the students can get the in-
formation from the readings. That any material included in the textbook has a
life of its own outside the textbook is a useless reflection. What matter the state
of the source, if the material has been printed in the required book of readings?
The textbook lends its weight to the value of whatever is found in it, in-
cluding the shape of the selection. To look up the original to see what else ex-
ists to it sounds absurd to most American students. Thus, we are educated to ac-
cept the excerpt as the whole. Education, we might then say, is in mins.
Excerpts enter the teaching and studying of literature in other ways. An-
thologies exist on special topics, and comprehensive editions in single volumes
cover specific authors. We seek overall unity, with adequate diversity along the
way. Ruins, which were pieces, become wholes, which then are pieces in the
whole, although the grander whole may be vague.
The Viking Portable Library is an exemplary series that jams the lifework
of an outstanding author into some 700 pages. The format allows for substantial
originals yet requires careful ruining. Some of these volumes, such as Malcolm
Cowley's edition of William Faulkner, or Morton Dauwen Zabel's editions of
Joseph Conrad and Henry James, may achieve classic status as compendia of
an artist's œuvre. Compilations help us get the big picture. Books of this kind
develop our taste for literary ruins.
Abridged and condensed books are another matter. They pretend to pre-
serve original unity while shortening. They delete instead of excerpt. They
clean out what will not he missed instead of making clear what has been
missed. They are works of convenience instead of aesthetic salvaging. The end-
less series of Reader's Digest Condensed Books makes the reader's task easier
by trimming away the dispensable without ruining the original.
Deletions may improve originals. One editor confessed to me that no mat-
ter how great a book, it can stand the pruning of a few pages. What a field-day
that editor would have had with this book! The editing profession stands in the
wings to bring peifection to whatever the stage of good writing. Every editor
would love to have received the manuscripts of Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, and
Marcel Proust, because of the excellence of the originals, but also for the op-
portunity to make final touches. Once the work is in print and well-known, we
are not supposed to improve upon it, unless "we" are the author. The published
classic falls into the editor's artistic hands for mining as excerpt.
Some condensations may substitute a different unity for that of the origi-
nal, so what was to be shortened turns out to be mined. Deletion of materials
from long works offers a mighty temptation to the editor to exclude objection-
able features. What appears slight changes in the elimination of waste material
can alter the character of the whole. Translators of long works who shorten
them may cause such transformations.
Debatable is whether works are improved, spoiled, or turned into other
things with their own aesthetic worth when they have been edited, abridged,
condensed, or excerpted. One remedy to a classic that has been harmed by dele-
tions is to bring out a new edition that restores the cuts—and makes new dele-
tions. The alternative of adhering to the original poses the ponderables of
length, cost, readability, and marketing. French publication of classics has long
honored le texte intégral, even in the portable libraries of the Pléiade editions
devoted to the œuvre of celebrated authors. An excellent tradition reigns in
France of bringing out critical editions that provide the best text of the com-
plete work, and complete indication of authorial changes {les variantes).
In recent years, scholarship and publishing in the United States has been
moving in this direction, exemplified by The Library of America. In the dec-
ades ahead, a national change in taste might result, although the cultural prefer-
ence is for fragments. The bowdlerizing of books for adults is no longer con-
doned, while American films aim at bolderizing fiction.
When I was a college student at the University of Chicago in the 1950s,
reading for my own instruction the Satyricon of Petronius (first century CE?) in
William Bumaby's old translation, I was distressed to come upon several pages
left in Latin (Petronius, no date, pp. 127-130, 233-234). Of taste, Burnaby was
serving as arbiter, in place of Petronius. I knew that I was missing something.
This was a great incentive to learn Latin. But with the impatience of youth, I
sought a complete translation and located one in the Rare Book Room on the
sixth floor of Harper Library.
You had to submit in writing a special reason for consulting a work in this
collection. "To read the dirty parts untranslated in my Modem Library edition,"
would have been the honest claim, though I must have entered a more scholarly
petition, because I was allowed to read the text, under the watchful eye of the
librarian. The Satyricon itself is a ruin, and to curtail its "dirty parts" is to be-
tray what has survived and twist what has been of interest.
For the record, I would like to translate the missing pages here, but limita-
tions of space regrettably prevent that service to the reader.
The greatest excerpter is memory. What do we remember of great literary
works read in their entirety on winter nights? Dramatic episodes, unusual
scenes, snatches of dialogue, descriptions of character. The monuments of fic-
tion are ruins inhabiting our minds. Mention Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace
(1868-1869), and distinct scenes of the novel come to consciousness, not the
enormously complicated plot, extensive theorizing, or confiict of characters.

Mention Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924), and
the snow scene magically materializes in mind. The swiriing core to the novel
and to our meaning as well. In 1990, I sat in bright summer sun at the café
"Zauberberg" in Davos, Switzerland, and my eyes filled with the storm scene.
Dante's Inferno (pub. 1472) brings to my mind the beautiful story told by Fran-
cesca of her ill-fated love of Paolo. I almost forget that we are in hell when we
hear her story. I forget the rest of Inferno when I recall it. Well, what the hell!
Ruins in literature? That is another story. (For suggestions, see Section 4,
"Literary History," and Section 9, "Imaginative Literature," in the Bibliograpb-
ical Essay, below.)
The widespread cultural taste for the excerpt in reading extends to maga-
zines. The most notable instmment of making mins out of writings is the Read-
er's Digest, whose contents almost all come from elsewhere. The Digest, high-
ly popular for decades, and published in many languages, gives the reader the
illusion of grasping the essence of what is going on in the written, and through
it, in the real, world. A comfortably-sized work for the hand, not an omnibus, it
feels like . . . a digest. Perfect for the dentist's waiting room.
Excerpts offer convenience and access to variety. If we wished to learn
about a field by reading a book on the subject, we could choose one of many
volumes written"by individual authors, or we could select an anthology (Gr.: "a
gathering of flowers") which contains pieces from several of these authors. The
attraction of the excerpt is evident enough in our times of hurried activities,
endless publications, and multiplicity of viewpoints.
We leam to read all materials, including intact works, with the Excerpting
Eye. Skimming is the art of not reading, exercised in the act of reading. I skim
the newspaper, magazine, newsletter, advertising brocbure, and my correspon-
dence, to avoid wbat will needlessly take up my time as reader. I would be
overwhelmed, if I had to read all this stuff. Very little is worth reading. Conse-
quently, to protect my valuable reading time, I read very little.
This protectiveness applies to the books and journals that cross my desk. I
must only skim these, if I am ever to get to the things I must read. Yet the eye
accustomed to fly over dispensable passages also leaps ahead when it comes to
reading good books or necessary texts. The rapidly moving eye assures us that
beauty is not just skim deep. We keep an eye out for what we need, the unity of
the text. The rest is build-up, ornamentation, digression. I often aim to get
something out of my reading so that I can get out of reading.
Where is that delight known in childhood of dwelling within the reading?
How I wished then not to stop reading! The build-up, ornamentation, and di-
gression were pleasures to be dwelt upon. Reading was once a mode of Being.
For me, it lies in ruin.
And what about you, reader? We are getting into pbilosophical questions.
Fourteen
PHILOSOPHY AS RUIN
Thought and Soul
Thoughts are the ruins

of the soul,
Chunks of what
once had been whole.
We build upon pieces
we find,
Making of ruins
our peace of mind.
Ruins enter philosophy. Great fragmentary works, like those of Blaise Pascal
(1623-1662) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), prove endlessly fascinat
ing. Pascal’s Pensees, composed 1656-1660, which come to us as scraps of pa
per, were intended as pieces in a tightly constructed argument, an Apology for
the Christian Faith. Their poor, pious author did not complete the grand work,
for he faded away from the Earth. We can wonder whether this was an unfor
tunate case of a work in process remaining unfinished due to circumstances
beyond the author’s control, or if this kind of work was given its appropriate
finishing touches by death. An argument on behalf of faith is doomed to fail, so
Pascal knew as a man of exceptional intellectual skills and life-defying faith.
Pascal’s earlier, scintillating work, Les Lettres provinciales (1656), is a
tour de force of intellectual keenness, or wit (esprit). There reason does its infi
nitely patient yet sprightly job, to wit, straightening out theological quarrels.
When he comes to the Apology, Pascal recognizes, as few thinkers have, the
limits of reason in matters of faith, for he thinks as someone who has made the
effort. Others too easily renounce unexplored reason in their embrace of unrea
soned faith. Not reason, then, but infinite passion is the meaning to Pascal’s re
maining days. The live coals of that passion sear the seer. What remains is the
burning presence of the soul in a world of darkness, not the calm success of a
rational introduction and explanation. Pascal confesses (from French):
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. (Pascal, 1954, no.
91, p. 206)
It frightened him out of his wits right smack into faith in immortality. That is
his answer to the unending silence of the universe. He died at age 39.
The Pensees in their ruined state are Pascal’s existential expression, call
ing out from the depths of the human being in his concreteness and mortali
ty, not the projected original as a reasonable guide to the truth of Christianity. I
will wager that of greatest philosophical and human significance is not what
Pascal failed to do because of ruining death, but what he succeeded in doing,
thanks to death.
The singular advantage of the present Pascalian format is that we may
take up and dwell upon any piece without reference to a whole. The shadow
behind the fragment fades from thought, despite ingenious efforts by genera
tions of scholars to patch the pieces together in the proper order. The fragment
bums its way into our soul. The Pensees make us really think.
If Pascal is the patron philosopher of faith beyond reason, Rene Descartes
(1596-1650) is the patron of reason as accessing everything knowable, includ
ing that God exists. Cartesian doubt makes ruins in the mind, only to find
among them the presence of the mind. “Mind?” sounds Descartes’s roll call of
realities. “Present!” is the resounding reply. The doubting mind exists, no
doubt about that. This is the bedrock upon which Descartes would safely build
all knowledge. Solid truth underlies the shambles of ruins. The Cartesian meth
od of doubt is the skillful demolition of faulty structures of knowledge on the
way to grand reconstruction.
Wittgenstein stuffed scraps of paper in boxes. These, along with his note
books, and the lecture notes taken by his students, have been published with
extensive commentaries. Wittgenstein published only one book during his life,
the sparse, but impressively titled, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Logisch-
philosophische Abhandlung, 1921), composed in seven main propositions,
while the Austrian served in World War I. Wittgenstein later repudiated the
work, though it remains a troubling landmark in modem thought. So concerned
was Wittgenstein about being misinterpreted that he stipulated the publication
of his works in English must be accompanied by the original German.
In Wittgenstein’s thinking, as evinced, say, in the principal book that has
come out of his manuscripts, the Philosophical Investigations (1953), is an ad
mirable probing, hesitancy, and self-consciousness about the limits of thought.
Wittgenstein is more seminal than systematic. An international army of com
mentators, translators, editors, and systematizers have been keeping their Witt
genstein about them, as they work out the full-scale theories. The fragmentari
ness of the author’s work is a carte blanche for explication, connection, and
expansion. Something may be found for everybody to work on among the ru
ins. A vast Frankenstein industry flourishes in philosophy, patching the pieces
of Wittgenstein together to give it life.
Pascal and Wittgenstein are cases of the fragmentary due to being unfin
ished, albeit the unfinishable is inherent to their thought. But undoubted mins
exist in philosophy as remains of what were once complete. On the Sublime
(ca. 100 CE), initially attributed to a “Longinus,” but written by an unknown
author, suffers several gaps. Reason is challenged to bridge them by a grasp of
Philosophy as Ruin 263
the argument. Such a successful completion of thought was contributed by Eld

er Olson, the literary theorist and poet (Olson, 1952, pp. 232-259).
The aesthetics of Longinus centers on the experience of ecstasy, which
may occur in any context, artistic or not, carrying the soul outside of itself.
What counts in that experience is not the unity of the artwork or natural phe
nomenon through which we are moving, the horizontal unity in time, we might
say, but the union of soul and something higher in the burning moment, or a
vertical unity outside of time. Artworks are only matter, context, occasion. The
sublime rises above them, making ruins of artistic wholes, as we are transport
ed beyond them and beyond ourselves.
How markedly different from the truly sublime theory of Longinus is the
Poetics of Aristotle (384 BCE-322 BCE), an anatomy of the artwork as organ
ic whole with necessary parts that achieve an appropriate pleasure in the audi
ence. Longinus rescues us from the whole realm of art, while we undergo the
highest kind of experience which takes us outside ourselves. How appropriate
to the argument of Longinus, then, is the lack of wholeness in his own text.
What does the text matter, when we have reached the sublime! The argument is
made whole by experience. By one resource or another, we are able to recon
struct Longinus into a unity of theory plausibly that of the original, although
we are missing about one-third of the text.
Philosophy is graced with ruins that are the smallest fragment of what
may have been substantial works. These are the celebrated texts of the pre-
Socratics. Of such towering figures in the history of thought, we know scant
details of their lives, we have questionable accounts of their doctrines, and we
possess precious little that confidently can be identified as their writing.
Of Thales (/7. 580 BCE), of Miletus, regarded as the founder of scientific
thought, we possess nothing assuredly in his own words. This might be because
he did not write anything. We have anecdotes about him, including the legend
that while gazing at the stars he fell into a well. Such tales suggest that Thales
should have left profound matters well enough alone.
We do have a few attributions of doctrine to Thales, notably by Aristotle.
The most celebrated of these is that the first principle of all things is water. We
can build on this piece of thinking as if it were a solid rock, making a world
view emerge for Thales, if we keep in mind the subsequent history of the pre-
Socratics. We are inclined to see Thales as taking the first step, getting his feet
wet, in a movement of thought on the foundations of nature. His is only the
opening chapter.
Of Anaximander (ca. 610 BCE-546 BCE), also of Miletus, who tradition
ally forms the second chapter, we have infinitely more that is authentic writing
than in the case of Thales: one fragment. Here is my rough translation, from
Greek, of the precious piece:
. . . something else, which is Indeterminate Nature (apeiron), is that from

which all the heavens and the worlds in them come into being. Also, it is
that in which the things that have come into being cease to be, in accor
dance with necessity, for they justly repay each other for their injustice, in
the ordering of time. (Diels and Kranz, 1934-1937, vol. 1, fir. 1, p. 89)
The closing line uses legal terminology for the rectification of the imbalance
between the becoming and the dissolution of things.
To apeiron has been rendered by scholars as the
Unlimited
Boundless
Qualitatively Unlimited
Infinite and Indeterminate
Ontological Storehouse (all by Philip Wheelwright)
Indefinite (by G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven)
untraversable
limitless (both by Charles H. Kahn)
matiere infinie (by Jean Voilquin)
grenzenlos-Unbestimmbare (by Hermann Diels and Walter Kranz)
In other words, it is the grounds for all change in nature. The perishing and
emergence of things, which occur in timely fashion with a just and necessary
balance, require an underlying principle of unlimited potentiality. Whereas
Thales had identified the principle of all things as the particular, water, Anaxi
mander recognizes that the principle cannot itself be limited in particularity if it
is to ground all other particularities. He gets the water out of the basement.
Of Anaximenes (/7. 545 BCE), last in line of the Milesian threesome, we
also appear to have but one fragment (from Greek):
Just as the soul, being air, holds us together, so the whole world (kosmos)
is encompassed by breath and air. (Diels and Kranz, 1934-1937, vol. 1, fr.
2, p. 95)
The natural-philosopher’s book has gone with the wind, leaving this whiff of
thought. Anaximenes returns to the identification of a preeminent particularity
as the grounds of everything, substituting air for the water of Thales. But in air
ing out the foundations, Anaximenes can connect the other elements, including
water, through the universal principle. Air has room for water in the form of
mist, rain, and evaporation. Air is no emptiness but manifests itself as wind and
breath—and our soul. Anaximenes gets down to earth, though he has his head
up in the air.
And that is the Milesian School: two fragments of three thinkers. A mor
tar to build with these pieces is made of numerous claims by later thinkers con
cerning the life and views of the theorists. As scholars develop the implications
of each contribution, they keep in mind the relationship between the thinking
of the three. The unifying notion of contributions made to an ongoing develop
ment of speculation engages most scholars who work on these materials. They
make the fragmented thinkers work their way into a whole.
We have more remains of other pre-Socratics. Of Heraclitus, of Ephesus,
a bumper crop of about 140 fragments remains. These are the most fascinating
materials in the history of philosophy, because of their striking language, puz
zling thought, and cutting edges. Heraclitus, the “Dark” or “Obscure,” opts for
fire as the principle of things. His statements burn the reader.
Individual fragments are stimulants for construction of a whole philoso
phy either in the name of Heraclitus or our own. This is the most celebrated
one (from Greek):
You cannot step into the same river twice. (Diels and Kranz, 1934-1937,
vol. 1, fr. 91, p. 171)
Another fragment adds the reason:
because the waters that flow in it are ever different. . . . (fr. 12, p. 154)
Perennially, thinkers seek to unite into a single philosophic view the many frag
ments of Heraclitus, which includes:
We can step into the same river, and we cannot, (fr. 49a, p. 161)
What is the right step to making sense of Heraclitus? Try this interpretiverse:
The River of Heraclitus
I cannot step into the river, because it has moved on before I make my
step.
I can repeatedly step into the river, because it is always a moving-on,
wherever I step.
I have flowed away, before even getting the chance to step.
Getting in step with the river, I can finally say,
AAAAAIIIIIEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Here are some more steps, perhaps in the wrong direction:

Panta Rhei
Everything flows.
Everything is on the go.
Where it goes, nobody knows.
All is on the run.

And when all is said and done,
All will be gone.
Panting, running,
We have floated away.
In the short run, things stand.

In the long run, things run.
Don’t let this thought run away with you!
Go with the flow,

Wherever the flow goes.
May the Flow be with you!
A river without shores,

Sure enough,
Can’t be shored up.
The world is heading down river,

And the river is out of this world.
All is a river
With nothing to cross (PI. 20).
Swim for your life!
“Away! Away all boats!’’

Cries the world,
As away it floats (PI. 31).
Being flows; we float.

Being runs; we tumble.
Being streams; we sink.
A river runs through it.

It is run through and through.
How thoroughly it runs throughout the world,

Though I am not through running with it.
Before you can say it,

It was.
It is gone before we are here.
Before you hear it,
We are gone.
Heretofore, we were.
Gone are it and we.
“Gone FishinT’
Is Being’s last word
Before leaving town.
“They went that a-way!”

Says Time of everything.
“Even this shall piss away,”

Says the river of Being.
“But ol’ man river,

he jus’ keeps roll-in’ a-long.” (Hammerstein, II, and Kern, 1927, p. 6)
Tomorrow is the river of today;
It will pick up all our sticks/Styx.
At the rate we are going,

Being will be gone
Before Becoming ever gets here.
Gone Today,
Gone Tomorrow,
We are goners.
Now, no jokes:
All flows.
That’s all folks!
Heraclitus is an author who bums us up. We treat him as uttering cryptic

fragments, whereas the utterances could be pieces from a well-ordered book.
Whether they are oracular pronouncements recorded from the lips of the sage
or quotable lines surviving from the text of his treatise is debatable. Heraclitus
is open to a never-ceasing stream of interpretation. We are tempted to dip into

his thought time and again.
Here is a summary of our encounters with the pre-Socratics:
Elementary
Thales was all wet.

He had water on the brain.
Anaximander was much grander

when he took a gander
and founded any element
on ungrounded fundament.
At this turn of the affair,

Anaximenes cried out for air!
Heraclitus went both deeper and higher,

when he darkly spoke of all-consuming fire.
And you, my post-Socratic, what atom, element, force, or idea

do you ground Being upon,
amid the flash and flow,
as things come and go?
I stand,
for the moment,
upon being human.
At four levels, the fragments of any one of these ancients challenge phi
losophers with the: (1) assemblage of the pieces and assessment of their au
thenticity; (2) translation of the remains, which may involve touching up their
edges and bracketing clarifications; (3) unification of the pieces in light of tra
ditions and other materials; (4) integration of the whole that results into the
larger whole of the development of pre-Socratic thought. The several levels are
worked upon interdependently. Translation is interpretation that may spring
from our notion of the “chapters” to the centuries of thought. What is said by
ancient sources about the doctrine helps in authenticating the fragments, and in
sketching their connections.
The pre-Socratics are a multi-dimensional puzzle that is intellectually re
warding to whoever works upon them. The pleasure of fitting the pieces to
gether is one of the rewards. Another is the cultivation of a favorite among the
thinkers. In putting together the past, we may catch the undertones to subse
quent and even current thought. Many thinkers turn to the pre-Socratics to
gather fuel for their reflections. Heraclitus alone has provided occasion for not
able studies by Sri Aurobindo, Theodor Gomperz, Martin Heidegger, Charles
H. Kahn, G. S. Kirk, Ferdinand Lassalle, Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich
Schleiermacher, Oswald Spengler, Gregory Vlastos, and Philip Wheelwright,
In the 1950s, I attended a lecture by Martin Buber at the University of
Chicago in the form of a reflection on the Heraclitean flux. His low voice
picked its way slowly over the fragments for an audience that filled Rockefeller
Chapel yet could scarce hear him. The voice of Buber flowed past me then, but
the solidity of his presence somehow remains with me.
A training in pre-Socratic philosophy was once part of the graduate edu
cation for the professional philosopher, even if our field was not ancient
thought or history of ideas. The value of such coursework was not in the infor
mation provided; you can look up each of the names in a reference work and
get a thumbnail sketch of doctrine and contribution. Without the reference
work, most philosophers in the United States today would be hard pressed to
keep straight Anaxagoras from Anaximander, or Pythagoras from Protagoras.
What counted in the study of the pre-Socratics by the non-specialist was the
formation of the intellect in having to deal with the levels posed by the tantaliz
ing ruins. Archaeophilosophy.
Nowadays, ancient Western philosophy is still tolerated as a field within
larger departments of philosophy, although the pre-Socratics are given short
shrift. They are treated, as their collective name suggests, as preliminaries to
the serious work of philosophy in Greece. Consequently, they may be covered
in a page or two of text or ten minutes in an introductory lecture. Something is
lost in keeping philosophy students from testing their minds on ruins so re
warding. The modern substitute is Wittgenstein.
Philosophers can compose their works as if ruins. The aphoristic mode
may be an imitation of the pre-Socratic fragments or of Pascal’s Pensees. We
can express our thoughts as they come and in their own length, without regard
to connections. The connections will appear, hopefully, in the long run, arising
from the thoughts rather than imposed on them.
Or the reader can be left with the task of finding the unity expressed in the
thoughts. The reader thereby has to seriously enter into them. A connection
drawn by the reader’s active intellect often has more power than one proposed
by the author to the passive recipient. Yet no connection may subsist between
the thoughts of a thinker. They might be ambivalent, contradictory, chaotic, in
complete, or incommensurable. All the better to present them as loose pieces!
In fragments, we can have the thought without the thinking, the conclusions
without the reasoning, the insights without the argument, the pith without the
philosophizing.
The most striking case of ruin-thinking in philosophy is the aphoristic pre

sentation by Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nietzsche’s books read as if they are
compilations of aphorisms instead of the development of treatises. Pieces could
easily come or go. This is opposite to the propositional development of the
short passages in the works of Francis Bacon, Denis Diderot, and the early
Wittgenstein, where every step counts in a forward march.
Nietzsche’s art is the bringing to ruin of civilization by the violence of his
aphorisms. They are meant to strike, shock, wound. The aphorism draws blood
with its cutting edges that plunge past the reader’s defenses. What counts in
Nietzsche’s writing is the destruction of the reader’s values, not the construc
tion of ideas. The reader is provoked to passion, a necessity if the complacent
lies of civilization and reason are to be shattered.
The aphorisms are the spear thrusts of the life-force. Their dangerous
points are forged in the passion of the artist, not stamped out calmly by the rea
son of the systematic philosopher. Systematic philosophy is a deceiving net
that must be slashed. Nietzsche aims to ruin systems, culture, and reason which
have perverted the vitality and nobility of the human animal. He launches a
heroic counter-attack. The upheaval of inverted values in the servile of the spe
cies is his goal. This is war against conscience.
In Nietzsche’s preface to the work he gave the astonishing title, Zur Gene-
alogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals), and which he combatively
subtitled, Eine Streitschrift (A Polemic) (1887), he explains (from German):
In other cases, the aphoristic form makes difficulties; this is the case today
because this form is not taken as difficult enough. An aphorism, correctly
cast and minted, is such that when it is read out it has not yet been
“deciphered”; instead, interpretation now begins, and, for this, an art of
interpretation is needed. (Nietzsche, 1967, pp. 182-183)
The reader has work cut out to do that goes beyond the words the author has
written on the page. The reader must suffer through the text.
Other great uses of the ruin in philosophizing are found in S0ren Kierke
gaard (1813-1855), whose pseudonymous books have the appearance of a ter
rain strewn with incomplete monuments. One of his volumes of metafictional
philosophy, published in 1844, supposedly penned by Johannes Climacus, is
entitled Philosophical Fragments, Or a Fragment (Smule) of Philosophy, with
Kierkegaard credited as editor (Smuler, Kierkegaard, 1946). Since such works
are attempts to discuss the unspeakable, a falling short is bound to occur, and
this is brought home to the reader by the strange forms of the text and the im
plication that their author is fictive. Thus, Johannes Climacus was a seventh-
century monk in the Sinai.
The whole can only be a fragment that invites the reader’s completion by
means of non-discursive activity, a twisting and turning of the soul. The prob
ing of faith in the philosophictional text is necessarily fragmentary.
Kierkegaard’s greatest work, published only two years later, in 1846, also
assigned to the invented Johannes Climacus, is the towering Final Unscientific
Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, again with Kierkegaard listed as
editor (Efterskrift, Kierkegaard, 1946). That the work is labeled “final” attests
to its being the last brave effort to speak of what cannot be spoken. That it is la
beled “unscientific” (uvidenskabelig) means, in nineteenth-century terms, that
it does not pretend to scholarly discipline in presenting knowledge. That it is
offered as a “postscript” to fragments signals that it is a ruin added to ruins. In
this case, the postscript is four times the length of its predecessor.
The character of the massive book is announced in its subtitle: A Mimic-
Passionate-Dialectical Composition: An Existential Contribution. To explicate
this fully requires about 500 pages. Kierkegaard goes back over the ground of
the Philosophical Fragments in bk. 2, pt. 2, ch. 4.
While the “final” book appears to conclude with a statement addressed to
the reader by its purported author, signing himself off, it is immediately fol
lowed by yet another postscript, “A First and Last Declaration,” confessing that
the real author of the work is S. Kierkegaard, who also acknowledges credit for
other pseudonymous volumes. Yet, in these works (from Danish), “not a single
word is my own,” for what they say springs from the life-view of the supposed
author. Kierkegaard, the real author, has
no opinion about them, except as a third party, no knowledge of their

meaning, except as a reader, not the least private relation to them, . . .
{Efterskrift, Kierkegaard, 1946, p. 701)
The author is outside the work, sitting in the seat of the reader. The books
have their peculiar life, removed from the life of any reader, including Kierke
gaard. Each book has a concreteness of life that springs from the individual ex
istence of each of the putative authors. Each is a puzzle for the soul. With the
most mind-boggling authorial confession in the literature of philosophy, so
concludes the greatest work written in the Danish language.
Philosophers of the ineffable find in ruins an evocative force for present
ing what cannot be formulated in straightforward fashion. I have to watch my
words here. The more we say about the ineffable, the less we have said about
it. The piece is broken off, leaving the reader standing at its edge, teetering in
silence before an abyss, trembling with the possibility of making a leap beyond
the text. The text invites abandonment in favor of the whole that it cannot pos
sibly be but to which it indirectly points. Are all books ruins? Is only life cap
able of completeness? I will answer those questions with an unqualified maybe.
The works of Buber (1878-1965), such as his short and memorable Zwei-
sprache (Dialogue, 1929), rely on parable, reminiscence, incident, and dream

to evoke what cannot be said. The result is a collection of strange pieces that
scarcely fit together. If we could fully grasp any one of the pieces, then a
wholeness might suddenly arise in our soul. Analysis directed to telling what
that wholeness is cannot succeed. Reason fails the truth here. Yet Buber does
not refuse to speak. He gives testimony and affirmation by means of words of
what lies beyond words. He speaks of silent communication.
In Dialogue, Buber relates an incident, occurring in Easter 1914, when a
group of humanitarian leaders discussed in frank terms what might be done to
save Europe from calamity. The discussion turned to Jews, Jesus, and love
(Buber, 1962, pp. 177-178). Buber was led to say to a devout Christian that the
Jews knew Jesus from within (from German), “In a way that to you remains
closed off.”
“He stood up,” relates Buber, “and I stood up; we looked each other in the
very heart (ins Herzen) of the eyes.” Did they then grimace, exchange insults,
or come to blows?—you ask.
Buber reports, “‘It has subsided,’ he said, and, in front of everyone, we
gave each other the kiss of brotherliness.”
What happened in this incident? The Jew and the Christian had been try
ing to work out humanitarian assistance to people. That is part of the so-called
Judeo-Christian tradition. Words had been spoken that had struck each in his
soul. The Jew told the Christian that Jesus, the Christian’s Christ, could never
be known as intimately by Christians as by Jews. Jesus, what a thing to say!
Jews deny the Christ; Christians acknowledge Him as their Savior. This
Jew appears to be depriving this Christian of his Savior. Yet Buber spoke to af
firm, not deny, Jewish access to Jesus. Jesus is Buber’s fellow Jew, something
which Christians cannot say of themselves, something which they ought not to
deny concerning Jews.
The preceding paragraph is the reasoning that might be articulated in
debate. But what happened was a stark assertion of commitment by Buber that
brought both men to their feet, not to their reason. They stood face-to-face,
each regarding the other as an opponent, obstacle, outsider, Other. But what re
ally happened? They looked one another in the eye. How deeply? Into the heart
of their eyes. What did they see therein? They saw each other.
And then? It was over, and they embraced. What was over, the disagree
ment? No, for neither gave up the commitment that starkly differs from the oth
er’s commitment. On the issue at stake, they remained disagreed, dissenting,
different. At heart, one was still a Jew, the other a Christian. Did they over
come their hostile feelings out of good manners or recognition of the formal
setting in which they were participants? No, for something occurred internally
and between the two men that led to an act of fellowship.
In a sparse paragraph, Buber explains what occurred:
The discussion of the situation between Jews and Christians had been
transformed into a bond between Christian and Jew; in this transforma
tion, the dialogical had been fulfilled. Opinions had faded; the factual (das
Faktische) had come to life. (Buber, 1962, p. 178)
What was the bond between Christian and Jew, these two concrete indi
viduals? How could dialogue occur in the moment of their silence? If the opin
ions and arguments had been left behind, what does the coming to fruition of
“the factual,” or “the factive,” mean? Has the existential overcome the concep
tual? What is the fact, the reality, of brotherhood between this Jew and this
Christian? Have they reached the intersubjectivity beyond their subjectivity?
Buber’s two sentences of explanation employ words to make sense of
what is unwordable. It sounds interesting and plausible, but it is too abstract.
We want to know exactly how the alleged transformation took place. What did
each see in the heart of the other’s eyes? Show us! What happens in our heart
when we see another at heart? How well can we see the fullness of the other, if
we do not wear our heart in our eyes?
The incident speaks louder than its explanation. What happened cannot be
fully described or adequately explained. But it is the factive, not the fictive. If
we had been seated at the table and had witnessed the incident, we would only
be outsiders to it, observers, not participants. We could describe the events,
much as does Buber fifteen years later, but in no wise could we describe what
each saw in the other’s eyes or what happened to them at that moment.
The chapter of Buber’s book is a ruin which witnesses to the factual/
factive that occurs between individuals—dialogue—yet is left incompletely
rendered by discourse. Stimulated by several of these ruins that Buber offers,
we are reminded of similar moments in our life. This may assist us to open our
hearts and receive one another in that silent communication which is together-
being. Opening our minds is not enough.
In struggling with this incident, I have learned from my colleague Jeanine
Czubaroff, the communications scholar, in our joint teaching of Buber (cf Czu-
baroff, 2000, p. 179).
Now, I will tell you a story about Buber and me. In 1981, during a peace
mission to Israel and the territories it occupies, I visited the Buber Room at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Buber, a Zionist, had moved from Europe to
Palestine in 1938 and became a leading figure at the University.
Since I was passionately interested in Buber’s insights, I wanted to see the
desk and setting where he worked. I stared at these things, as if they could turn
toward me and tell me with kindness everything that I had failed to understand.
But they remained mere objects. Books and furniture. Empty things. And I felt
empty. I-and-them, not I-and-thou.
A young student-guide noticed me and approached deferentially. He must
have seen puzzlement or loss in my eyes, for he asked, in English, “Can I help
you, sir, by explaining anything? This is where one of our greatest scholars
worked. His name was Martin Buber.”
“I know,” I replied, “for I am a student of Buber.”
“Oh, you were a student of Buber! Then you should be the one to tell me
the answers to so many questions I have about his work!”
I had created a misunderstanding. Something in the English language had
deserted me and disserved us. Words deceive. I had meant to be deferential,
placing myself in the same category as the student, that is, as subservient to the
departed master. But the student mistook me to be myself a master, hence su
perior to him, because I had supposedly studied with the great master. I ap
peared to have an advantage, because the master must have imparted his wis
dom to me. If I had been a good student, I would now be a master.
Yet this Israeli student must have loved his studies of Buber’s works, for
here he was serving as a guide to these remains. Buber meant much to him.
The two of them were somehow present to each other almost daily.
I could have disabused the student by explaining that I had used language
in a misleading way, that I was too young to have been Buber’s student, or that
this was the first time I had been in Israel. All of these were the facts to be pre
sented politely as one stranger to another.
Or I could have confessed that I understood nothing of Buber, that it all
remained a mystery to me, that I had not gotten from Buber’s texts whatever
they had to them, that as a scholar I was a failure, that as a human being I was
lost. All of these were the harsh truths that one searcher for the truth could have
presented to another searcher. Instead, I . . . .
But let us get back to philosophy as ruin. Confucius (Master K’ung, 551
BCE-479 BCE) comes to us in pieces. In the United States, sage utterances as
sociated with Confucius support the impression of insight detached from any
systematic position. A quick reading of the Sayings, the Analects (Lun Yu) con
firms this popular Western view of Confucius as formulator of wise, or, at
least, clever, pronouncements.
Yet the sayings and stories were meant by Confucius as pedagogical de
vices, demanding explication in terms of a carefully thought-out moral view.
The fragment is the stimulating start for discussion, not the scintillating ending
of it. The pieces that are so detached are capable of being attached by the stud
ent who works out a Confucian ethics as comprehensive guide to the whole of
life. The exercise of building the whole to the ruin builds character and under
standing. For generations, the Confucian sayings were the test questions for as
pirants to the Chinese civil service.
The method of working on the pieces is supportive of the cultural fabric
(win), since it involves a scholarly reverence for ancient literature with a reani
mation in the life of the student. Confucius explains (from Chinese),
I offer one angle, but the student must get the other three. (Confucius, no
date, 7:8, p. 139)
The subject intended may be a square, a plot of land, or a who-knows-what.

Confucius does not spell it out. But that is the point of his student-centered
teaching. The whole that the fragment strengthens is the moral force or virtue
(te) of the person, better, of persons, consequently of the society, and, finally,
of the world.
Confucius was a wanderer in search of a sage-ruler who could place the
society on the right path (tao) in which the goodness and humanity (jen) of per
sons would flourish. The world that Confucius found, built by war-lords, was
only a ruin of what it should have been. The rulers and the populace needed in
struction in virtue. Confucius contributes the materials and method of instruc
tion whereby individuals may transform themselves. By overcoming the frag
mentariness of life, they will come to live in harmony in their person, family,
society, and world.
The greatest ruin-crunching machine in philosophical thinking is the dia
lectical method which serves Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx in
the redemptive unification of conflicting ruins. Marching across a field of ru
ins, dialectical thought erects greater unities that complete them. Only because
of ruin—partialness and incompleteness—can we advance. If we are to build
intellectually on what is intact, we must first show it to be a ruin in disguise.
While the dialectical method finds the shortcoming of every position, at
the same time it rescues the strong part to be saved. The dialectical takes a-part.
It lifts to a higher level (Ger.: aufheben). A parade to the music of unity which
eventually will include all things. The dialectical stops at nothing. Everything
fuels it. All belongs to the whole. Of this most powerful of philosophic meth
ods, we must be most cautious, for the method mirrors the deepest longing of
our being, and, once let loose, it may run us over.
In addition to such special texts, thinkers, and methods, as I have dis
cussed above, philosophy as an intellectual enterprise thrives upon fragmentali-
ty. Unlike science, philosophy is a discipline that lives off its past as a set of ru
ins. In science, the past is a tale of errors compared to what we know, while
science, by definition, is the best state of what we know. No need to read Lu
cretius, if you are an atomic scientist.
The philosopher views the past of the discipline as openings for present
labors, not as primitive efforts, filled by errors, that have been overcome. The
philosophic past is peculiarly present. Plato and Aristotle are more than begin
ners of lines of thought of which we are the masters. They are the masters of
lines of thought in which we may be the mere beginners. This is what I think
each time I open their books.
The history of philosophy is never exhausted. It can be dealt with repeat-
edly without being definitively settled. Errors of reasoning are detected, but
these are usually not crucial. What counts is a method, a principle, a set of dis
tinctions, or a body of insights.
The history of philosophy does make efforts to integrate philosophers as
contributors to the advance of philosophy, but several ways exist for conceiv
ing of the history of progress in philosophy. We can go back to the past and
redo its history in the light of something we now find valuable, say, for the
sake of argument, ruins. What has been discarded as insignificant we can re
claim as insightful. In philosophy, the historical cannot be footnotes or prelimi
nary chapters to the present.
Philosophy is an art of living with ruins. It starts over and moves on from
the pieces of previous efforts. Philosophy does not build cumulatively. It re
builds upon what it tears down. Philosophic practice generally takes one of two
reliable forms: (1) we look at thought now dominant to tear it apart, or (2) we
look to features of past thought to build afresh upon them.
The challenge to every philosopher is to respond to philosophy’s past in
terms of present concerns, questions, and insights. The past, in turn, responds
to these. Philosophy is dialogue of minds over centuries. In this way, we dis
cover common problems that are not limited or eliminated by time. Philosophy
makes its progress by reactivating, not overcoming, its past. This discipline ris
es up from its history by acknowledging its perennial presence. Philosophy is
similar to literature and the other arts in possessing a past that is not dispensed
with or regarded solely as the preliminaries of what we possess in full value.
The polemical side of philosophy is fueled by ruins. Truth-seekers are
error-hunters. We encourage philosophers to respect scholarship and treat the
past fairly. Go back to the sources to see for yourself just what Aristotle is do
ing, and then see what Hegel does about that. Next, you may make whole the
context for the fragment in each. Philosophers rediscover each other and recon
struct predecessors.
Philosophers also turn to the past to flesh out the topic upon which we be
gin reflection. The literature in the field for the scientist is the currently accept
ed work. For the philosopher, the literature in the field is all the treatments of
the topic across the history of the discipline, in addition to the current work.
The pieces are fitted into the whole of our theory. No matter what our theory,
useful fragments fit it, while other fragments, equally useful, cannot fit it, but
serve as foil. Philosophers can always find an insufficiently digested argument
from the past to reurgitate.
Philosophers, then, are at home among the ruins. Their profession—my
profession—keeps ruins alive. And philosophers are generally aware that their
fate is to become no more than a string of ruins that others might pick over.
Philosophy, when it reflects upon itself, and it cannot be philosophy without so
doing, leads to musing upon the nature of ruins. “What is the meaning of ruin
to being human?”, is a question we are obliged to ask. (Let us answer it at

length in the final chapter [Nineteen], “Meditations.”)
When we push our minds to the limits of their intellectual powers, as is
required by the philosopher’s vow, we discover, alas, their limits. Truth ever
lies outside. Knowledge always stops at the unknown. Well, what do you
know! Aware that we have had opportunities, a chance to speak out in the
darkness, and that little time is left, just a moment or two, we recognize that
our contribution has been fragmentary. No one really listened, no one learned
anything. That is the incentive for trying again.
The teaching of philosophy is replete with that kind of ruin prevalent in
literature and in most of the other academic disciplines: the excerpt. For text
books and anthologies, not all philosophical writings are equal. Some are more
excerptable than others. Some are not as acceptable in shortened form.
The Treatise and two Enquiries of David Hume (1711-1776) have been
tackled by generations of beginning students in large chunks reprinted in the
book of readings. Assignment of the full texts is rare, given their length and
their demand for re-reading. I wonder whether the teachers have been reading
the full texts. Hume is invariably known through excerpts.
Yet Hume was among the most cautious philosophers in the composition,
styling, and revision of his texts. He wrote to engage the reader in the complex
ity of the intellectual issues, in which we were to experience anticipation, re
flection, surprise, compromise, balance, pause, concealment, and discovery.
Hume takes the whole of a text to work upon his reader, and also upon himself,
for he did not always know where he was heading or where he had arrived.
Philosophy for Hume is a form of liberalizing letters, a growth in under
standing by a delicate conduct of writing out thinking. But we cannot get the
whole in an excerpt. Hence, Hume appears too damn circumspect in
expression—that Humebug!—instead of being a master in the art of philoso
phizing. This is because he is a master in the art of philosophizing by writing.
Oddly enough, Hume’s Treatise (1739), which he repudiated, was rewrit
ten by him as the two Enquiries (1748, 1751), and he also prepared excerpts of
his work in the form of Essays (1741-1742), though these are rarely included
in the book of readings. Hume fed off his own works and sought to recompose
their unity. We should Humeor his way of working.
The Ethics (1677) of Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) is difficult to ex
cerpt, so tightly bound is the geometrical reasoning of this masterpiece. We
need the whole work to grasp what is going on at any point. Hence, Spinoza is
left out of the undergraduate’s circle of philosophic acquaintances, even in an
introductory course in ethics.
But Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is easy to excerpt, since his writings are
loose in organization and stuffed with a variety of content. Taking up scissors
to rescue a unity from his rambling Advancement (1605) or its augmented Latin
version, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), is a useful and tasteful

way of slicing the Bacon.
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), one of the greatest of American phi
losophers, will find his way into general anthologies in philosophy for Ameri
can college students, for Peirce left short pieces in the form of papers, projects,
and notes, never having completed a book. Peirce did not succeed in an acade
mic career and was near starvation, but he is the patron saint of a Peircevering
academic industry that edits, reprints, and explicates his fragments.
Some philosophic authors make easy the task of selecting from their
works, since they organize their writing in manageable sections. To move a
few of Descartes’s Meditations (1641) or parts of his Discourse (1637) right
into the anthology without interior cuts is appealing.
Several writers in the English language, including John Locke, George
Berkeley, John Stuart Mill, William James, John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell
(Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950), are likely to be represented by long selec
tions in our philosophic volume of excerpts. This is due to their readability as
composers of non-technical writing which engages the reader in its flow.
Some authors are anthologized only in brief pieces because of their com
plex thinking, unusual forms of organization, and inadvertent awkwardness
when translated. Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, whose presence in intro
ductory volume and topical anthology is mandatory, are judiciously curtailed in
length. Two pages of Aquinas proving God’s existence suffices.
Which philosopher’s texts are most likely to be anthologized intact? Plato
(ca. 429 BCE-347 BCE). His Socratic dialogues are just the right length. And
because of the down-to-earth questioning, which is the method of Socrates (ca.
470 BCE-399 BCE), students are able to follow most of the text, although they
can be frustrated by the inconclusiveness of several of the works. Those dia
logues that are not primarily representations of Socrates in intellectual action,
but which we may regard more as the Platonic dialogues, are rarely included or
excerpted. The Plato to which the student is exposed is the Euthyphro or Meno,
not the Timaeus or Laws. Hence, for the beginner, Plato remains in the shadow
of Socrates.
The textbook editor who tries to be neutral and equitable in selecting texts
is led to decisions about inclusion and excerpting related to problems of length
and difficulty. Those decisions shape the identity of philosophers in the minds
of students and even of teachers. All editing is value-laden. The measure of a
working philosopher’s attitude to the ruins of the discipline is likely to be the
anthology that this philosopher regularly requires as teacher. We learn from
what we teach.
Every teacher of philosophy regards a textbook as the ruin of what it
should be, that changing whole which has taken up residence in the back/book
room of the teacher’s mind. Scratch a philosopher, and a book of readings will
tumble out. I followed this rule-of-thumb as the editor of philosophy textbooks

for Jones and Bartlett Publishers in the 1990s.
Fashions flourish in the contents of textbooks. The Existentialists now are
in. The Scholastics are out. Textbooks are frequently revised. This disarms the
used-book market for the previous edition and gives a fresh marketing impetus.
The revision is a juggling of the ruins. Entirely new textbooks come out as al
ternatives to those in the field. My set of ruins is better than yours! What helps
differentiate the books of readings is their format and introductory material.
Philosophy, a discipline that learns to live with the originality of its past,
turns to teach itself by means of ruins. Philosophy is an art of illuminating its
discursive failures. Its words are the ruins of its efforts. Socrates practiced phil
osophic dialogue as the midwifery meant to bring the truth to term. But to tell
the truth, for a change, to speak is to falsify. Language interjects the conceptual
between the real and the soul. The word . . . the world: something is lost bet
ween them. The most for which philosophical writing can hope is a strategic
misleading of mind to the point where the soul breaks through conceptualiza
tion like a bird that frees itself from a patched-together net and by a flight of
beating wings pounces upon the truth in mid-air. Through the descending dark
ness of the world, at any moment we might see a glint.
Throwing Light on the Subject
Glint
is the
glance
of light
that alights
on things
glimpsed by the
unexpectant eye:
the lash, at last,
of Being
that slashes the
glare
of mind’s vision,
joining
in a flash
unmined
world
and
whirled
I
Philosophy is usually recovery, not discovery, of the truth, which then ob
liges us to recover from the experience. The truth hits the philosopher like an
archaeological find (PI. 61). Philosophy is an incurable passion for wholeness,
PI. 61. Archaeological Discovery, Stavanger, Norway, 1968
but it drags about its nets of reason whose interstices permit Being to flee. All
that we pull up is the network of propositions that we fling out. How the ex
periential reaches the real is uncertain, though if anything is certain, it is that
we sometimes come to grasp what is. This is mystical. I assert a mystical union
of experience with Being. This is not as strange as it sounds, for Being is ex
periential, and we are experiencing beings. Sometimes the truth arrives, despite
philosophy. Doesn’t that sound sound?
The Greek word for truth, aletheia, which Heidegger has amply celebrat
ed, signifies disclosure, the breaking down of closures. The truth opens up to
us, and thereby it opens us up. Searching for the truth can be ticklish business
It can tickle us like a feather (Egypt.: ma'at). The truth revels as it reveals. An
altogether smashing experience.
Here Comes the Truth!
The truth is
A breaking open,
A coming out,
A looming up,
The falling away of concealment,
The dissolution of surface,
The running outward of innerment.
The truth breaks in upon us.
It loosens the grip of the world.
Smashing thought aside,
It frightens the wits out of us with a word.
The truth breaks out in a bright grin,
While tripping us up,
Ruining our best shelter,
Scattering our mistakes helter-skelter.
The truth just kicks its way right in.
The truth gives us a beating,
And nothing can beat the truth.
It leaves us cut and bleeding.
And ain’t that the truth!
I value a philosophical treatment that pushes on to the furthest limit that

philosophy can treat, even beyond that limit. Philosophy forces the issue by
putting all its pressure of thought upon the truth, until the truth dissolves and
flees, bares its teeth and fights, or welcomes us with a benign smile. Philoso
phy is the exaggeration of thought in pursuit of truth. The philosophic attitude
is a willingness to let an argument or an inquiry lead you away from where you
are going, an arguous task. The philosopher’s imperative: Don’t leave a lot of
unasked questions in your thinking! Philosophy teaches us to challenge what
we have taken for granted but also what we have taken for rejected.
Who has the right to be a philosopher? The irrevocable license to phi-
osophize is the human mind. But the difference between an idea that is far-
reaching and one that is far-fetched may depend on which side of the bed the
philosopher got up. To reword William Shakespeare (1598),
For there was never yet philosopher

That could endure the [truthjache patiently! (cf Much Ado About Nothing,
Shakespeare, 1997, Act. 5, sc. 1, p. 724)
The Philosopher’s Stone is a ruin that transmogrifies thought, usually into

fool’s gold. The professional philosopher has a special mission in the world,
exemplified by this treatise, of arguing as if a fool. Of a philosophical charac
ter, Edward Bulwer-Lytton judges, “He would have been an active friend, a
useful citizen,—in short, an excellent man, if he had not taken into his head to
be a philosopher’’ (Bulwer-Lytton, no date, p. 247).
Though a pest, a gadfly, a torpedo fish, a nudge (Yid.), the philosopher
must return to the world to solve, salve, savvy, savor, and save it. That requires
the wisdom of tikkun olam (Heb.: “repairing the world’’). Philosophy should be
a non-prophet organization in the public interest.
Though philosophy plods/plops along prosaically, it longs to take wing as
poetry. Here, at the drop of a hatchet, is a flay on words:
Philosophical Surgery
The axe
of asking
cleaves
the received
to the narrowest bone.
A clean-cutting
question
clings to the marrow
of the bloody unknown.
A gentler, yet sadder, way of looking at things:
The Philosopher’s Window
We look with inward eyes

Upon the truth we truly need,
While outwardly we gaze at life,
Whose lies we daily lead.
Now for the main event, in which we fight truth and nail:
In the Ring
The Truth punched me in the mouth,

Took my breath away,
Almost floored me with a wicked uppercut.
I fight back blindly, bleeding,
Butting, jabbing, clinching, tangling on the ropes,
Eye cut lips split ribs cracked teeth knocked out.
They try to pull us apart:
“Keep Truth away from him!”
“Truth will murder da bum!”
I wave them off,

Come off the ropes,
Hold my own,
Roll with the punches,
Feint and duck;
Fancy footwork keeps me on my feet.
“C’mon ya bastard!”,
I shout, “I’ll learn ya
A thing or two!
I’ll knock the living daylights out of ya,
You washed-up two-bit bush-league punch-drunk has-been
Son-of-a-bitch!”
In the final round,

Truth lets down its guard,
Bewildered by my bob and weave.
Now for one helluva lollapalooza knockout punch,
“Heavyweight Champeeeeen of the World!”
Will sound in my broken head,
As I give such a swing from somewhere near the floor . . . ,
But the bell rings,
And I lose the match on points.
I try to write philosophy like a poet or novelist, for a lyricism and novelty
of experience may be brought to mind by the acts of language. Not to simply
reason with the reader, since you are experienced in fighting reason with rea
son, but to bring to you the decisive experience, despite the divisive defenses
of reason, and to so oblige your reason to listen with a new heart. Philoso
phy is not an exact science but an exacting art of provocation, evocation, and
invitation. Occasionally, philosophy is a trifling affectation, but it becomes a
passionate affection when love (Gr.: philo) is poured into it.
Reason only reasons, and that is only reasonable. But experience knows
something too, without reason, and sometimes without being reasonable. Ex
perience alone does not suffice to being human, for it would be an endlessly
enriched but inchoate stream of happening. Reflection is demanded to differen
tiate the currents and deliberate upon the steps to be taken. Yet reason alone
does not suffice to understand anything of significance, other than mathemat
ics. The fatal error of much Anglo-American modern philosophy of the pas
sionless Analytic School is to insist that reason only reason upon reason.
“Don’t bother me about the world!’’, objected one of my philosophy teachers.
Such an exercise of reason loses its anchor in the real. Reason’s treason is to
abandon life for itself alone. Pure reason is poor reason, self-referentially
smug, instead of worldly wise.
I ask that reason be passionately inspired by life. Our life as human be
ings. Human thinking is dialogue, even when in monologue. What do you think
of that? Better, what do we think of that? Intersubjectivity requires that our
thinking be linking. In other words, as I write, my thinking presupposes your
mind. Do you mind that?
The purpose of my writing is to sentence you to experience. To make you
see with the mind’s involuntary eye, to induce response from the heart hidden
behind seven iron bands, above all, to have your reason face your reality as if
for the first time, and hence to be seized by the truth. May the truth give you a
good shaking up! This work aims to make a ruin of you.
As reader, you have been a visitor in the theorizing. With philosophy, you
have entered the ruin. Now let us try to get our terms straight.
Fifteen
THE TERMINOLOGY OF RUIN
Cartoon by Handelsman from P u n ch (3 February 1982), p. 203, reprinted

by permission of PUNCH Cartoon Library © Punch, Ltd.
We must come to terms with the terminology of the aesthetics of ruins. Terms
are the boundary stones (Lat.: t e r m i n i ) of discourse. As we make our way
across a field, we kick some over, miss others that are overgrown, and set down
new ones of our choice. “Define your terms!” was the fighting cry in my stud
ent days in the 1950s at the University of Chicago. Philosophy ministers to the
terminological disease that comes to afflict any field of discourse.
Aesthetically speaking, a ruin is the irreparable remains of a human con
struction that, by a destructive act or process, no longer dwells in the unity of
the original, but may have new unities that we can enjoy. By reference to the
absent original, assuming it was a work of value, “ruin” is a term of regret and
loss. It stands in the negative category of words, in contrast to positive terms,
like “artwork,” that aesthetic discourse honors. Assigned to that entity whose
unity has been destroyed, “ruin” apparently could not be valuable in aesthetics.
When we reflect that the ruin is all that remains of something valued, we
do accord it some aesthetic weight. It is valuable as the remnant of the original.
It keeps the absent present. The original may become so mingled in mind with
the remnant that we are willing to treat the ruin as the presence of the original,
not only a reminder or part of it. In such cases, we regard the ruin as a cultural
treasure. Ambivalence in the term, which comes from considerations outside of
aesthetics, speaks of loss and presence, regret and pride, antipathy and value.
The Greek words for ruin, olethros and ereipion, designate torn down,
fallen, wreck, destruction, death. Similarly, the Latin ruina, from which we de
rive the English “ruin” and its cousins in the Germanic and Romance languag
es, signifies something fallen, often said of walls, and, by extension, of disaster
generally. Though the Oxford English Dictionary (1989, pp. 225-227) traces
the rich linguistic history of “ruin” and related words in their many senses of
destruction, the OED does not pay sufficient attention to the aesthetic values of
the terms.
Let me sound out the flavor of “ruin” in the English language. To ruin
something is to irretrievably destroy it, to spoil it by breaking it down. To ruin
an event is to lead it to disaster. Ruined projects are demolished. Ruined hopes
disintegrate. The road to ruin is a practice that heads toward defeat. To have ru
ined your chances is to bring about your sure failure. Impending ruin: destruc
tion ahead!
Someone who is a ruin has had a downfall. “I am ruined!”: rendered pen
niless. A ruined fortune has been squandered. A ruined personality is degener
ate. Ruined for life: no salvation. An institution in ruins is finished. A social
practice that comes to ruin is discredited. A ruined civilization? Fallen. Kaput!
Ruined goods are a bad bargain. A ruined business: bankrupt. A ruined
crop: inedible. A ruined manuscript? Ineditable. A ruined story: incredible.
To ruin the cake is to fail at getting your just desserts. To ruin the dinner
is to spoil it. To ruin your appetite is to have no stomach left for dinner. To ruin
your health is to endanger your life. To ruin your lungs is to make your life go
up in smoking.
To ruin a machine is to wreck it. Something gone to ruin has been so ne
glected as to lose its value. A ruined natural resource is consumed. To ruin a re
lationship is to really louse it up. A ruined structure has collapsed. A theory in
ruins isn’t worth our thought. A theory of ruins is another matter!
Ruined by drink = an alcoholic. Mothers’ Ruin = gin. Blue ruin = bad gin.
Red ruin = anarchy. A ruined beauty is distasteful. A ruined reputation is irre
deemable. A ruined marriage is headed for divorce. A ruined woman is irrevo
cably dishonored. Ruined maid: the daydream of every Victorian gentleman.
The rise and ruin of a movement or organization is the history of its de
velopment and fall. Whoever ruins a surprise is a killjoy. To spread ruin is to
sow destruction. To go to rack and ruin, wrack and ruin, or wreck and ruin is to
The Terminology o f Ruin 2 87
be thoroughly racked, whacked, and wrecked. Ruined land is unfit for cultiva
tion. A ruined Earth is a nightmare. An utter ruin is unutterably destroyed.
“Ruin” reeks/wreaks of negativism. Everything bad may be described as a
ruin. Ruination is therefore the enemy of human beings. We hope, build, strive
for wholeness. What we do and what we would be is ruined by what is and by
who we are. Ruin is no mere injury or reparable damage, not minor error or
temporary setback. Ruin is not something we can overcome. It overcomes us.
We cannot mend the ruined. We cannot make amends for what we ruin. Unit
ing all these usages of “ruin” is the vector of falling down. Having fallen and
been broken, the ruin cannot rise again, not though “All the King’s horses and
all the King’s men” give it a try. Nothing creative or pleasant in all this ruining.
Yet the negative “ruin” has been seized upon for heroic posturing. The
image is of surviving, working, loving, and vanquishing, while surrounded by
life’s disappointments and disasters. Heroes accomplish the feat of overcoming
defeat. “Ruin” is a stylish and evocative pose in titles of works that are not
about ruins. Thus, Thoughts Among the Ruins by George Lichtheim (1986).
Love Among the Ruins, a title used by more than a dozen authors, including Ro
bert Browning (poem, 1855), Evelyn Waugh (novel, 1953), and Elmer Rice
(play, 1963). Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy (1971). Ruin the Sacred
Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present by Harold Bloom
(1989). The University in Ruins by Bill Readings (1997). “Legislating Amid the
Ruins,” editorial in the Washington Post (20 December 1995).
Look for these titles in the near future: Against the Ruins, Beyond the Ru
ins, A Superabundance of Ruins, Everything in Ruins, My Life in Ruins, Ruins
Ruined, Ruins Ahead!, Damn the Ruins!, Enough of Ruins!, Ruins Schmuins!
“Ruin” in the eighteenth century referred to the remains of monumental
edifices of bygone civilizations. Ruins, then, might impart historical and moral
lessons, though not necessarily aesthetic gratifications. But, with time, “ruins”
as monuments of lost civilizations did become aesthetically valued. The great
Encyclopedic, or Systematic Dictionary, restricts the term (from French):
The term “ruin” is only spoken of in the case of palaces, sumptuous

tombs, or public monuments. “Ruin” would not at all be used in speaking
of a private dwelling of peasants or bourgeois; in such a case, we would
say “ruined buildings.” (Encyclopedic, 1775, p. 405)
I take a democratic view. Wrecked homes may have great aesthetic value,
while the remains of great edifices may retain little aesthetic interest. Aesthetic
value is found in what the ruin is, not what the original was.
Does the negative meaning of ruin make us wary of enjoying the rem
nants of things that are called ruins? In the aesthetic sense, ruin is something
positive, for it is existent. It has not been destroyed, though it is the product of
destruction. It is not devoid of unity, though in relation to the original it is frag

mentary. It has been refreshingly found, not irretrievably lost.
In a world of destruction, the ruin is a consolation. It is what destruction
leaves behind that we may yet value. To appreciate and make respectable this
aesthetic sense of ruin, we must redirect the term away from reference to the
original destroyed to the new unity that originates. The ruin is an open door to
experience, not a missing door. The aesthetics of ruins may need a fresh word
to refer to the objects of this kind of experience that does not carry the burden
of negative terminology. The word “ruin” might ruin the pleasure.
Yet that pleasure arises in a measure against expectations, and valuable
incongruity resides in the actuality contrasted to its pristine state. The term
“ruin” helps cloak the object in attitudes that we can then enjoy casting off. Not
to call a ruin a ruin might ruin some of the pleasure. To mask it as something
that did not arise from destructive activity puts us on a different, and false, foot
ing, for we would then investigate it with the presumption of organized purpose
and well-crafted design. The ruin is not a work of art in its own right. It is the
unintended gift of destruction.
I ask that we use “ruin” as an aesthetic term in reference to a unity worthy
of enjoyment though bom of destructive activity. What matters is what it is, not
what it is not. The min is the presence of the remnants reunified. What is abs
ent, the original, is not essential to the min but has contributed to its presence.
The min is not a work of art, though its original may have been one, yet the
min may work aesthetically much like art.
Ruin-poetry has invested our basic term with positive value that moves
beyond the moralizing attitude to picturesque, dramatic, symbolic, and lyrical
expressions. We easily use “min” as a poetic word. Ruins attract rhyme/rime.
“Ruin” alliterates with “rune,” “room,” “me in.” In English and German, it
combines effectively with many another word. (You will find several instances
in the Bibliographical Essay, below.) In English and the Romance languages,
“min” shares letters with “reunite,” “reunion,” and “ruminate.” (See min words
under Section 35, “Ruinitis,” in Chapter Eighteen, “Fragments of a Chapter on
Ruin,” below.)
The damaged work is the original that has suffered destmctive activity yet
retains its unity. It is still itself. It has not become reunified as something else.
It is not a new aesthetic experience, but its injured state diminishes its aesthetic
strength. The damaged work is regrettable and calls for repair.
Repair is possible because the damage is not permanent loss. We know
how the missing piece fits, as with the fingertips of the statue of Puck that stood
on the grounds of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, which suffered
damage during construction of new facilities in 1980. The repaired statue now
greets visitors in the Library’s lobby, at the entrance to the theater:
The Terminology o f Ruin 289
What fools these mortals be! (A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Shakespeare,

1997, Act 3, sc. 2, p. 269).
If we do not know what is missing from a structure, though it was a major

part, and we cannot accurately replace it, then we have moved beyond damage
to ruin. The original, strictly speaking, is gone. In its place is another work with
most of its original parts but missing something essential.
To prevent, halt, and repair damage to works of art is proper. The aesthet
ic sense demands this. So does moral obligation. A damaged work suffers aes
thetically. Yet a ruined work, oddly enough, might profit aesthetically. If dam
age is deliberately inflicted, we react with horror. A crime against aesthetics
has been committed, an assault upon our cultural heritage.
When Michelangelo’s “Pieta” (1498) was attacked with a sledgehammer
by Laszlo Toth on 21 May 1972, the act was universally regarded with repug
nance as a monstrous crime, although the deed has been astutely discussed as a
symbolic act of iconoclasm that echoes the words of D. H. Lawrence (cf Teu-
nissen and Hinz, 1974, pp. 43-50).
No question arose of allowing the damage to remain or of presenting the
“PietY’ as a ruin. It was lovingly restored. It has recovered from its injuries.
The eye does not detect any ravages, although the eye is now kept at a safe dis
tance from the statue in a protected chapel of St. Peter’s in the Vatican. We are
led to believe that the work miraculously is itself again.
In 1983, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York offered a more re
spectable ruining of the “Pieta” in its gift shops and sales catalogues, in con
junction with an exhibition of art from the Vatican: a replica of the Madonna’s
head extracted from the body and unrelated to her cradling of the Son. The
“Piet&,” however, was not a work on exhibit. The brochure makes this pitch:
NEVER BEFORE—For the first time in history—a cast marble

sculpture of the Head of the Virgin from Michelangelo’s Pieta. For five
centuries this masterpiece has been one of the chief artistic glories of
Saint Peter’s. It has been copied countless times in every size and materi
al, but never with total success.
Now for the first time, a detail of the Pieta, the Head of the Virgin,
has been re-created in cast marble with line-by-line and millimeter-by
millimeter accuracy—exactly as Michelangelo carved it.. . . $150.00.
The Museum’s blurb makes the copy of the excerpted piece a new work
of art by assigning it the title, “Head of the Virgin.” While centuries of copying
the master’s work have failed, the history-making event at the Met offers more
than a copy: a detail “re-created” with “accuracy,” “exactly as Michelangelo
carved it.” Would smashing these heads constitute a crime against aesthetics?
Just as damaging artworks is improper, so, too, is ruining them or letting

them fall into ruin. But the world, as you may have noticed, is a destructive
place. Everything becomes damaged sooner or later, and everything is subject
to ruination. To the violent practice of vandals, terrorists, and bombardiers,
must be added the destructive activity of floods, fires, and earthquakes.
The subtler forms of destruction, human and natural, might well deserve
most blame for damaging and ruining things. Our hands wear away the statue
we caress with admiration. The oil from our fingertips eats into the prints we
handle. Acid rain dissolves monuments of marble.
Processes
The wood cracks,

the metal rusts,
the paper yellows,
the dust settles.
The moth lays its eggs,
the worm turns,
the termites swarm,
the rats nest.
The birds soil,
the soil molds,
the mold dampens,
the dampers leak,
the leeks die,
the dye fades.
The wind and the rains,
the sun and the heat,
the cold and the wet
take their turns,
make their toil,
take their toll,
make our ruins.
A sidelong glance at the world reveals it to be a stream of things passing

out of Being. Things that we see straight on appear to have identity as entities
that last, but I am afraid that what is, is in process. The process of the world is
of falling apart. Nothing lasts. Decay is the authentic stamp of Being. What is
Being coming to? Be-ing is be-coming into non-being.
Everything is embraced in the destructive process. Damage is the rule,
ruin the outcome, preservation the exception. Artworks are retained in their in
tegrity against the tide of Being. The aesthetic object is an achievement of
wholeness in the face of process that rubs away the intact. The art museum and
the library stand against reality, affirming human unwillingness to be washed
away. That is why I seek shelter in them every week.
The refusal to permit damage is crucial to the aesthetic sensibility. We or
ganize to prevent damage to objects by building protective structures for them.
But what of buildings and cities? Venice is a difficult case in drawing the line
between damage and ruin. This city of islands, Queen of the Sea, “where all the
streets were paved with water” (Charles Dickens), is sinking into the stinking
sea. The tides enter the squares and ground floors. The very air, laden with the
effluvium of industrial waste, attacks the stonework. The stones of Venice are
slipping away from Being, as we wander from island to island. The canals,
those streets of Venice, are also the city’s sewers. To fall into a Venetian canal
is a death worse than fate.
On a hot summer’s afternoon, when no wind blows, Venice is invaded by
the stench of putrefaction so pungently represented by Thomas Mann’s novella,
Der Todt in Venedig (Death in Venice, 1911).
We glance at the fallen plaster along the murky, befouled canals, exposing
the cracks of brickwork to decay. The details of Venice are shabby. It is a city
lived-in, not a museum or a Disneyland display. Living in it is accompanied by
unusual difficulties. How can an energetic modem people in an increasingly in
dustrialized society live in a Renaissance city on crumbling islands? The prob
lem has been receiving international attention, for the world has a stake in Ve
nice’s future. The lagoon might be sealed, nearby industry dismantled, plastic
bubbles built over the islands. The islands may be lifted with injections of plas
tic filler, the best pieces removed to a museum, the whole city relocated in the
Arizona desert. Or Venice may be left alone to become a ruin.
In 1986, in Venice, then under sentence of a strike by the operators of the
steam launches, Ellen and I were seeking our favorite restaurant, when we were
caught in an unrelenting rainstorm that sent pieces of the city down at our feet:
plaster, cornices, roofing. We held on to each other in the arch of a doorway, as
Venice made ruins of itself. We feared the falling water and the rising water
would wash away the bridges and set the islands free to float into the sea.
The hypnotic views of Venice painted by Antonio Canaletto (1697-1768)
show cracked plaster, discoloration of damp walls, and unevenness of stone
work. While the grand vista and harmonious lines give the picture its structure
and impact, the details, with their admixture of idealized perfections and poign
ant blemishes, draw our presence to them. Canaletto’s Venice flavors the gran
deur of achievement with the mustiness of decay.
Venice is a perpetual aesthetic problem. It courts damage and presents its
precariousness with careless nonchalance. It moves us about on graciously/
gracefully uplifting bridges that invite us to dwell a moment, only to detect red
olent filth. It rises from the sea, as we approach by boat, until we see that it
sinks into the sea. The sea we see is simultaneously its streets and wasteland.
The water is within and without.
Decay is that form of damage that comes with aging. The inherent de-
structivity of decay threatens everything, though often by the slightest steps,
over a long time. Decay creeps in where violence has been kept out. It keeps its
foot in the door of the palace of art. Decay dwells silently even within the work
of art. The building sags, the paint cracks, the photograph fades.
Literature is most immune to decay, for aging of the physical text in no
way affects the literary text, thanks to the endless replicability of print. The per
forming arts of music, drama, and ballet do not have a fixed physical object
subject to decay, though the performers are subjects who age.
The art of gardening is most open to decay, since the moment a garden is
finished, if we may use that term, it is susceptible to aging, dying, and rotting.
If we consider gardening as our interaction with living processes and organic
form, not just as a pictorial showpiece of domesticated nature, then the decay to
which it is naturally subject can contribute to aesthetic excellence. Fallen
leaves, wilting petals, broken stalks, and dead branches may be integral parts of
the garden. I find interacting with them can be as enjoyable as seeing the bright
healthy specimens.
On this question, the maintenance of botanical gardens for scientific pur
poses may part ways with keeping the pleasure garden. Some formal gardens
seek to banish all signs of decay, enforcing a daily cleanup, while some botani
cal gardens allow decay to make its presence known as naturally befitting.
Routine conservation procedures are meant to counteract decay. We re-
coat the statue, repoint the building, reprint the negative, and replant the bulbs
in the garden. The intensive-care units that constitute many museum galleries
arrest the processes of aging by strict control of temperature and lighting, glass
enclosures to keep out dust and bacteria, railings and guards to keep back peo
ple. Decay could be further prevented by keeping the object in a vacuum con
tainer away from all light, tucked away safely in a lead-lined underground
vault. We are restricted in how much we can save from decay. Choices limited
by funding and public access set the values in the aesthetic treasuries that are a
society’s art museums.
The damage caused by decay may be so great, as in the case of Mayan
cities left to the ravages of the jungle, that a ruin results. Decay may not be no
ticeable aesthetically, and thus not constitute damage. Most artworks in physi
cal form are decaying. The breath of their human admirers may contribute to
their invisible weakening. Visitors are not aware of anything out of place in the
work. “Oh, how perfect!’’, we exclaim, adding to the imperfection.
If the eye that happily gazes is allowed to come close, it may find crack
ing on the surface, fingerprints on the print, lint within the glassed-in enameled
bowl, leaves caught in the cathedral’s sculpted portal, bird droppings on the
head of the bronze hero. These little touches bring the work down to Earth, tes
tifying to its physicality as a denizen of our world. We dismiss such slight signs
of decay from mind, turn them into a moment of amusement, or retain them for
a rewarding contrast with the artwork’s apparent victory over its physicality.
Eloquence speaks even in the dust of art. Dust thou art.
Decay is destruction that occurs gradually and through natural causes. It is
not an act of human violence, though it can result from neglect. Decay may
pass unnoticed for years and then enter consciousness as something to be re
gretted. If not arrested and countered, decay imperceptibly crosses from dam
age to ruin. The decaying fruit turns rotten. The decaying corpse decomposes.
The decaying tooth may have to be pulled. We usually think of decay as bio
logical process. All living things must undergo it, and many inanimate things
suffer it at the hands of organisms. Physical processes of wind and rain also
bring decay to structures, and we picture them in biological terms as eating
away, tearing away, scratching, pounding, or clinging.
Decay is built-in to the cosmos. The atom decays in casting off an elec
tron. The sun decays in casting off its radiation. The human being decays when
buried. “Decay” is not a pleasant term. It sticks in the mouth. Decay is a pro
cess in ourselves that we resist. By extension, we are repelled by it elsewhere,
whether in manners, transportation systems, or civilizations.
Love of decay may be an expression of decadence, a social perversion, or
an idiosyncratic pathology. Unhealthiness is suggested in enjoying decay, for it
goes against the spirit of our biological defenses. We may categorize decay as
gradual damage that does not pose a clear and present danger to the original
unity, or it may be another word for ruin, when the original is so far gone that a
new unity arises.
Decay plays another role for intact building and established ruin by ad
ding interesting qualities. In that function, decay is inventive, not destructive. It
presents surfaces, for instance, with attractive texture, color, and pattern, thanks
to the action of lichen. Such surfaces may be lichened to artistically-prepared
elements. Ruins generally profit by this ornamentation, and intact works may
cash in aesthetically by the non-damaging decay. Mediocre buildings may be
rescued by the likes of lichen and other forms of incrustation or aging. The pa
tina upon bronzes is a natural deterioration of original surface highly valued for
its color and texture. The statue or roofing that is patinaed may be said to have
reached maturity, not to have decayed.
Decay may be a type of damage that can be stopped, excised, and possibly
reversed. If decay cannot be repaired, then the stronger measure of restoration
may answer to its subtle depredations. “Decay” as a term of biological import
often suggests irreversibility, whereas “damage” fits the mechanical model,
whereby suitable repairs can make the whole operative again, almost like new.
Decay adds to enjoyment of what survives, if decay is the context for
those exceptions. What has resisted decay or made good use of it stands against
the background of its ravages. When we are in the ruin, or when we look upon
the pictorial representation of it, the ruin tends to occupy the center of the vis
ual field, which then trails off at the edges into decay. Structures give way to
pieces which crumble into stones that intermingle with rocks and then disap
pear into vegetation. The ruin is sited in decay.
Decay is a contributor of irony, for great masses may endure with aston
ishing vigor, while the gentle persistence of the decaying process slowly under
mines them. We have only to sit down on a ruin to come in contact with decay.
The stone has been reshaped by rain, cracked by freezing, discolored by vegeta
tion, abraded by dirt, and rubbed away by human beings seeking shelter. How
good to get our hands, and trunk, on this decaying ruin, touching its solidity
while dissolution is in process, its integrity during disintegration, its firm pres
ence as it slowly disappears. Here today, gone tonight. Decay can be the ruin’s
fitting companion, not its cause, but its decoration and context.
We too are susceptible to decay. We who resist decay throughout life may
come to be reconciled to it in its presence in the Other, the ruin, which teaches
us, in this respect, as in others, to be human.
Destruction is the activity whereby an original artwork, or work of anoth
er kind, loses its unity and becomes a ruin with new possibilities of unity. De
struction, in this sense, is conversion or transformation. What is destroyed is
the unified original: that no longer exists. But destruction originates a new uni
ty: that presently exists. Hence, destruction is sometimes creative.
Destruction may be the slow process of decay turning into damage that
becomes ruin. Or it may strike of a sudden by natural catastrophe or human
deed. Some of the most spectacular results of destruction have come about by
gentle degrees. Some of the most spectacular acts of destruction leave little of
value in the way of ruins. Destructive activity as the creative ruining of some
thing deserves analysis.
In another sense, destruction may refer to the total elimination of the work
and its remnants, so that not even a ruin remains. Ruins, which are what has
been destroyed, may themselves become destroyed. A destroyed work, in that
case, is an original that has been removed from existence, without permitting
existence of a ruin.
For centuries, people thought this had applied to Carthage (Qart Hadasht,
“New City’’) the Punic city at last erased by the conquering Romans, who
rubbed salt into its foundations as a final punishment (146 BCE). But the ruins
of ancient Carthage have been making their appearance from under the ruins of
the succeeding Roman city, in Tunisia. As a symbol of national pride, the inter
national airport of Tunis is designated “Carthage.’’
Often when the term “destruction’’ is applied to a work, it is exclusively in
reference to the original unity, though remnants may be available. Here, as in
the case of total loss, the original cannot ever be present. This is a proper usage.
The remnants are not the original. They are parts of it or pieces of its matter.
They are, but it is not. If we can repair the remnants so that the original is made
intact, then we have an instance of damage, not destruction.
Use of the term “destruction,” a powerful negative word, can lead to con
fusion, because it refers to something totally lost—ruined—and it may refer to
a loss that produces something new—ruins.
Deformity has held strong attraction for artists. The deformed subject is
the incarnation of the unique that slips through the nets of general laws. The ar
tist captures it in its persuasive realness. The deformed is an affirmation of the
particular. Hence, it strikes a sympathetic chord in every viewer. The deformed
is what each of us potentially is. The particular is what each of us, including the
deformed, really is.
The artist makes us see beyond the rule. The artist also makes us see how
the exceptional can be made accountable by further rules. The realistic por
trayal of deformity, as in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s portrait of an old man with
diseased nose (ca. 1480) or Diego de Velazquez’s images of dwarfs (1630s and
1640s), is distinguishable from the deforming fantasy of the artist in expres
sionist or surreal works. In the case of Salvador Dali (1904-1989), the laws
governing things have been replaced, so that things exist in a bizarre world in
which we uneasily dilly-dally.
The mysterious stone shapes in the gardens of Bomarzo (ca. 1560), Lazio,
Italy, are deformed forms that crouch upon the ground as if ruins. Eighteenth-
century gardeners in Great Britain gave in to the taste for the deformed as frol
icsome folly, grotesque grotto, or replicated ruin. For them, the presence of the
deformed adds charm to the beautiful landscape.
While the deformed is not a ruin, since it does not arise from destruction
of an intact entity, we might think it a ruin in the abstract. It shows how a pre
sumed norm of nature has been violated. Ruins suffer if we see them as defor
mities, viewing their supposed deficiency instead of their self-sufficiency.
The D words—damage, decay, dilapidation, decline, destruction, deform
ity, devastation, desolation—are distressing, disturbing, and depressing. We are
finished with them and can move on to more cheerful terms.
We might consider the unfinished or the incomplete as the ruin of the
work that was to be. As such, it may have a unity different from that of the in
tended other, the work which has been lost in advance. Usually, the ruin is a
remnant of what once existed, but the unfinished work is the remnant of what
never existed: the completed whole.
Rarely do we respond to the unfinished as a ruin, though it may have oth
er aesthetic attractions. It lacks the jaggedness of destruction. It does not re
sult from a broken unity. It just stops. We read unfinished literary works, like
Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers,
because they are good writing that stimulates the imagination. We may be
drawn to them due to interest in a favorite author, not for their own sake as art
works. Before starting the book, we know that we will never get to its end. The
author cannot authenticate our imagined completion of the mystery or romance.
We enjoy this exceptional pleasure of not being finally satisfied by the book.
The unfinished work can be experienced as a work in process that regret
tably will never be completed. Yet someone else may be commissioned to fin
ish the work in its original medium or in another, such as film. Wharton’s Buc
caneers has been completed for print and screen. I hesitate to read or see the
complete versions, for fear they will ruin the incomplete original.
We must distinguish unfinished works of art from the nonfinished in art
works. In Michelangelo and Paul Cezanne, the nonfinito (Ital.) is the inclusion
within the work of a contributory inconclusiveness. The uncut stone, white can
vas, or abandoned subplot in an artwork provokes heightened awareness of the
artistic process. The presence of the unworked material amid what has been
worked-over makes us participate in the making of the work. A gain, not a loss.
The work’s unity incorporates the undone in this sophisticated kind of artistic
doing. The nonfinito shares with the ruin enjoyment in the discovery of materi
al, contiguity of the formed and the unformed, and springing forth of form.
The infinitely nonfinished, in the form of the work not yet begun, stares
every artist in the face. Albert Camus’s perfectly finished story, “Jonah”
(1957), depicts a painter, who, experiencing the infinite possibility of the blank
canvas, must put down the brush.
To repair is to make the original whole by overcoming damage. Ruins
cannot be repaired. Where damage has reached the point that the unity of the
original is lost irreparably, there is the ruin. So an aesthetic ruin is broken
beyond repair, but an inaesthetic ruin, in the words of Sam Brawand, may be
broken beyond ruin.
Damage invites repair. Ruin does not. Damage need not be repaired, for
the original to be experienced. In the ruin, we no longer experience the original.
At some point, the devil only knows where, damage is so great that we may say
the original no longer exists and could not be brought back to itself by any
amount of patching up.
Damage, the opponent of repair, is not a matter of quantity, although
some conservationists try to calculate the percentage of the original that re
mains on site. A structure split in half might be skillfully mended. A statue
shattered with a hammer blow may yet be pieced together, so that not a hairline
crack is visible. A chapter might be deleted and thereby twist the structure and
sense of a novel. Break the nose of a bust, and its character may disappear. Re
build the walls at Knossos in Crete, smooth them out, and paint them over, but
lose the feeling that these are the originals: too good to be a ruin.
At one point, the original is there, despite damage. At another point, the
original is going but still may be repaired. At yet another point, the original is
gone and cannot be repaired. At that point, it is a ruin.
Literary repairs are possible when putting back the pieces that have fallen
out due to the errors of printers and the tastes of editors, but to speak of repair
ing the excerpt to make the original whole makes no sense. The excerpt is an
exception as a ruin, for its original lies just around the corner. We could turn to
the whole itself to let it in to the library without bothering about the excerpt.
This leads to the anomaly of the intact original rubbing shoulders with its ruin,
the excerpt. I glance at Leo Tolstoy on my shelf to find a few complete editions
of War and Peace, which nonetheless substantially vary among themselves, an
abridgement, and then excerpts in several books of selections. Literary ruin and
its whole coexist.
To repair is to rectify damage without altering the identity of the original.
Repair is in service to the unity that perdures. The repairer must not alter the
whole on hand but work within it. Though repairs may be poorly done, inflict
ing a type of damage to the work, they do not ruin it if they leave the unity
alone/all one.
To restore is to undertake a more ambitious intervention. Let us use the
term for reconstruction or rebuilding that attempts to put the unity of the origi
nal back in place. Repair and restore can be distinguished in terms of the iden
tity to which they are applied. Repairs are to damaged originals whose unity
has not been lost. A ruin can never be repaired. Restoration is of the unity lost
to originals. Ruins can be restored. To restore or not to restore are options for
dealing with ruins. Often, something that has been ruined and then subsequent
ly restored has thereby again been ruined, as John Ruskin tirelessly protests.
Strictly speaking, the ruin that has been restored is no longer a ruin. But it
is not quite the original. We might be fooled into experiencing it as the original,
though usually it is too bright, clean, and intact to carry off the masquerade.
Restorations in their completeness lack the touches of incompleteness that au
thenticate old originals. To remedy this, restorers may antiquate the surface,
simulating aging, and they may strategically leave places unrestored. These
practices, too, we perceive as artifice. Most often, we experience the restoration
not as the original in its true glory, but as what has been done to the original
with well-intentioned care.
In the repaired work, we are assured that most of what we see is original.
Repairs are subservient to what is in place. In the restoration, we cannot be sure
what is original and what introduced. What was in place may become subservi
ent to the whole that is built with the thought we are rebuilding. The repaired
work, just as the damaged work, is the original. The ruin is a different kind of
being than the original. The restoration is a new life for the original.
Restorations have several values. They may play a didactic role. They are
superior to replicas, because they spring out of the site and retain elements,
sometimes substantial, of the original construction. Unlike the replica, we can

invest the restoration with symbolic affect. While the ruin may profit from its
poignancy as symbol, the restoration has the advantage of being put to use in
symbolic function. Restored town halls may house civic offices and play an ac
tive role in community life and social consciousness. The restored building may
also eschew symbolic transformation and stick to the practical value of being
used for its original purpose or something else.
Restoration is generally cheaper than tearing down and building some
thing from the foundations to serve in the same way. This lesson is preached
with regularity by preservationists, who add that maintenance of the original in
good repair is cheaper than having to restore it. Our social interest is in saving
buildings by Maintenance, Repair, and Restoration, for these three active steps
create good habits of preserving community assets and good attitudes opposed
to neglect, damage, waste, and destruction. A society committed to a compre
hensive program for its buildings cares about its past and about entering the fu
ture in harmony. Don’t tear it down and rebuild it! Restore it and thereby con
tinue to build the bonds of community!
Restorations may have aesthetic qualities, often in their details, that are
good for the soul, but which would not be considered in construction of new
buildings. The restoration when put to active use adds something to life that
otherwise may not be available. To restore is not to stifle the taste of a progres
sive society but to make available a variety of tastes that have roots in the so
ciety. Restoration insists on the meaningfulness of what we have been together.
Not everything of value is to be restored. Ruins would be ruined by resto
ration. They would lose their originality in being remade into not-quite origi
nals. The ruin needs protection as ruin from those who would raze it and from
those who would restore it. The values in the restoration must be weighed
against the values in the ruin. Don’t build it up! Enjoy it!
Some restorations are unthinkable because of the acknowledged value of
the ruin. Who would rebuild the Colosseum in Rome, Solomon’s Temple in
Jerusalem, the palace at Persepolis, the Acropolis of Athens, the temples at
Chich^n-Itza, the city of Pompeii? World opinion would denounce such aberra
tions of taste. Leave well enough alone! Don’t harm the ruin!
Yet some ruins are bereft of symbolic energy. Insalubrious and difficult of
access, eyesores for a neighborhood, and, worst of all, lacking in aesthetic in
terest. Such ruins have no social benefit. They are on the razer’s edge. The op
tions are to raze them by destruction or raise them by reconstruction. “If the
ruin is of no value, why bother with its restoration?’’, you ask. The restoration
may achieve values not accessible to the ruin. What has been reduced to no aes
thetic interest by the force of destruction and the play of chance may find new
interest in being put back together as if it were the original.
Some features of the restoration must be attractive, or else we would not
make the effort to rebuild. Researchers identify the authentic trappings and give
the restorers suggestions for the style at which to aim. A restoration has an aes
thetic style, whereas a poor, destitute ruin may be lacking in anything aesthetic.
But a wonderfully beautiful ruin may be turned into a dull restoration. No nec
essary connection exists between aesthetic value in the ruin, the restoration, and
the original.
A restoration project, in addition to any intrinsic aesthetic charms, may
put life back into a community. The Society Hill section of Philadelphia is a
vast neighborhood in which Colonial houses were restored in the 1960s and
joined by modern architecture that respected material, color, and height, while
developing its own integrity. The authentically old and creatively new are fur
ther held together by vague replicas of Colonial housing meant for modem con
venience. Restoration accompanied by copying and innovation led to a livable
wholeness. The attitude is respectful, not grave, playful, not capricious, com
fortable, not luxurious, traditional, not outdated. Civic confidence has been re
stored in Society Hill.
Tearing down the worthless ruin leaves only a hole in the ground. This, in
turn, is an unhealthy blemish. Hence, something else has to be built. That
could eventually turn out as undesirable as the ruin. The restoration is a neat
way of avoiding these problems. It eliminates the need for demolition or re
building from nothing. It has in mind the precise result, and the value of the
original model is accepted. To restore may be economically advantageous and
aesthetically safe.
The Restoration Ethic offers guidance to a culture divided about its future.
It inculcates pride in the common heritage, gives the satisfaction of saving
worthwhile structures from oblivion, and counters the drift toward carelessness,
vandalism, and violence directed against things. Restoration is restorative of
community spirit. Yet the Restoration Ethic may lead to turning our back on the
aesthetics of ruins. If a ruin cannot, or should not, be restored, it may nonethe
less be saved from razing. The ruin may rise up above the interests and efforts
of restoration to the height of community value as symbol, aesthetic value as
experience, and economic value as sightseeing attraction. One good ruin may
be worth a dozen restorations.
By its concern for the original, restoration runs the danger of losing sight
of the original. Originals become lost among the restored. Restorations are lost
among the replicas. Replicas are lost among the stylized echoes. We are lost in
a world of appearances. Restoration may sap the energies of instauration. Sav
ing, we might neglect making. Not everything needs saving. Some things are
dispensable. We need opportunities to start from the ground up.
Electronic restoration is upon us in the form of computers and screens,
stationed in archaeological exhibits and at the site of ruins, that generate graph
ic reconstructions. Textbooks and souvenir books have so often shown the great
ruins in images of their hypothetical intactness that in our mind’s eye we see
such places as missing the buildings instead of as the visible remains. A recent
innovation in publishing accommodates restoration to the ruins by means of
overlay plates. You can have your ruined cake and eat it too.
The work that is a total loss is a prime candidate for rebuilding in replica.
As we enter the Archaeological Museum at Cop£n, Honduras, we must face
head-on the full-size replica of a temple that is still embedded in a nearby
Mayan pyramid. The replica is replete with blood-red features. The sculptural
remains of Copan are displayed in the museum on two spacious floors around
the temple. As we stroll among the authentic treasures, the replica gives
them—and us—an impressive central reference point. The original temple, in
accessible to the public, appears to have projected itself into this commanding
public presence. Nervously, I kept looking over my shoulder, in 2003, as I en
countered the magnificent sculpture in the museum. The temple was eyeing me.
Unlike the restored building or painting, we cannot mistake the replica for
the original. It does not threaten to lose the aesthetic value of present ruins in
attempting to regain what is absent. The replica has educational merit. It shows
us what the original presumably looked like. It may have aesthetic interest.
What counts against that interest is the oddness of seeing something like the an
cient original perfectly intact. It is too true to be good.
When a destroyed building is rebuilt in replica on its site, a feeling of fal
sification may result if the site remains as it was. The replica, though it looks
like the original, is a different order of being than the original site. Replicas are
most at home in communities of the replicated. This helps us keep in sight that
each such work is totally distinct from its original. The replica shares neither
grounds nor stones with the original.
With pleasure and profit, we stroll through a park of replicas, such as Bar
celona’s Pueblo Espahol, in 1961 (Poble Espaynol, in 2004), with its vernacular
copies, or Budapest’s Vajdahunyad vara, in 1984, with its statue of one of my
favorite authors, Anonymous (? - ?). This is relaxing activity, since no origi
nals are present to make us adopt the serious attentiveness they deserve. No ru
ins to explore. No trace of revered antiquity to touch. The replicas are clean,
complete, convenient. They may be comprehensive in scope, safe to visit, well-
organized, and highly instructive.
Some museums are devoted entirely to replicas, such as the Museum of
Roman Civilization in Rome. Here we may get close to reproductions of Ro
man art and construction from every comer of the Empire. A bountiful survey
is offered that serves as introduction to Roman history, art, and civilization,
although, in 1981, not a single work of art is present. The Museum aptly/amply
demonstrates that Rome was not ruined in a day.
While the replicas in the Roman Museum are of extant works, replicas
may also be of works that have been destroyed. When we know this is the case,
does the aesthetic power of the original become transferred in part to the repli
ca? Or does knowing that the replica is of a work forever lost drive a wedge
into the experience that keeps the supposed power of the one from entering the
presence of the other? The answer to both questions is Yes.
We can experience replicas as if they were works of art. We know many
classical statues only through deductions made from surviving replicas, while
the replicas have become appreciated for themselves, especially if they have
had the fortune to become ruined. In most of our galleries of Roman statuary,
the ruin of a replica of a destroyed Greek or Roman original is the original uni
ty proposed for our aesthetic enjoyment.
Adaptation or readaptation is the use of a structure for a new purpose. A
ruin may be restored for use as something other than what it originally had
been. In this case, while we can speak of the structure as having been restored,
its original use has not been restored with it. The change of use may be suffi
ciently inventive and appropriately convenient to introduce delight. Restored
works of many kinds are easily turned into restaurants, shops, and museums.
Intact buildings may be converted to other uses without waiting for them
to fall into ruin. Can a work be turned into a ruin by such conversion that does
not destroy any of its major parts? The case for it becoming a ruin is that de
struction of purpose has occurred and hence of the building’s unity in use. It no
longer is what it was, although every stone may still be in place. The case
against calling this a ruin is that structure and substance have not been appreci
ably altered, so the building retains its original unity, although it is used for
another purpose. The wholeness of the intact adaptation speaks against the bro
ken character of ruins that we encounter by our senses.
The ruin is rough-edged, incomplete, with accidental attributes and open
ness to nature. The ruin is usually useless. The adaptation is complete, smooth-
surfaced, spick and span, and in full operation for human activities. While the
adaptation may spoil what we take as inherent in the original, and thus become
an aesthetic liability, it might cleverly convert the original in pleasing ways that
relate to the inherent aesthetic quality or that assert an original aesthetic view
point. Adaptation perforce is significant changing, but neither in its successes
nor its failings does it produce what we experience as the ruin.
We may think of and experience the adaptation as a mode of preservation,
an ingenious way of saving an original from falling into ruin or being demol
ished. In the United States, the following changes have been greeted as gains:
railway station turned into a restaurant in Newark, Delaware; cigar factory into
shops in Tampa, Florida; marine air-terminal into the city hall of Miami; torpe
do factory into artist studios, guaranteed to be explosion-proof, in Alexandria,
Virginia; patent office in Washington, another fireproof structure, into double
museums of the Smithsonian Institution; and, a few blocks away, on Pennsyl
vania Avenue, post office into The Pavilion, with fast-food court and offices of
the National Endowment for the Humanities. In these cases, respect is evident
for the identity of the original, along with tasteful accommodation of old func
tions to new ones.
We may encounter the adaptation as a modern work which happens to
make use of an older structure that served a different purpose. In this case, the
original that we see as intact is the modem building, not the old one. We ad
mire the cleverness that has turned what was in place to what may currently be
used. This work has not primarily preserved something. It has advanced itself.
We feel this as a gain for the new, not a loss of the old. In this case too, we do
not experience a ruin.
Suppose the intact original that we value has been utterly spoiled by its
adaptation. Or suppose the adaptation is markedly unsuccessful in using the
original for its fresh purposes. We would say that the original has been mined
or the opportunity of adaptation has been ruined. Saying so may express more
an indignation and regret than a negative aesthetic experience. We might mean
that we have been deprived of the aesthetic pleasure of an original or of a min.
We might also experience the maladapted original as a kind of min, for it has
suffered a destructive transformation and lost its unity, only to find a new unity,
which may be odd and moving.
The theoretical problem is that if the adapted original has much positive
unity, then this is likely due to its successful transformation or preservation. We
do not experience it as ruin. The problem dissolves, as soon as we consider
adaptive use of originals that are mins or are physically turned into mins in the
adaption process. Here we see that something is done with—or to—a min, and
we are free to experience the min within its adaptation.
Does re-creation or a change o f medium make a work of art into a min,
because a new unity is arrived at by a process destmctive of the original medi
um? No. Samuel Richardson’s pioneering novel, Pamela (1749), becomes a
different work of art when rendered into opera, engraving, or motion picture.
Perforce new unity. The new work stands on its own. It is not the original de
stroyed. We may place the later version alongside the original, which remains
intact. The new work alludes to the original and may be dependent upon it for
appreciation of its own qualities.
Only by mistaking the work in the new medium for the original would we
see it as a ruin of the original. The aesthetic error on our part would be to take
transformation as replacement.
In 1971, at the close of a screening in Paris of Lucchino Visconti’s just-
released Italian film, Morte a Venezia, based on Mann’s German work of fic
tion, Der Todt in Venedig, an American woman arose and shouted in English,
“No, no, it is all wrong! This isn’t the way it was. This is a fraud!’’ She had
been cheated out of an authentic experience of the literary work with which she
was familiar.
We may find fault with Visconti’s interpretation of the story, such as his
crude physical version of the horseplay among the boys, but this may mislead
us into experiencing the film as if it were primarily literary interpretation in
stead of film. We can appreciate it as a work in the cinematic medium, without
reading the book. We might then accuse the film, let us say, of being all wrong
in violating its self-consistency.
However, we may not be able to shake the original out of our mind, while
attending to the work in the new medium. Awareness of the original proves dis
tracting, even if we cultivate the aesthetic willingness to experience the new
work on its terms. If somehow the change of medium damages our feeling for
the integrity of the original, then the antidote is to go back to the original and
enjoy its untrammeled wholeness. Thus, my belated response to the irate film-
goer is, “Nothing has been ruined, except your misplaced expectations.”
Some works of art no longer exist intact, or even in ruin, and are known
only through versions in other media. Numismatics rewards us with priceless
information about the appearance of nonextant, but celebrated, statues and tem
ples. Prints portray lost paintings, photographs show us destroyed buildings,
prose describes missing treasures. We may regard the surviving medium as
documentation or aesthetic work in its own right. In neither case is it a ruin,
though it is an “incomplete” representation of a destroyed original. It may be
complete in its medium.
From the viewpoint of the artistic process, the change of medium may be
a valuable kind of ruining. The artist can rescue the theme, character, or form
embedded in an original by tearing it out of its imprisonment in that medium to
take on life with new unity in another mode of art. In the process of originating,
the artist acts as destroyer of the original and its medium. The artist overcomes
what has been done. In redoing it, the artist makes the second medium flex its
muscles on the old material with a springing forth of energy.
A traditional practice in every art has been to look for subjects in the other
arts. Artists are keen observers of media other than their own. This is likely be
cause they love aesthetic experience and may be enriched in taste, but they also
find the other arts an excellent resource for drawing out materials. The satisfac
tion of building something valuably whole may be accompanied by a secret
pleasure in tearing apart something else, casting its whole and its medium
aside, to appropriate what the artist discovers. The artist creates in this case,
and due to the destructive intervention, re-creates.
The ruin may be rebuilt in the sense of restored to something like its
original and then used as such or as something else. The ruin may also be re
built as something else instead of restored to its original appearance. In this
case, the aim is to build again on the original, not to rebuild the original. What
we rebuild on it may have nothing to do with what the ruin is, the original was,
or the community use will be.
Most ruins throughout the world have been built upon as convenient foun
dations and materials for other structures. Jericho is layer after layer of city,
built time and again upon the walls of Palestine, as archaeologist Kathleen
Kenyon showed (PI. 27). The Emperor Diocletian’s palace on the Dalmatian
Coast of the Adriatic has been absorbed into the structures of the Croatian city
of Split (Spalato). Not a ruin in a city, but a city in a ruin.
For centuries, ruins were regarded as valuable to construction. The ruin
furnished an intimacy between ordinary people and great achievements. Monu
ments were incorporated into homes. Commoners lived within the foundations
of palaces. Such rebuilding of the ruin is another category of experience. The
ruin in that case is no longer free to live as a ruin. It has become something
else. It is also present as a remnant, and we are aware of its role in the unity of
the adapted structure which otherwise might have no aesthetic interest.
The R verbs—repair, restore, rebuild, replicate, readapt, replace, recon
struct—mostly come to the rescue, as modes of return, but they are rebuffed by
raze and ruin.
Preservation is the term for an overall policy of identifying, protecting,
and making accessible what is worth keeping. It acts against the main flow of
nature and society to break down and cause loss. Preservation insists on taking
the second step in the stream, but the exact steps to follow are problematic. To
identify a ruin and its value requires exploring it.
We must have access to it. Access, whether initial exploration or subse
quent public visiting, poses problems for protection. Fences, walkways, waste
baskets, warning signs, guard booths, toilets, souvenir stands, tea houses,
guides, and plug-in recorded tours enter the scene.
The measures taken for protection may intrude on recognition of the
ruin’s aesthetic identity. How can we enjoy it by moonlight, if it is closed at
night? Mark Twain had to climb over the locked gates to the Acropolis to do
this in Athens. We are thankful that he did so (1869):
Through the roofless temple the moon looked down and banded the floor
and darkened the scattered fragments and broken statues with the slanting
shadows of the columns. (Twain, 1980, p. 249)
Preservation is activation of evaluation. Its choices, informed by values,

usually aim at some kind of access to the identity of the thing whose protection
has been decided upon. Preservation is not limited to putting a protective fence
around a site whose value is evident. It is involvement in the testing out of what
may be valuable.
The ruin reserves the right to challenge preservation. It is exposed to de
structive forces that help make it what it is. Unlike the intact structure, the ruin
is in process. To stop what is happening to the ruin may not be protecting it.
What should be stopped? When should it be stopped? What should be protect

ed? What should it be protected against?
The first step, if the ruin is to be preserved for people, is to protect it from
people. The innocent visitor may inadvertently bring ruin to the ruin, unless
preservationists give care to floors, walls, paths, and stairs. Caretakers must
prevent stonediggers, vandals, and souvenir hunters from indulging their incli
nations. In 1990, near the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, I visited a village
whose principal source of livelihood over the centuries has been graverobbing.
The basement of each house branched out into tunnels. Upon receiving whis
pered advice, I refrained from taking pictures in the village, which shall remain
nameless (no PI.).
In the second step of preservation, the people must be protected from the
ruin. This is not just a matter of regulating their behavior. It calls for shoring up
features of the ruin that might come tumbling down upon them. Mutual safety
of ruin and visitor is uppermost in the preservational mind. The steps taken on
these accounts may prejudge the other issues. All loose stones might be ce
mented in place, so that none of them fall, even if no public space exists under
neath them. All rooms may have warning signs posted about touching the
walls, appropriating tiles, arriving at the toilets, and finding the exits. Every
postcaution must be evaluated.
Styles of protection have consequences for the aesthetics of the experi
ence. The question remains of arresting the destruction suffered by the ruin. To
raise the question in terms of the ruin’s suffering is to imply that a loss of value
will occur, unless we prevent the process that has shaped the thing of value
from continuing its action. This far and no further. The ruin as aesthetic object
is then judged to be finished. It is good enough as it is. Or the risk of it becom
ing something less successful is not worth taking.
Preservation of the ruin is intervention in its process. This applies only in
large terms, for on a smaller scale, the destruction runs on. Wind and rain, heat
and cold, birds and plants work away. These forces assure that the ruin is still
in process. To exclude them entirely would mean to sanitize the ruin, remove it
to a museum, or enclose it fully as object in its own museum.
The Altar of Peace of Augustus in Rome (ca. 13-9 BCE), which had sunk
in mud, was elevated to ground level and reconstructed in 1938 by G. Moretti
by pumping cement footings under it. Then, the incomparable masterpiece was
given a lofty protective shelter with natural lighting. It works quite well in ex
perience, save that the ticket desk and postcard counter are placed inside the
shelter, signaling from our entrance that this is our space instead of entirely that
of the imperial Ara Pads.
Incongruity resides in a ruin whose low-lying walls we see have been
sealed on top to keep out the seepage of water but whose foundations are splat
tered and pitted by the mud that the falling rain kicks up. Trees and brush may
have been replaced as flooring by a nicely maintained lawn, while weeds grow
freely in the cracks of walls. Supporting beams have been bolted to towering
sections, yet chunks of stone are worked loose by rain and vine to pile up at the
foot of walls. The ruin insists upon decaying, despite efforts to preserve it.
Intact buildings are subject to wear and aging, but we can minimize and
conceal these processes from sight. Roofs and gutters, sealed walls, solid
floors, controlled landscaping, regulation of heat and humidity, filtering of the
air, along with regular dusting, washing, and painting reduce the decay to the
intact monument to less than that suffered by the ordinary present-day intact
building. No sense in dusting the ruin. To dust thou shalt return.
To stabilize or consolidate a ruin is to take steps to keep the remnants as
we find them and to prevent their further disintegration. Stabilization appears as
neutral activity that keeps open further options about what to do with the ruin.
If the site is not stabilized, then eventual preservation or restoration would suff
er defeat. To stabilize is to apply the minimum treatment needed to keep the
ruin. It need not be attached to a policy of access, study, interpretation, restora
tion, or rebuilding. The experts can work out those policies in the future, thanks
to the ruin having been saved. Stabilization appears as a purely scientific effort,
without aesthetic or social pretensions. It leaves the field intact for others to
make decisions of those kinds. But no scientific efforts are socially and aes
thetically neutral. You may underline the previous sentence.
To stabilize is to choose. Walls, for example, might be treated, while
floors are left alone. The cracks may be sealed between stones piled evenly
upon one another, while those in a jumble might not be sealed. Drainage will be
introduced to protect some features, not others. Vegetation will be removed
from some surfaces, though not all. Decisions must be made as to what to pro
tect by what method and for what purpose. A stabilization technique that irre
versibly prevents access is undesirable for the public interest, though it may ap
pear in the best interest of the ruin.
Stabilization often takes the form of evening out a broken wall by replac
ing its fallen stones. This allows the wall to protect itself. We scarcely think of
it as an intervention. Even so, it is a form of restoration. The jagged wall, with
out those stones, is a Line of Destruction quite different from the wall in which
stones have been evenly replaced. While replacement protects the ruin, it may
inadvertently do away with the ruin.
Or is such an act part of the process of excavation whereby the ruin is
brought to light? Excavation is no simple removal of the soil to unearth the ruin
intact. Digging involves coming upon loose stones that are carefully put back
into the place they evidently had occupied. Stabilizing the structures in this
manner, while in the course of excavating them, may be necessary to dig fur
ther, otherwise total collapse might occur. If the excavators were to take the
vow of leaving every stone unturned from where it is found, digging would
have to stop at the topmost level of excavation. Instead, the archaeologists

make a record of the location of each find, and they decide whether to place
stones where they belong, keep them aside as museum pieces, or eventually put
them back as loose objects on the floor of the completed excavation.
The pleasures of archaeological discovery are not limited to what we find
with our skills. They extend to what we do with the finds, using our skills, in
cluding replacement. Fallen columns are often given the excavator’s helping
hand. The scientific interest is in having the structure stand again as it had been,
and the aesthetic interest is in seeing the impressive column stand above the
ground and against the sky. Sometimes, a drum section may be missing or
found so shattered that it cannot do its share in the resurrected column. A re
placement piece works its way into the set of originals. Is it a falsification of
the ruin or part of its stabilization? Is setting up a column an act of excavation
or of restoration? Do we truly reveal the ruin or ruin the ruin by such steps? For
each ruin, we can draw up a different column of answers.
Archaeologists, aware of these delicate questions, mark, say, by color var
iation, those materials they have put back in place. A practical purpose is be
hind this, for if archaeologists later discover that the materials have been
wrongly placed, they may make corrections without harming features that are
the givens of the ruin. An aesthetic consequence of this principle of reversibili
ty is that we can see where the ruin’s edge was when first uncovered, in com
parison to where the edge now is, thanks to the replacement of what had fallen.
The walls at Masada are marked this way.
Sometimes, we do not care that a lower line was initially visible, for the
present line may be sufficiently irregular to absorb our interest. Even where we
can recognize that modern substitutes have been introduced into a wall or col
umn, we might not pay any attention to their presence, while we enjoy the unity
of the structure they make possible. We might try to envision the ruin without
the later additions, whether of its original pieces or modem versions, but this
will not work. Presence speaks louder to experience than absence. To imagine
the standing column without one of its drums makes no sense.
Yet the replacements for pieces and the re-placement of pieces may dis
tract us from attention to the whole. We become aware of manipulation. We
may feel cheated of the min in its purity. We regret that we have gotten here
only after noticeable human intervention. But, I regret to report, no such thing
as a pure min exists.
All ruins, even those of which we might be the discoverers, are subject to
the intervening agency of values. An aesthetic quality may be lost by the most
skillful and accurate acts of replacement. The edge may be too even, as often
occurs if stabilization has been a goal in replacement (PI. 44).
Incongruity arrives on the scene, when we (1) detect the limit of the sub
stance first exposed, then (2) notice the replacements, and (3) still feel the ab-
sence of further lines as intimated by the space. The threefold character ex
presses what we have been able and willing to put back upon what is there, and
what we are unable or unwilling to put back. Intervention is evident, while res
toration is not complete. We human beings have restricted our ability to do
something with ruins on behalf of the ruins. The intention is not to interpose
human contributions, yet that intention is contradicted in its efforts.
The P verbs—preserve, protest, protect, present, promote—are primarily
proactive. They get us out into the field to do something.
When is a ruin still a ruin? Sometimes, we arrive too late at a celebrated
ruin to find that it has been so cleaned up, fixed up, and shored up that we can
not experience it as a ruin. We have to imagine it, then, in its lost savageness,
not in its salvaged presence.
The ruin is in process. But which process? The process of being excavat
ed, stabilized, restored, left to be a ruin, or allowed to disappear? A few months
ago, after years of anticipation, stimulated by reading the adventures of John
Lloyd Stephens and seeing the illustrations of his companion, Frederick Cather-
wood, I finally visited Copan, “the Athens of the New World,” in Honduras. I
missed the rough edges, pervasive brokenness, and engulfing vegetation. In the
well-tended Mayan site, I tried unsuccessfully to imagine it as the ruin it must
have earlier been but which had been replaced by the efforts to recover and
maintain it. My failure was relieved by coming upon the incongruous vivacity
of great trees growing out of the steps (PI. 62). A ruin not completely ruined!
You may wonder why these trees are not cut down and their roots re
moved before they damage the steps. Their roots hold the stones in place. To
remove the roots would scatter the steps. Thus, the arboreal intervention upon
the stairs that retains the old feeling of a ruin is a collaborator in keeping the
stairs from falling into ruin.
In the forest at Yaxhd, Guatemala, a Mayan ruin proudly emerges from
the earth (PI. 63). We greet it, in 2003, as a new-born, not dead, creature. While
still protected by its natural setting, it shows signs of loving preparation for fac
ing the world to which it is exposed. The cement is still moist on its stabilized
surfaces. My mind was ready to denounce the work as spoiled, too artificial,
too much of an intervention, but the ruin overruled this veto. So much for theo
ry! The organic unity and spanking newness of the ruin are gratifying, especial
ly in contrast to its continuing attachment to the earth. This is a ruin between
categories. Next year, it may be too good to enjoy.
Hands-on experience of the ruin is transmitted to us vicariously by the
workers on the site at Altun Ha (Mayan: “Rockstone Pond”) in Belize (PI. 64).
We are excited by the handling of each stone moved up from a pile to place
ment in a structure. This is not construction, the making of something not yet
present. It is reconstruction, the bringing back into presence of what had been
there. In 2003, the ruin is coming to be more of itself right before our eyes.
The Tenninolo}’)' of Ruin 309
PI. 62. Stairs and Trees, Copan, Honduras, 2003

PI. 63. Restored Pyramid, Yaxha, Guatemala, 2003

But possibly less of itself, insofar as the cemented pieces replace broken
ness by completion. This is the opposite of demolition. We cannot shout out,
“Don’t put that stone back in place! It will ruin the beautiful Line of Destruc
tion of the ruin!’’ Instead, we take pleasure in the archaeological exercise that
makes the ruin appear more as its original, while we try to enjoy every aesthetic
feature of the ruin before it disappears.
A ruin is a mixed bag. In process of being broken down yet stabilized.
Unrestored yet given replacements. It is as it was found, yet it has been cleaned
up. The dirt that filled it has been carted away, as not being thought part of it. It
is protected from damage for human beings, and from human beings, yet the in
troduction of protective measures changes it.
Access to the ruin may result in ruin of access. We may preserve the ruin
because of its arresting process of disintegration, yet preservation may arrest
that process. We restore some features to leave others unrestored. We raze/raise
minor structures to make room for visitor conveniences.
For enjoyment’s sake, we give access to what is on hand. For safety’s
sake, we dismantle what is underfoot. We interpret with signs, booklets, and
tours, and we interpret with digging, replacement, and restoration. Periodically,
the ruin requires repair, and its stabilization needs redoing. So many technical
terms and careful distinctions brought to ruin!
The visitor gazes at a pillar in Chichen-Itza (PI. 11), Delphi (PI. 28),
Dougga (PI. 73), or Persepolis, and muses at its resistance to the forces of de
struction, as it carries aloft the proud banner, “I have withstood!’’ Then we no
tice the fabricated section that sits within the originals. The next pillar is entire
ly authentic, as far as the eye can determine, but we wonder whether it did
withstand, or was lifted to its pedestal by the admiring archaeologist. Does it
now withstand or has it been stabilized with supporting rods and a seal on top
against the rain? Has the pillar always stood thus, from the moment of its emer
gence out of the destruction of its original? Has it several times borne the de
structive blows that bring us what it is now, and is it even now changing under
their action? Is the pillar entity or process?
What of its context? Has the stone flooring around it been adjusted and
completed to give us sure footing to enjoy the untouched column? Or is every
thing as it was, the archaeologist having left no stone unturned in the effort to
reveal the ruin as it first appeared? When might we say did it First appear as
ruin, for it may have endured numerous uses over the centuries before the cul
tural decision to preserve it as ruin?
We ask in words, but the stones remain silent. The ruin does not answer
these questions, nor need we do research upon them to properly enjoy the ruin.
It is enjoyable despite the questions. The ruin responds by shifting in our ex
perience. It springs forward and recedes under various identities. Liveliness of
the ruin accompanies the unclarity of its status. Indecisiveness, contradiction,
PI. 64. W orkers at Altun Ha, Belize, 2003

and incompletion fit the character of ruin. Surprise, contrast, and oddity are
built into the encounter with the broken-down. The ruin ruins plans and theo
ries, expectations and intentions, policies and purposes. These, in turn, contrib
ute to making or remaking the ruin. How frustrating not to be able to seize the
ruin itself, undisturbed by the processes of seizing! Do you seize what I mean?
The interaction of human value is inescapable to the ruin, no matter how
studiously we would value the ruin apart from any human contribution. We are
a process of the ruin. To step into the stream is to be part of the stream. We
have put our foot into it.
The ruin is in-between, eluding the roles we would have for it. The ruin
may be injured by what we do for it, enhanced by our act, or unchanged by it.
No telling how a ruin will behave! A guide to the beauties of ruins would be
self-contradictory. The ruin brusquely terminates our terminological logic. Re
store, repair, replicate, rebuild, replace, refrain, protect, stabilize, preserve,
excavate, discover, interpret run into another. We cannot keep our terms
straight. The ruin tramples upon our professional processes, skein of concepts,
flow of values. It makes ruins of everything we do.
I am pleased as Punch to confess that I have largely invented the vocabu
lary of this chapter. I have not drawn the meanings from dictionaries, those
monumental ruins of the language. Nor do I pretend to represent current usage
in ruin discourse (see the Bibliographical Essay, below). The terms that I have
discussed here I have twisted to fit distinctions drawn by my theorizing in this
book. Theory, based on experience, comes first, then it produces meaningful
terms. In doing this, theory also terminates many distinctions that others are in
clined to draw.
In the Cage
No terms in this field, or any field, are theoretically neutral. We do not

start with a mutually agreed-upon set of terms and then build divergent theories
upon them. Delusion to think so. Equally self-deceiving is to think that a theory
terminates in terms, so that an aesthetics of ruins aims to define the concept of
ruin. Definitions can be misleading. This was shown of the neo-Platonic defini
tion of a human being as a featherless biped, when Diogenes of Sinope trotted
out a plucked chicken to meet the philosophers. What a poultry human being
that was! A fowl trick.
This aesthetics is meant to drag you through the experience, kicking and
protesting as you might. The vocabulary only serves to make vocal the appeal
to insight. I have your insight in sight. Terminological discussions are intermi
nable, unless they reshuffle the terms to better fit the vision that lies just outside
words. The non-verbal guides our words.
The Punch line of the cartoon by Bud Handelsman that prefaces this
chapter reminds us that all terms are value-laden. If we speak, we cannot es
cape judging. Values, I must say, are always on the tip of our tongue.
Next let us speak of theories of ruin.
Sixteen
THEORIES OF RUIN
The pleasure of a ruin is to stimulate our imagination and reconstruct in
our mind’s eye the structure in its original state. The better we understand
the ruin (common sense or, if necessary, archaeology), the better the
imaginative reconstruction.
M. W. Thompson, Ruins: Their Preservation and Display (London:
British Museum Publications Limited, “A Colonnade Book,” 1981), p. 17.
But it is difficult to image the roof on, and the sky shut out. It all looks
right as it is; and one feels, somehow, that such columns should have
nothing between them and the infinite blue depths of heaven.
Amelia B. Edwards, of the Great Hall at Kamak, Egypt, A Thousand
Miles up the Nile (London: Century, 1989 [orig. pub. 1877]), p. 151.
The time has come to reassess the two grand aesthetic attitudes toward ruins.
Let us call them the Romantic and the Classical, though without tying them to
historical movements. I make my evaluation aesthetically, not historically. The
Romantic vision sees the ruin as remnant of an irrecoverable past and thereby
weighted with the burden of loss. The ruin teaches us that the past has slipped
through our hands. We possess its shadow, a broken image, fragments. The
passage of time has trod heavily upon the ruin. A lesson resides therein. We too
are subject to ruin. The reminder that all things pass away renders our present
sober/somber/solemn.
History is a procession of ruins. We are fragments for the future. The ruin
strikes the chord of melancholy. When we visit the ruin, we get away from the
world to get a glimpse of what the world was, hence of what it will be. Just as
the skull once functioned on the desk of a noble, so the ruin functioned on the
noble’s estate. Ruins are what become of the noblest efforts of mortals. Cities
tumble and civilizations crumble. Ruins, therefore, make us humble. The Earth
reclaims the world. The forces of nature outlast all human achievements.
The features of the ruin are vague. Their meaning irretrievable. No resto
ration is feasible. What we wander about, in wonder, is indecipherable. No tell
ing what went where or what it all meant. The original unity has forever fled.
The ruin is a stranger to the world, and, stranger still, we are strangers in the
world. Alienation is the ruin’s homeland.
Intrusions of nature aid the lack of clarity in unity, purpose, and function,
as at the Arab-African settlement, Gedi (from Galla: “precious”), built of stone
on the coast of the Indian Ocean in Kenya, and probably abandoned in the early
seventeenth century (PI. 65). In 1991, Gedi is disappearing, before our eyes,
into the jungle. It is inhabited by lush vegetation and gigantic millipedes, more
PI. 65. Gedi National Park, Swahili Coast, Kenya, 1991

Theories o f Ruin 317
pedestrian in form than centipedes. The great trees offer themselves as structur
al features of the ruin.
Nature breaks buildings and makes them ruins. Vegetation plays an essen
tial role in the Romantic vision, for the life of plants kills the art of human be
ings. The ruin is torn away from the human realm by the living force in nature,
just as earlier, humanity, in its independent constructions, vanquished nature.
All in vain. All in vine. In a different vein, ruin is revenge, the cosmic rebuff to
human pride. What we raise up shall be brought low. What we have taken from
the Earth will be retaken by the Earth. The ruin indistinguishably extinguishes
itself in nature.
The Romantic attitude is acutely sensitive to the weather and time of day.
Heavy dark clouds add to the fundamental obscurity and sadness of the scene.
Rain washes out form, drives the visitor to shelter, carries away material under
our feet, and lords it over the puniness of humanity. Rain is the stream of de
struction in which we and the ruin are caught.
The ruin is most itself at night. The night of time resides in its shell. It
draws the cloak of night tightly about its frail shoulders. At night, the ruin loses
its last vestiges of clarity and is totally invested with mystery. Moonshine is the
ruin’s destined lighting. The moon probes the ruin through the shroud of clouds
and the screen of trees. Magic beams illuminate partial structures and make sur
faces gleam. The ruin is a fantasy that dances in moonlight. Ruinmoon excites
wonder. Enthralled, we are captivated by inchoate feelings that come to light
like moonbeams and then sink behind the shadows of primitive walls. Shudder
with delight.
Sit Walter Scott instructs us, in “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805),
If thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright,

Go visit it by the pale moonlight; (Scott, 1899, Canto 2, st. 1, p. 11),
though the poet was to confess that he had not practiced at this Scottish border
abbey what he preached in his poetry. Great Scott!
The ruin in the Romantic attitude is a temple of reverie. Here we sit apart
from the world, while in the presence of its underlying flux. The ruin takes
shape from the flow of our associations and sentiments. It breaks open the gates
of the soul. Our inner life comes pouring out to fill it with our longing, dread,
sorrow, and unrequited love for life.
The visitor is lost in thought, absorbed by the scene. The stones find in us,
with the help of moonlight, a fellow ruin. The ruin is the reflection of the dark
night of the soul of which San Juan de la Cruz wrote.
Upon the melancholy grounds of the ruin comes the flight of the sublime.
We are uplifted by the revealing wing of moonbeam. The ruin is wonderfilled
with grandeur, and this has a mighty effect upon our sensibility. The ruin
sweeps us away out of the stream of time. Sadness bums away in the exhilarat
ing rise above the earth, as we dwell in the secrets of the min’s hopeless lon
gevity and nature’s irresistible insistence.
If we are to experience the height of the Romantic attitude, the min must
present to the studied gaze an ungraspable mystery purfled with associations of
the past and of the passing world. To see aesthetic unities of form and material
in one corner or another is to be distracted. To endeavor to reconstmct in imag
ination the missing whole is to set out on the wrong foot. The present whole in
its inescapably ruined state is stronger aesthetically than any part of it or any in
visibility of which it was once part.
Insofar as we can with ease concentrate on a charming part or envision the
totality of the original, then the ruin has lost its minedness. A min must be a
min. Yet wholeness emerges in the union of ourselves with it and with nature.
The dialectics of force speaks to the soul through the min. Unity experienced is
a breakthrough, fusing passion, not freeing form. The min liberates the soul
from the world by uniting them.
The min resists the clear eye of daylight but welcomes the blinding sun.
The oppressive shimmer of midday in jungle or desert brings out the inherent
exoticism of the ruin. The burning light burnishes the min’s secret life. This
initial strangeness of the min in which we are ill-at-home is necessary for that
ecstatic reversal in which the min finds its way to locked secrets of our heart.
We see the light within.
In the Romantic view, we do not need a guide to the min. To hear or read
about what is not there is absurd, when we can see for ourselves that it is not
there. What is there is the min of what was. We can visit it in our ambling steps
and wandering thoughts.
Let the min be the guide to the feelings within. If some feature is identifi
able as having been such-and-such, we might experience the huge irony of its
present minedness. We sit where emperors sat and gaze at the broken empti
ness where once cosmic celebrations filled the soul. “Lost, lost, lost,” murmurs
the min.
“Leonidas!”, cried Franôis-Rene de Chateaubriand, as he sat in the over
grown mins of Sparta in 1806, seeking the tomb of the King-General who had
held off the Persians at Thermopylae (480 BCE) on behalf of all the Greeks.
Chateaubriand was answered by the most laconic of expressions: silence
(Chateaubriand, 1946, p. 225).
“Chateaubriand!”, I cried in 1985 from the same spot and was answered
by the echo of the Romantic’s name (PI. 1). Sitting by my side at the site, Ellen,
my altar ego, and I soon forgot about the past, for the present, though occupied
by mins, was world enough for us.
Early in the nineteenth century, Casimir Delavigne expresses the shock of
finding the famous city utterly ruined (from French):
What city once covered these hills?

“Sparta,” replied my guide. Hold on!
these abandoned walls,
A few nameless stones,
some tombs, some ruins,
That is Sparta whose glory filled the world! (Delavigne, 1833, p. 76)
Delavigne issues a call to arms to Greece to liberate itself.

The ruins of Sparta, alas, are quite spartan. Visitors are free to make of
them what they seek. Or miss. Ruin as hide and seek, hit and miss, lost and
found, come and gone.
In Ankara (Ancyra, Angora), Turkey’s capital, a stork rests upon the Ro
man temple dedicated to the deified emperor Augustus, while a titanic doorway
serves as Framing Device (PI. 66). The wall bearing the nest presses forward
like the prow of a boat afloat in the blue. That ship is moored by a makeshift
wall of filler. The wall to our right is another towering projection in the blind
ing sun, but a selection of capitals brought low are arrayed at its feet.
In 1965, amid the stark, dizzying, yet august, forms, the alienating scale,
and the crowning incongruity, we are about to reach ecstasy or else collapse in
the heat of 43° Centigrade (110° Fahrenheit).
Incongruity crowns all ruins, for they are human constructions at the mer
cy of nature’s destructivity. We must experience every ruin in its natural con
text, for each is being drawn down into the earth. All ruins point sadly to our
destiny. We are doomed.
Ruins of least value to the Romantic attitude are those that are neat, clean,
devoid of vegetation, carefully signposted, outfitted with organization by
means of walkways, endowed with large intact features, caused by human
agency, reconstructable in mind, set in ordinary fields or streets, and cursed
with clear skies or gentle climate. These things ruin the ruin by civilizing it.
The ruin reclaimed from destruction is the ruin lost.
Nature must have its way, else we cannot leap to its secret sway over the
soul. The ruin must be immune to the full grasp of knowledge, else it cannot
keep its secrets. Science kills mystery. In a world of scientific mastery over na
ture, the ruin remains a bastion of mystery and a lesson of nature’s mastery
over humanity. Don’t inform me about the ruin! Let it form itself about me.
The Classical vision of the ruin, the other attitude that I am placing on the
dissecting table of philosophy, sees the remnants as the valuable parts that sug
gest the whole retrievable on site by the activation of disciplined imagination.
The original, fortunately, is not lost, precisely because its remains are still with
us. The ruin wins out over time, nature, neglect, and destruction. Do inform me
about the ruin! Knowledge helps imagination. Imagination helps understanding.
Understanding helps recognition. Recognition helps self-knowledge.
PL 66. Temple of Augustus and Rome, Ankara, Turkey, 1965

The ruin retains the past in the continuity of its stones. The primary emo
tive provocation caused by the ruin is curiosity, the desire to know.
Archaeoinquiry
Who built it?

When?
For what purpose?
How did they do it?
What happened here?
Who destroyed it?
Why?
What is left of it?
How did it function?
Where is the rest of it?
What more can we find out about it?
The ruin challenges us to unravel its secrets. We need a clear eye to do

this and bright weather. We unearth the ruin, saving it from extinction. The ruin
is liberated from destruction. We reclaim it and its past as ours. The ruin is
made whole by our desire to make a whole out of the passage of humanity. The
ruin defies the stream of time.
The Classical view is guided by the imaginative projection of the original
that precedes our encounter with the remnants. Before we get to the site, we
have in sight the reconstructed model, the graphic representation of what it
must have been, the plans and descriptions and narratives. We see the ruin
through the Totaling Eye that fits the fragmented visible into a vision of the in
visible whole.
Imagination is an inveterate reconstructer. It completes the visible sugges
tions with comprehensive projections. While we are in the ruin, our mind con
stantly goes beyond the ruin, by tracing and applying a whole not immediately
apparent. The result of our day’s experience in the ruin is further awareness of
the whole, gratifying recognition of the original, though it is far from intact.
We do a lot of work in the ruin, according to the Classical attitude. Scien
tific knowledge is the biggest resource for fitting together the pieces of the puz
zle in imagination. “Tell us more!’’, we insist of the ruin.
Consider how the extensive ruins of the Gallo-Roman fortified town of
Alesia (Alise-Sainte-Reine), France, that fell, with Gaul, to Julius Caesar’s ar
mies (52 BCE), are alive with agile forms that address one another (PI. 67). The
pillar has nothing to hold up, and barely does it hold on to its head, but it makes
a good stand, coming at the end of a horizontal line of stone. That line, slightly
above ground level, is paralleled by the opening downward whose entrance is
guarded by two single blocks of different size but equal character. The Line of
Destruction, which breaks into regular pattern, sits atop a stone wall and before
another, edged with larger blocks. The arch below is a happy form that carries
the life of the ruin to further depth. Pink gravel, tastefully laid upon the floor of
the ruin, softens its bareness. Growth on the stone—lichen or not—provides
maturity for a ruin which, in 1989, is still emerging from the hill.
Archaeologists in France, stimulated by a commitment of Napoleon III,
are keen to learn more of the extensive site and indigenous culture, the Gallic
roots to the subsequent Latinate development. In the “Gallo-Roman” conjunc
tion, the glory of the “Gallo” is due its share.
Knowledge of the construction of what is in ruin, its history, and its mate
rials gives us the field upon which to work imaginatively. Knowledge of other
works of the same time may prove decisive in our conception of the one we
visit. We can fill in by imagination the missing roofs and shattered walls, be
cause we have seen these parts in similar works. We may have seen one of the
series with intact upper parts. One ruin reconstructs another. Each is a piece in
the whole of a civilization. We study the background of that civilization to bet
ter understand, explore, apply, and envision.
The ruin is an invitation to imaginative precision. We savor the likelihood
of being right. Mysteries dissolve before our imagination. The ruin comes back
to life. We participate in its originality. All is not lost. The mute stones speak!
As we listen, we must control our responses, not letting imagination run away
with ourselves. The distractions of the fractured and the incidentals of the ac
cidents should not overcome our attentiveness to the essential.
Interpreting the ruin is a challenge to intellectual detective-work. The ruin
is the dismembered corpse that has been uncovered. The detective seeks the
missing parts of the body, to identify it, including its name, age, and occupa
tion, and even to deduce the cause of its death. For the essentials of ruin, the fo
rensics of ruin. Each ruin harbors a story. We enjoy the exercise of skills that
piece together the story. Sometimes, a structure was a ruin when left to the ele
ments. Hence, we discover the ruin instead of the original, though the ruin sug
gests the story of its original.
We must not allow sadness caused by what the original has suffered to in
terfere with the uplifting experience of regaining the original. The ruin raises
our spirits, as we raise the original from its ruin. When we come to the convinc
ing experience of the whole, we are released from the world’s temporal and
material limits.
Sublimity is the result. We fly up beyond the remains that are fixed to
Earth and soar in the imagination’s world of unimaginable perfection. The ruin
transports us to the ecstasy of ex-temporal completion in union with the won
derful original.
The worst ruins, from the Classical point of view, are those overgrown
with vegetation that conceals their identity and spoils the spaces integral to
their structure, and those of which so little remains or is known that we cannot
make anything of them. But we can cut back the vegetation. It is no legitimate
part of the ruin. And we may dig further to learn more of the unknown frag
ments. Even sparse remains can be the springboard for extensive imaginative
reconstructions.
History and art history are the supporting players for the Classical ap
proach. Pleasure occurs at each advance in recognition, each restitution of what
had been obscured or buried. The Classical attitude is a great supporter of ar
chaeology as science: “Get in there and dig!”, it cheers.
Excavation—elevating extraction—is elation. Enjoyment of the ruin is in
tune with the fundamental wish of our psyche to find ourselves immune to
death. Archaeology addresses itself to the longing of the soul. It brings the
buried to rebirth. It allows the completeness of what had been destroyed to
grow in imagination .
The comfort of the archaeological experience is that one day someone
might make something whole out of the remaining pieces of our material ef
forts. When we destroy ourselves by an incineration so intense that few walls
will remain standing, the foundations of who we were may yet be traceable for
thousands of years by extraterrestrians. The last comforting thought of the hu
man species. (But see Section 6, “World Destruction” of “Meditations on Hu
manity, Self, and the World as Ruins,” Chapter Nineteen, below.)
The Classical attitude is fond of plans, models, replicas, reconstruction-
drawings. It inclines toward repair, preservation, restoration. If we can put back
the fallen pieces or insert substitutes with accuracy, then we should do so on
behalf of the ruin. No advantage in leaving the ruin exactly as we found it,
when our interest is in the original exactly as it was. Most of the time, we rely
on sketching and imagining how we think it was instead of playing around with
the loose stones. We must take no license with the remains. These are to be
strictly governed by the state of our scientific knowledge. We may patch things
up only when we are sure.
I have roughly sketched the two attitudes, Romantic and Classical, to
make them stand at opposite extremes. The Romantic view stresses the deep
well of feeling that the ruin arouses in the visitor and that sets the mood of ru
ins. The Classical view aims at the objective features of the ruin that clear
headed thinking and solid information may address. The Classical is more intel
lectual and formal. The Romantic is more emotive and nonformal. This is the
reason for my choice of the two traditional labels for our discussion of attitudes
to ruins.
The Classical calls for clarity in sight, the Romantic for vagueness in site.
The Classical approach aims to disengage the human-made from the natural
elements and forces. The Romantic approach insists on facing the destruction
wrought by nature upon the human-made. To one, the murkiness of weather fits
the mood of the ruin perfectly. To the other, such weather menaces the mental
reconstruction of the ruin. The Romantic does not call for further digging. The
ruin suffices in its half-covered state. The Classicist favors further delving, un
til every stone left appears. One shudders with affront at the presence of a tree
on top of the wall. The other shivers in delight at the sight.
The two approaches take up opposed positions on the question of original
unity. For the Romantic, that unity is forever gone. This is the meaning of the
ruin. If the unity were still there, the ruin would not be a ruin. If the unity is
imaginable, then we are not experiencing the ruin as a ruin. For the Classicist,
original unity is gone but imaginable. This is the challenge of the ruin. Because
it is a ruin, it provokes us to grasp its wholeness.
Both positions, however, overlook the unity of the ruin, which may be
present without reference to the original.
The two attitudes have features in common. Both call for activation of the
visitor’s imagination, though the path of imaginative involvement sharply di
verges. The Romantic imagination appears wild to the Classicist. The Classical
imagination seems pale and overcast with thought to the Romantic. Both aim at
deep-seated feelings embedded in our longing. Each is a conquest of our de
struction, the one by adhering to the mind’s reconstructive power, the other by
embracing nature’s destructive power.
Each recognizes an aesthetics of ruins. The Romantic enjoyment, filled
with associations, is a grave musing, colored by climatic conditions and twist
ing vegetation. The Classical pleasure, backed by information, is a delighted
recognition and projection, accompanied by clarity of vision and directness of
evidence. Each ultimately leads beyond the beautiful to the sublime. Union is
achieved with the glowing whole of the human-made, which stands over
against (gegeniiber again) nature, or else with the force which is the organic
whole that overcomes everything human.
The two ways of experiencing are attitudes that blend into theory. The
Greek theoria is no idle construction of the intellect. It is a way of seeing, a
view upon things. A theory represents what we observe in the theater of the
world. Two theories of Being arise from the ruins. The Classical theory sees
form as winning out against flux, thanks to human effort. The act of mind di
rected to the flow of Being is the victory of form, the identifiable, transmittable,
meaningful, ideal, enduring.
The Romantic theory sees flux as sweeping away all form, including hu
man form. Being’s organic power is ever-mutable, and it reaches to the depths
of the human mind. The inchoate, transmutable, mysterious, processional are
the victory over category, form, concept, and commitment.
Creativity, Romantically conceived, is the force of Becoming, hence, of
destruction. Classically conceived, creativity is the forming of the Ideal, hence,
of the indestructible. The Classicist leaps in fulfillment beyond the world to

what escapes change but is manifest in human striving. The Romantic plunges
beneath the surface of the world to the changing from which nothing escapes
and which is evident in ourselves. Mathematics is the model for Classicism; bi
ology for Romanticism.
Both theories exult in a union possible between humanity and that greater
grounds of Being. More than a way of seeing Being, each is a way of being Be
ing. These are world-views, not just views of art and ruins. People bring a view
of the world to the world of the ruin and oblige the ruin to match the image,
dance to the tune, and speak the terms of a preferred theory.
The two theories are antithetical. They repel each other and cannot be rec
onciled. We cannot maintain them both simultaneously. But we are contradic
tory and fickle beings. Experience is richer than theory. In the blink of an eye,
another way of seeing may come into being. Attitudes may alternate, notably,
with changes in the weather. Whether we are to seek the original whole or
wholly abandon it may hinge on a passing cloud.
Thus, Hamlet, playing with Polonius:
Ham. Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

Pol. By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.
Ham. Methinks it is like a weasel.
Pol. It is backed like a weasel.
Ham. Or like a whale?
Pol. Very like a whale. (Hamlet, Shakespeare, 1963, Act 3, sc. 2, pp.
271-272)
Sudden switches spring forth, attesting to the ruin’s vitality. The ruin is
able to change our mind. We are of several minds with respect to the ruin. The
ruin chooses its theory among them to fit its passing fancy.
We may start as strict reconstructionists, only to discover the endeavor’s
hopelessness, as we are swept away in the irretrievability that underlies every
thing. The vegetation we sought to block out of mind so insists on its connec
tion to the ruin that we forget the invisible original to follow the lead of this liv
ing destruction. While absorbed in the place’s mystery and nature’s mightiness,
our eye may be caught by the structures that suggest a formal or functional
completion within grasp of the imagination. The original rises out of destruc
tion’s hands. The two theories compete in experience with the theatrics of cos
mic positions. Each is a metaphysical response to the spectacle of Being.
In their theoretical and experiential extensions, the Romantic and Classi
cal views miss something in the ruin: its integrity, centrality to our encounter,
and aesthetic substantiality. Both views banish the ruin by being systematically
blind to it. The Classicist refuses to see what is there, in the act of imagining
what is not there. The Romantic resists close scrutiny of what is there but sees
something else that is there.
In place of the ruin, the Classicist is concerned with the original. In place
of the ruin, the Romantic is concerned with the destruction. The exact configu
ration of the ruin is of no matter to the Romantic, as long as it is ruined. The
cloak of obscurity improves the quality of any ruin. The Classicist cares for the
exact features and forms of the ruin only insofar as they point to imaginary
completion. Every ruin would be improved by having more of its stones put
back in place.
But the ruin defeats attitudes and ruins expectations. A preponderance of
interest exists in the exact forms and structures that appear for us, for what ex
ists is insistent. The presence of form outweighs its lingering absence. The
quality of material radiates a vitality that overcomes the ravages of destruction.
The Classical approach is wrong in putting the imaginary whole above the ruin,
for the ruin, as whole, has greater imaginative power. The Romantic approach
is wrong in putting the felt destruction of the whole above the ruin, for we feel
the ruin, a whole, with creative force. Both views are mistaken in their lack of
interest in the ruin’s unity.
A more serviceable aesthetics of ruins takes its position between the ex
tremes of Romanticism and Classicism. Our intellectual habit of building ex
tremes allows us to bring them to ruin, thereby revealing the advantageous
identity of what we favor to begin with.
Reason’s surest strategy is to first build the extremes to our unexpressed
insight, then set them in conflict to show the error of their ways, each to under
mine the other, until they cannot withstand the cracks, and so bring them down
and let be seen what we had in mind. The right view sets itself comfortably in
the ruins, building upon the smashed extremes. Give us not sound theories to
extend but unsound ones to salvage!
For a change of pace, I have given you the right view first, in the preced
ing chapters, while in this chapter I construct the hypothetical theories that it
would replace. Honest sophistry.
Like the Classicist, we ask for a clear eye under a clear sky. But we wish
to experience what we see, not to move imaginatively to what is unseen. Like
the Classicist, we are willing to spend hours in the exploration of the ruin’s de
tails. The Classicist, however, is busy integrating each discovery into a concep
tion of how it all was, while we are discovering the aesthetic integrity of the
unity that is. The Classicist uses the ruin, while we are absorbed by it. The
Classicist comes to the site with a head full of ruin-information. We head for
the site with a heart open to the ruin in-formation.
Like the Romantic, we appreciate the vegetation and the working of other
natural elements, but we are drawn to examine their precise contribution to for
mal and textural values. In 1967, the tree that I saw standing in the wall at Res-
tenneth Priory, Scotland, had just the right mass and height to balance the de
tached tower and the line of remaining walls. Wall, tower, and tree participated
formally. The disclosure of that balance determined the point at which we stop
or take a picture. For the Romantic, any tree growing anywhere suffices, since
it expresses the intrusive voice of nature.
Like the Romantic, we are sensitive to the structures without function and
to the incongruities of the ruin. Yet these may add to formal pleasure or intro
duce amusement instead of reinforcing a somber lesson for our edification
about the passing of human edifices. The Romantic has a sharp interest in the
phenomena of weather, and so do we, but we wish to see how these conditions
clarify the ruin’s particularities, instead of obscuring them. Like the Romantic,
we are open to feeling and are willing to sit in silent contemplation. But we see
and feel configurations and qualities of this one ruin, not necessarily of some
cosmic process.
The Romantic view is right in drawing us to the destructive process pres
ent in the ruin. Destructivity here does not only destroy; it also constructs unity.
The Romantic attention to the aging, decay, and deterioration is in the right
spirit. But let us not dismiss as an aesthetic loss the parts so affected/afflicted,
for they may flourish in texture or pattern thanks to such activities.
The Romantic vision captures the symbolic power of ruins, though it
would turn all ruins to symbols of the same destiny. We profit from this vision
in learning of the process whereby affective meaning is invested in some, not
all, ruins.
The Classical view is right that the imagination projects structure and pat
tern that we encounter. We can enjoy the thrust of forms, outreach of patterns,
and implications of space as part of the aesthetic material before us, without
conceiving of their materialization. We sense the bust’s missing nose, though
we do not picture it. The faith of the Classical theory, that not all is lost in a
ruin, is justified. The ruin still lives, though not the original, and the ruin repays
detailed exploration.
Classical attention to form is fitting, though we must be willing to greet
the forms within the ruin and not perpetually seek the form of the original. Be
cause of information gathered by Classicists, we may better detect incongruities
in the ruin or come to accept some ruins for their symbolic significance.
Both positions find beauties in our visit to the ruin, though for each the
beauty is but one kind of progressive discovery: the advance to the reconstruc
tion in mind or the destruction in nature. Many kinds of beauty subsist in the
ruin. These may not be related in a whole. The ruin often is of pluralistic tem
perament. Yet unity may evolve in the ruin. This unique irreducibility is not the
original nor the inchoate.
Both positions aim above the head of beauty, at the sublime. We can ex
perience the sublime in some ruins, just as in some artworks and works of na
ture. The sublime comes with more ease and frequency according to the two
theories than according to their replacement, which you have been patiently
reading. This throws doubt on the replacement. Such imperfections threaten to
ruin my theory.
We value theories more for the goods to which they give access than for
their veracity. An exaggerated account that promises much may have more aes
thetic value than the exact analysis that promises little. The attraction of sub
limity speaks more or less in favor of adopting one or other of the extreme
theories. What does theory matter, if we can reach the sublime?
The Classical and Romantic theories are not so much analytical tools as
springboards for experiencing. They are strategic commitments to ulterior pur
poses and prescriptions for ecstasy. Each theory finally gets away from the
ruin. The sublime arises for them despite the ruin. Yet, if we stick to the ruin,
we may well experience the sublime, though the ruin is responsible for the un
premeditated strategy that brings that result.
In that case, sublimity is in the ruin. We are in the ruin. We and ruin unite.
In that ruinunion is sudden freedom, joy, and might. But do not expect that
each ruin is destined to afford this delight beyond delight. The sublime by na
ture is unusual.
Since the Romantic and Classical theories are the attitudes of opposed
temperaments both directed toward the sublime, then to develop an attitude to
enhance a temperament of ruins that may also lead to the sublime is feasible.
What we would look to is the character of the theorist, not the character of the
theory. What disposition in accordance with the proper aesthetics of ruins will
lead to increase in ecstasy? A sublime question.
The Classical and Romantic views are attached to a philosophic value that
goes beyond aesthetics. They are too eager to suspend aesthetics or point it to
ward service for a more profound purpose. Both are correct that the ruin invites
reflection, is filled with meaning, exhibits relationship to nature and surround
ing world, is subject to irony and poignancy, and can stand as symbol. The re
laxing disorder of the ruin enhances meditation. Seated in the human-made,
though out in nature, we have the occasion to ponder humanity and nature,
form and flux, time and moment.
We may come to the ruin to philosophize. But the site of our reflection
need not be what our reflection has in sight. Or, we can choose to meditate
upon ruins instead of experience the ruin in which we are present. The ruin may
be used as metaphysical metaphor. Rumination upon ruins may take them as re
flections of larger matters. (See the “Meditations” of Chapter Nineteen, below.)
Yet in taking the ruin as springboard for a whole line of meditation, we ought
not abandon the joys in the ruin’s line of wholes upon which a modest aesthet
ics wishes to throw light.
Classicist and Romantic take ruins with enormous seriousness. For this,
we are grateful. The central insight of the Classicist, which we wish to retain, is
the life of form. But the invisible form of the original does not interest us. The
many visible forms of the ruin are worth independent attention. Not just in the
ruin, but throughout the world, are we enjoyers of form. The human is a
formal—formative—being. Formidable formanimal!
The central insight of the Romantic, to which we cling, is the mystery in
the ruin. But the secret of unidentifiable remnants or the mystery of natural pro
cess does not attract us. Mystery resides in the vitality of the ruin, its organic
vigor, and life of unities. Throughout the world, in many kinds of things and
experiences, we may enjoy the springing forth of unity, which is mystery. To
be human is to live in the mystery of Being.
Sunset enters the ruins of a mansion designed by America’s first great ar
chitect, Thomas Jefferson, at Barboursville, Virginia (PI. 68). Destroyed by
fire, on Christmas day, 1884, the house was neither totally pulled down nor re
stored. The Jeffersonian ruins are wisely left alone. The fire of the setting sun
tests classical pillars of the missing portico, the gentle/genteel presence of
Greece in Virginia. The massiveness of human shelter is present on the right,
while towering above the capitals is a profusion of natural dendritic forms. The
portico held aloft this evening in 1969 is the glowering sky and a wild growth
of branches.
The large tree to the left has its start much as another pillar, and its com
panion has so blended into the first pillar that the upper parts burst out of that
pillar. The natural form imitates the human-made, the human-made imitates the
natural. The autumnal hush steals upon us, as we stand in darkness, awaiting
the extinguishing of the world’s last light. The darkness of forms is alive with
connected intensity. The ground enters upward into the heroic standing figures,
flies out to the horizon, and stands under us, human beings watching a sunset.
Aesthetics is the art of detecting, analyzing, and elucidating the workings
of form and mystery in art and life. It puts its clinical hands on vital parts. It
dissects the seamless and dismantles the moment. But it invariably falls short as
knowledge, since form and mystery unite as an irreducible whole. We cannot
split the atoms of aesthetic experience.
Aesthetic theories built carefully on the best of ruins of other theories are
due themselves to crumble. The field of aesthetics is strewn with ruins. This
book could be titled The Ruins of Aesthetics.
Experience is an accomplished miner of theory. The aesthetic, as I have
observed throughout the ups and downs of my career, has a way of triumphing
over aesthetics.
Whatever the net of our attitudes and the strategy of our approaches, the
wonder of form and mystery elude them. Intellectual work is often inspired by
the Classical vision of perfectly reconstructing in mind what takes place in ex
perience. Theory builds castles in the air, while the river of life runs on. This
llworics o/ Rum 331
PI. 68. Mansion, Burboursvillc, Virginia, USA, 1969

theoretical construction too shall pass away. Reader, you have been wandering
the chambers of a condemned edifice. This has been a falsification of ruins, a
ruining of truth. Systematic deception is a hallmark of sound theory, for a con
sistent perspective necessitates disciplined selection. A theory is the ruin of
fered by the mind in place of the truth.
What theory would you apply to a ruin that you suddenly encounter? Take
the ruin in the Egyptian desert offered in Plate 69. What do you make of it the
oretically? What would you ask of it that would account for whatever aesthetic
value it might have?
Tell me, for a change, what you see. Or what you don’t see. Don’t trust
me. Let me get out of your way. You deserve a chance in this book!
When I had my chance to build theory, I saw that the Romantic vision
would dash the works of intellect and leave us in primitive wonder. Its art is to
evoke and point to, not to analyze or reconstruct. Between the sentiments and
the substance is the gap. We are obliged to leap over it.
Evocation is the art of overcoming the brokenness of experience. It seeks
to make whole again. This it does, not with concern for the whole which is the
ory, but for the whole which is insight. Give the reader but a convincing
glimpse, and the fullness of experience may appear through that hole. The evo
cation of ruins is an invitation to enter them experientially.
My challenge has been to induce in you the insight that breaks through the
accumulation of expectation and immunization of theory. Thus, I have played
upon language to disarm you. You have been the target of the thrusts of words
that take advantage of your trust to slip beneath your guard. I have dragged you
to the edge of the subject to push you over into experience. You have been the
victim of the expedition.
You cannot get to ruins themselves through this project which insists that
we cherish ruins for themselves. This book, I confess, has the shortcoming of
being a book. Ruins exist without books. The Romantic attitude tells us that the
truth-seeking projects of the intellect finally conceal the truth from the seeker.
No book can succeed in bringing to its reader the full experience of which
it talks. Discourse is a ruin. Words cannot say exactly what we feel, nor can
they make us feel it. You can take my word for that! To read this book is to
miss what it is about. The ruins lie without. The experience is buried within.
Every book is a ruin. To write one on the aesthetics of ruins is to compound ab
surdity. To read one on the aesthetics of ruins is to waste your time. But please
don’t quote me on that.
The truth makes its belated appearance amid the collapse of our futile ef
forts! But when truth is at stake, better late than too early.
We are left with ruins. These ruins have been built on theories which in
turn were built on ruins. You are welcome to build further from what is lying
at your feet. The failures of the intellect are the fuel of the intellect, and there-
Theorie s of Ruin m
PI. 69. Fragments in the Desert, Egypt, 1990

fore, finally, are not failures. Success in thinking often requires succession,
picking up the pieces of prior thought and carrying them forward to make
another unity.
Fig. 8. Norman Castle, Clonmacnoise, Ireland, 1999
The subject has been ruined for you, so that you, too. may enter it and
take a hand. Reach out, tear down what is offered you here! Shatter this book
into endless pieces. Vent your dissatisfaction. Taste the satisfaction of reducing
all to ruins. And as you face the attraction of rebuilding theory, keep an eye on
the ruining power of your senses.
Seventeen
THE RUINING EYE-AND OTHER SENSES

An intact building is a pre-ruin.
Adam Gurvitch, 2002
We may turn the eye attuned to the pleasure of ruins to exercise its vision with
aesthetic profit elsewhere. If we have learned to look at the ruin in its unity,
without any care for the unity of the original, then we may look at a feature of
any kind of work for the sake of that part, with its unity, regardless of its role in
the intact whole. The Ruining Eye makes visual excerpts, redeems worthwhile
sections from mediocre wholes, and wrests aesthetic satisfaction from dullness.
Where no ruins exist, the eye selects them to enjoy their presence.
If you are counseled to envision the invisible originals during a visit to ru
ins, you would find this a difficult act for the imagination. But now that you are
being asked to envision the visible parts of intact works as if ruins, this comes
easier to the imagination. The eye is obliged to be selective when it encounters
large, complicated, and unclear things. It acts to seize upon unity in its field,
before it completes the examination of the outlay of the work that takes much
time. Eye is a unifier. We seek the whole in the work and are dissatisfied if it is
frequently put off, thoroughly concealed, or entirely absent. The eyes have it.
“Give us unity,” demand our eyes, “or else we will make you into ruins!”
The Ruining Eye is the faculty of enjoying nonexistent ruins, without
making them physical remains. No need to tear down a stupid building to high
light what it imprisons of aesthetic merit. Just concentrate on its lovely door
way and let the rest recede from consciousness. Set the whole aside in the act of
seeing the part as a whole. The eye has this destructive might in which the
imagination takes delight. A skillful way of not seeing. To not see what is there
is easier than to see what is not there. For the activity of not seeing follows
upon the activity of concentrated seeing. See what I mean?
Selection that has found aesthetic unity makes a whole spring forward out
of the background that we no longer see for itself. The Ruining Eye is a conso
lation in a world of unsatisfactory things upon which we cannot shut our eyes.
No longer need we dread strolling down dull streets, because they will offend
our sensibility. Instead, we may look forward to the jaunt as an exercise of our
Ruining Eye. We may make agreeable discoveries in these drab, undecayed,
tasteless facades. The eye plucks a jewel out of what offends it.
We may appreciate a single stone for its pure materiality, while it sits in a
building. No need to wait until it has fallen as a ruin. The visual excerpt may be
a form, not the form of the building, but a form held captive by the building.
The eye liberates the form, despite the building. The eye may select a function
for its energetic design. Thus, a door may be more expressive of its service to
PI. 70. Stairs of the Knights of St. John, Rhodes, Greece, 1974
human activity than anything else in the building. We can take our stroll among
doors, or keep our eye on steps, instead of bothering with the houses to which
they are attached.
In 1974, sunlight treads the Medieval steps worn by the passing to and fro
of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem in the city of Rhodes (Gr.: “rose”) of
the Dodecanesian isle of that florid name, in Greece (PI. 70). Time marches on.
Mind your step! Odd that the left block is unworn on the lower three steps. This
suggests that they have been replaced. The same fate awaits the fourth step.
The worn-out stones may be disposed of and replaced by substitutes, without
diminishing the character of the whole. The eye, carrying our weight, moves
from the right center of the lower steps to the left. The parallels of the straight
blocks on the left are offset in the rhythm above of gently scooped stairs.
A staircase of stone is built to be worn out. The sides naturally are higher,
as they fit with tension against the walls. If we narrow our eyes in the Rhodian
sunlight, then we are mounting the darkness by means of shimmering flexed
beams whose highest band is ornamented with crumpled paper.
The Ruining Eye likes to light upon entertaining incongruities. Thus, in
American residential districts, the entrance ways may feature a Colonial door
with Victorian knocker, Philippine door-mat, rustic mailbox, Gothic numerals,
New England lantern, modern security chain, and antiqued placard: “The
Joneses.” Take a picture of all that with your eyes.
Constant amusing contrast plays between replicas of style and adaptations
of convenience, such as the television aerials that clutter the roof above the sup
posed terminus of the ornate 1850 cornice, the 1900 bay window with the
window air-conditioner stuck in it, the 1950 gingerbread detail of the side en
trance, blocked by the 2000 overflowing garbage containers and piles of wood.
Absurdities of treatment or neglect can become enjoyable, such as the
wood-frame dwelling whose walls are covered with aluminum siding or simu
lated brick shingles, while at the corners, at the roof line, or at the back porch,
the structure underneath peeks through to grin at its improvement. The resi
dents cannot see the detail that calls out to our eye, because they are absorbed
in the whole. The whole means nothing to us. In seven seconds, we have
walked past it forever. We are an anonymity in the world of the uninteresting.
For a moment, though, we stop, and the world comes alive.
At a house of immaculate brickwork and uniform shingling, a bird enters
the attic through a hole near the roofs pinnacle. The seamless construction,
maintained with care and pride, has one flaw. There in the awkward corner is
space enough for another bird to enter. We forget about the shape of the wind
ows, the size of the porch, the style of the brickwork. All that counts is that
sharp angle that harbors life. The solidity of the wall, thrust of the point, accen
tuated altitude contrast with the feathered form, worm in beak.
The Ruining Eye may detect decay that turns out delightful. The occa-
sional patch of fallen plaster, peeling paint, and cracked stone can relieve the
monotony of ordinary construction. Not the wall in its implacable dullness, but
the imperfection in its enlivening presence strikes the eye.
No respecter of the integrity of works, the Ruining Eye cuts across from
one building to another. The profile of ordinary houses seen seriatim from the
end of the street may produce gratifying patterns of porches, railings, and fore
shortened facades. The Ruining Eye frees each building from itself. Elements
in proximity conjoin. A little of this with a little of that sweeten the sourround-
ings to make a unity with a whole lot of interest. Context is cut up into pieces
that congeal with pieces of other works to work together. The eye remakes the
world given to it. Vision creates revision. Revision recreates vision.
By moving along, the eye discovers unity. The seen changes orientation,
things shift relationship, and framing comes to aid selection. Because the eye in
movement suddenly detects pleasure, the liveliness of the unifying process con
trasts with the static dullness of the building. The frames offered by trees and
shrubbery, railings and street furnishings, and the adjacent structures supports a
ruining examination of a work that hits us in the eye.
Do we see any building whole and at once? Is not every extensive work of
architecture or engineering approached initially with a partial vision framed by
its surroundings, natural or human? The whole we appreciate may come into
experience only after its introduction as visual ruins. We press on to get to the
celebrated work in its entirety, not trusting our glimpses of it on the way, con
taminated as they are by other things. Why not stop a moment and accept what
we see, such as the window framed by these screening trees, or the emphasis on
the entrance way engendered by the engaging view from the energetic gate.
Most of the enjoyable partial views are accidental, some are retained upon
discovery, a few may be intentionally devised. The sightseer who wishes no
trees were in the way, no other buildings on the street, no fence fencing in, and
even no active street, so that just the treasure may be experienced fully and di
rectly, misses some of the treasure.
If the Ruining Eye is satisfied when applied to the object of presumed aes
thetic excellence, it will be pleased when turned to what is not expected to
please. In that case, the discovered framing saves us the unwelcome view of the
whole. This masking of the ugly permits the otherwise unnoticed beauty to ap
pear. Framing is gratuitous unity. Welcome it with gratitude. The eye that
moves, the frame that appears excite the imagination.
We have become partial to the partial view thanks to the Photographic
Vision. Photography of famous places has one eye for the Total View and
another for the partial view. We have two eyes in our camera, and in our head.
The total view in the brochures, guidebooks, and postcards may be the one we
cannot have, for it requires taking to the air or waiting for the season without
foliage, traffic, and visitors. Ideal pictures, they stick in the mind as the true
identity of the place, even if we could never see it in exactly that way. If the
publisher can print only one shot in the book or brochure, or if we have re
solved to purchase only one postcard, then this total image imposes itself. The
full frontal view unimpeded by landscaping, street furnishings, or tour buses.
Every Scottish ruin that sells postcards is sure to have one Total View tak
en from an aircraft. This satisfies our wish to see it all and grasp it all in our
hand. The one view I am sure to buy, for it helps unify experience in recollec
tion. Yet this is a formal layout that we cannot see from the ground. Ruins from
Above should be published as a multi-volume, global, photographic project. My
camera is ready!
We may observe the non-professional photographers who arrive at a site
on the tour bus struggle with getting it all in. I have been planning a documen
tary film of this amusing movement. Often, they beat a retreat to obtain that
distance from which to see the whole. We can hear them denounce intervening
buses, trees, buildings, and people. A tourist’s life is not an easy one. Fortu
nately, the gift shop will have the Total View for sale. We can all bring home
the simulacrum of our pilgrimage.
The full view of any ruin is only of one dimension. Not the whole, but the
principal part. We need the sides and rear to make the whole. From endless per
spectives, we can see the work, so that it decidedly has infinite sides. Henri
Bergson made this observation about scientific knowledge of objects. The Total
View is an illusion.
We are left with the admittedly partial view. In the pictures we take or
purchase, we seek framing that introduces local color or national context. The
image then aspires to the quintessence of the culture. Olive trees embellish the
view of the Acropolis, street lamps and cobblestones embroider the edges of
the French cathedral, cherry blossoms emblazon the monuments in Washington
to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. These views are widely avail
able, and the visitor may directly encounter them.
The more practiced photographer shoots through the trees, fence, street, or
even the other people, to form a pretty picture of the object by means of the
compositional frame. As some of the tourists run away from the entrance to get
that impossible shot of the whole, their fellow travelers rush to right and left of
the gate to frame some part.
Let us suppose them all to have taken their pictures and entered the
grounds. Close to the sight, they walk around it. What do they see? The whole
disclosing itself in movement through space that takes time? Perhaps. More
likely, they see the several wholes that suddenly disclose themselves entirely
yet disparately. The significant detail causes visitors to pause. The proof is the
taking of a picture. Our eyes follow the camera’s mind. Our attention is drawn
to excellent shots. The camera-I is a Ruining Eye par excellence.
Photography is an art of making ruins, for it isolates in unity the part, the
detail, the unconnected. Photography has made us see windows and doors. It
shows us faces and hands. Photography interrupts reality to make permanent its
vision. This is a universal miner of things. The camera is unity in search of the
world. The photograph enlarges the unity, bringing it forward out of the stream
of reality. This may be further enlarged in the darkroom, cropped, and brushed
out at the edges, the physical reshaping of something into a whole. Nowadays,
PI. 71. Roman Amphitheater, Carnuntum, Austria, 1963
you can do this in a lighted room, electronically, with digital images and a
desk-top printer. Photography salvages reality by slicing into it and bringing
back meaningful pieces that fill the moment.
Of Carnuntum, in Austria, the photograph clips what is scene at the Ro
man Amphitheater in the act of composition that replaces min by landscape (PI.
71). The image produced is a balance of forms and tonalities in which the
subject matter of the photograph, the ruin along the Danube, matters less than
the visual design of the photograph as object.
Photography is a refined instrument of art and a popular machine for
transforming the world. A ray gun with which the traveler is armed in expedi
tions into the world. It preserves us from being swamped by the flux. It turns
out solid stepping-stones, resting stages, and landing places. Pictures are par
tial. They produce things in a rectangular frame. Snapshots are snapshorts,
snapshuts, snapshucks that repackage reality. Testimony to our having been
there. The mark of our step into the river. What have we marked, what has tak
en us in the photograph? The remarkable detail, framed shot, revealing angle,
privileged perspective. These we have seen. These we show and remember. To
re-member, re-collect, is to put back the pieces again in mind.
Our photographs are unities encountered, yet pieces. Memory has difficul
ty in imagining the greater unity of which these pieces were parts. That greater
unity, involving understanding of intentions, movement through space, invest
ment of time, and the flow of experience, cannot be pictured in a photograph.
The architectural at heart is an art foreign to photography. The photograph
changes the architectural into the sculptural or the pictorial. We buy the souve
nir book with its pictures, the postcards, preferably those with the Total Views,
and slides for showing to our patient relatives or impatient students. Yet, with
all of these, we cannot take home the experience of the architectural. We might
have missed the experience, so preoccupied were we with the pictures.
Moving patiently through the castle or the cathedral, we may be awaiting
the moments of the pictorial, the building having no unity that we can picture.
Architecture becomes a field expedition for the sublime. The building is noth
ing but the grounds upon which independent moments flourish. Now, in this
room, we have such-and-such a treasure. Next is a lovely stairway. Then the
hall with the famous tapestries. The process of being guided about moves us
through a stream of things with occasional pictorial views. While we hear about
the architectural organization, we do not experience it. Tourism and photogra
phy intertwine to train our eyes for their ruining appreciation of architecture.
Though the photograph does not physically ruin what it has seen, it can
cut the piece out of the former whole. Scissors select. The cutout is then pasted
up in a brochure, poster, or guidebook. Scissoring is a systematic exercise of
the Ruining Spirit. It allows us to sever the context, separate detail from origi
nal, and design a framing edge suitable to the unified piece. In this case, the
photograph has been successfully ruined. Its whole is cut down to give Caesar
ean birth to the fresh being, alive and kicking. Photography, once the camera is
behind us, has to be reconsidered as the art of determining what to throw away.
This art, at its cutting edge, is practiced upon the photograph, whether negative,
print, or electronic image, instead of upon the scene.
With an eye to rescuing captive wholes, the photographer’s Ruining Eye
studies what the camera has made available. The photograph is the neutral
world in which the bright unity might be found. The world outside, which the
picture appeared to have captured, recedes from view, while the world inside
crops up, embedded in the picture and crying out for liberation. The photogra
pher does not so much freeze the unity of the world in the photograph as frees
the unity of the whole from the world of the photograph.
Although I brought my camera to Carnuntum, in 1963, when a student, I
brought my scissors to the photograph, in 2003, when an author (PI. 71). Pho
tography shifts from an art of taking pictures of what it is given to an art of
making pictures out of given photographs.
While we bring our camera on the visit, the photograph brings us to the
site. We choose what to visit from images we have seen and take with us in the
visual mind. At the site, we “take” (or, in German, make) photographs, but we
also see photographically, even without a camera. We purchase photographs as
documentation of the visit. Upon return home, we refer to the site by means of
the pictures, the ones we took, the ones we bought, the ones in the books that
first led us to the trip, and the ones in mind. Get the picture?
Years afterward, what do we remember of the site? We see it in the
mind’s eye as snapshots and postcards. The picture postcard is the autograph
testimony of our visit, a dispatch of something of the site to someone for whom
we care.
I wish you were here. But since you are not here, I send this to where you
are, so that you may have a view of it which moments ago I enjoyed. You
have in hand, then, an authentic presence of the site, to which I give a
date, an official stamp, and my good name.
This is the message of all picture postcards.

The postcard shares experience by communicating visually, and in words,
a worthwhile wholeness. The postcard is an out-of-site picture. The image on
the card influences our imagination of the original, if we have not been there,
and even if we have. Postcards shape the world. The partial view in pictures
prepares the Ruining Eye in life.
If the photograph makes ruins out of intact works, then what does it do
with ruins? It cannot present them in the Total View of how they really are, for
no such view exists. Ruins are photographed partially and hence are further ru
ined. The Photographic Eye brings a strategy of vision to the ruin. We come
with a set of things to look for and then find them. Later, looking over the pho
tographs, we choose for public display those that confirm our initial strategy.
At Tenayuca (in Tenamitl: “Walled Place,” capital of the Chichimecas),
Mexico, cactus and stone rise from the earth with equal vitality (PI. 72). The
steps march up toward the sky, while the agave waves its arms in passionate
PI. 72. Pyramid of Tenayuca, Mexico, 1964

freedom. Something decisive, dizzying, and dangerous is shared. In 1964, we

marvel at the fine stonework, restored almost to perfection, but we are made
uneasy by the ascent, accentuated by the three protruding masses near the top
that lead to nowhere. The crowning ceremonial temple is invisible. What would
we find on top should we get around the cactus and slowly mount?
At upper left is the evidence of symbiosis between pyramid and hill. The
hill has been claimed architecturally: pyramidized. The pyramid is a human-
formed mountain. The left edging of the steps looms as a buttress holding the
hill intact, while the earth that is visible tells us it is the core of the construc
tion, supporting it on the pyramid’s compressed sides. Forces lean into one
another with angularity and mass, while the wild leaves stab out in every direc
tion, a life-force bom of the same earth as the ruins it screens. But what is scene
is what our point of view has seen. We have made a picture out of a site.
At Dougga, Tunisia, in 1996, the image places columns between striated
fields to stitch together a fabric (PI. 73). In effect, we have removed the col
umns from the impressive Roman city of Thugga to reconstitute them as formal
elements of the countryside that had served as the breadbasket for the city of
Rome. The photograph replaces the imperial reference by pastoral Tunisiality.
(For the contribution of professional photography to the aesthetics of ru
ins, see “Art of Photography,” Section 11 of the Bibliographical Essay, below.)
When readers of illustrated books think that what they are seeing is a ruin,
what they are seeing is only a photograph. The photograph of the ruin imposes
a ruinedness. Be wary of the pictures that accompany a text pretending to ex
pound the aesthetics of mins! The photographs are not rightly the mins they
picture, though they are mins in their own right.
In this book, I analyze photographs, two-dimensional stills, not what we
see in depth, motion, and the flow of time. The photograph is a min of what
may no longer exist. Hence, I have dated them. What is pictured by the photo
graphs, alas, is invisible. Missing from all these pictures are the mins them
selves. You have been defrauded if led to believe in the truth of the pictures.
Plato’s critique of the arts as imitations of imitations, and hence as lies
(Republic, bk. 10), applies in extra measure to photography, which persuades
us that we are seeing the real thing.
So, in suffering through this book, you have not seen any mins, only pho
tographs and graphics based on photographs. I have made, inserted, and cap
tioned these works to persuade you to accept the arguments advanced. I have
used photography as a rhetorical, not pictorial, art that evokes experience akin
to that of encountering its objects. But you have not experienced any mins here.
I have misled you. You might have looked at the pictures as independent
works of art that you found within these pages. But their placement within this
context converts their mission to bringing you to the brink of an experience that
the text cannot possibly provide. In this dialogue of picture and word, you have
to do all the work of imagination. But you will have to throw down the book to
engage the true test of Being.
Being? How did that get into this discussion of appearances? (Be patient;
we will make our way to Being in the last chapter, the “Meditations.”)
Photography teaches us something about ourselves in the world. If we
carry a camera around with us, the viewfinder is the instantaneous, universal
Framing Device that we are willing to try out on the world to take pictures with
our Ruining Eye. You can go one step further into the world by leaving your
camera at home. Use your eyes all the time, everywhere, upon everything.
Before the age of the photographic view was the age of the drawing and
print. The great ruins, like the great intact treasures, reached the world in illus
trations made by hand. Care had to be exercised in the selection of the view,
given the painstaking labor devoted to its representation. The artist, who may
have intended a scientific or historical description, discovered the perspective
that gave the ruin its most dramatic presentation. Context and framing were
given by means of the clouds and the vegetation. Human figures, introduced for
purposes of scale, added poignancy and incongruity. As surrogates for the
viewer of the scene, they contemplated and pointed to what was to be seen. Pic
tures thereby gave us pointers for seeing ruins.
Drawing could select the unity from the whole to portray in its own terms.
Ruin or original could be excerpted by the graphic artist far more easily than
the photographer. No cropping of the print was needed, no darkroom manipula
tion. The detail could be initially drawn, since the detail draws the eye, and the
eye draws the detail. The artist had the faculty to make ruins on the spot.
The illustration of the detail requires a detailed illustrated history. For the
detail became a standard expectation in the study of matters artistic and other
wise. Products and processes were best explained visually by being broken
down into parts, stages, and pieces. Deft display of its components revealed the
secret of the whole. This devotion to the didactic power of the detail is still with
us. The detail also served for enjoyment of itself. The window from a church,
eyes from a portrait, border from a mosaic, incident from a fresco were present
ed as aesthetic highlights, labeled “detail.” Artworks were regularly trans
formed into these details by the Ruining Eye.
The practice continues in art books by means of the photograph. Students
of art history have been educated to the detail. They see it as valuable part of
the whole that demands detailed examination and as potential unity despite its
presence in the original. The art historian zeroes in on the details to reproduce,
thanks to photographic enlargement. The professionalism that finds the right
detail is aesthetically satisfying. Since reproductions of the work as a whole
may be readily available, the skillful ruining of the image draws our attention.
The art books offered to the general public for enjoyment follow the convention
of providing a detail of a work after its full representation.
This is a boon to the reader. It allows us to see things unnoticed in the full
picture, so that we can return to it with renewed sensitivity. It also allows us to
enjoy the detail as if it were a new picture, to which we are much closer. A
large or complicated picture appears to be made of many pictures. Pieter Brue
gel the Elder (ca. 1525-1569) may be more popular in pieces than in whole.
The power of removing part from the whole by way of illustration allows
us to move parts from different wholes into new contexts. A thematic unity,
such as the kiss, may be the fresh grounds for viewing ruins of several works,
alongside some that are intact. For the sake of the theme, whether the picture is
part or whole matters not. It is has enough unity to please the eye as part of the
theme. Scholars expound art history by means of juxtaposed visual excerpts.
How successive artists treated such matters as the hands in portraits or the land
scape seen over the shoulder may be keys to artistic development.
Art history is always aiming for the part, for if it stayed exclusively with
the whole unique to the aesthetic work, it would have a work of art but no his
tory! At times, the art-historical may be antithetical to the aesthetic whole, be
cause aesthetic experience is largely ahistorical. The aesthetic whole has no his
tory. Its relationship is traceable only to its parts, a formal, not historical, con
nection. The parts do not generate the whole by their step-by-step emplace
ment. The aesthetic whole is coextensive with its parts, the whole informing
each part as it is placed.
Confusion haunts this discussion between the aesthetic realm and the his
torical, between unique timeless whole and temporal occurrence of separated
parts. The art historian frees the part, which may be a theme, mode of treat
ment, subject portrayed, or formal device, and builds for it a fresh whole which
is the story of its development across many works of art. Such tracing relies on
appearances. Similarities, parallels, variations are examined, usually with the
operative assumption of influence.
The art historian uses two slide projectors simultaneously, so that a work
can be visually related to its detail, its earlier version by the artist, or its source
in the work of another artist. As an aesthetician, I use one slide projector, so
that the audience will be fully absorbed in the world of the work exhibited.
The skill of the art historian places the part from the whole of one artwork
within a narrative whole in the history of art. That narrative takes on a drama
turgy of initiation, experimentation, flourishing, and maturity in the hands of a
great artist, then decline, and, finally, disuse. The art historian conjoins the
rigor of forensic scholarship with practiced sensibility in the art. Art history as
pires to be scientific in a field where probabilities reign and scholarship must
call in connoiseurship. We may fruitfully study the history of art history to bet
ter understand its values. And to evaluate them.
What threatens to disappear in the practice of art history is art itself: the
powerful unities that uniquely govern what may be familiar parts and that en-
gross us in participation. The art-experience plucks the artwork out of its his
tory for our enjoyment, just as art plucks us out of our history to enjoy mo
ments whole and free of consequences. The aesthetic point of view rescues art
and us from the stream of history. As the running/ruining head of this page re
minds us, I have been developing an aesthetics of ruins, not an art-historical
study of ruins. That has meant putting aside the history, associations, sources,
and influences, to grapple with the whole which paradoxically arises from the
part that is the ruin.
A useful role for the history of any art medium is to enlighten the appre-
ciator about features the contemporary audience would have easily understood.
The conventions utilized in the artwork may need clarification for a new audi
ence, if we are to experience the work in its fullness. Flowers in painting and
poetry had symbolic associations about which you and I are not inclined to
bother. Their identification and explication in the work may assist us as view
ers. In this way, art history helps our enjoyment of art by providing the preface,
footnotes, and glossary for an unfamiliar tradition.
We must raise several cautions against this helping hand. Information
about a work is never equivalent to experience of it. Guided tours of art mu
seums and explanatory catalogues may lead the general visitor to feel that what
counts is knowing about the work instead of experiencing it. By becoming ha
bituated to look for the explanatory aids, we approach works of art within a
scholarly framework instead of meeting them on their terms. Visitors to art mu
seums function as readers, listeners, or talkers, before they exercise their facul
ty as lookers. Art museums are daily the scene of parades of people with
recordings plugged into their heads or gallery notes held in hand. They see
what they are told.
We might well enjoy the work in its aesthetic unity without being told
about the conventions employed. What we lose in appreciation of some features
can be compensated by the immediacy of encounter and the explorative free
dom of our eye. Art history may save works for deeper aesthetic appreciation.
For this we are grateful. But the discipline of art history needs to learn from
aestheticians how to place aesthetic objects at the center of aesthetic apprecia
tion. May the present study help in that direction!
The visual excerpt, like the literary one, can serve that high aesthetic mis
sion of saving worthwhile unities embedded in otherwise mediocre originals.
The haunting dream of the student of art is to have on hand full-size reproduc
tions of all artworks, indistinguishable on the surface from the originals, so that
most of them can be skillfully cut up to salvage for the world what is worth see
ing in our finite time, while disposing of all the rest. This would be the supreme
task of exercising good judgment, discovering unanticipated graces, and taking
a creative hand in reshaping the second-rate production of artists. We could
save an interesting background from a weak portrait, a picturesque tree from a
botched landscape, a Botticellian smile from a bungled allegory, a delicate inf

ant Jesus from an excessively adulatory Adoration.
But we run the risk of throwing out the baby with the bath water. Errors in
taste occur. The well-meaning salvaging of second-rate art could cast away
wholes that one day we might rediscover aesthetically. The dream may be put
to use as a good test. Supplied with a group of works of seeming unimportance,
how would we reproduce them in ruin so as to make available the maximum
aesthetic value they might contain? Oddly enough, the worse the work, the eas
ier the assignment. The more the work approaches first-rate status, the less will
ing, or able, are we to save it by ruination.
This test is no idle game. It is common in professional practice. If the art
scholar is to choose a limited number of illustrations for a catalogue of an exhi
bition or for an introductory picture-book on an artist, the detail, tastefully cho
sen, in place of wholes, or accompanying them, can elevate the book’s aesthetic
level. The art scholar must have a sharp eye for ruins and a sharp Ruining Eye.
Photography is the versatile facilitator of the detail. Select, enlarge, crop,
frame, mount: the history of visual editing. Thanks to the photograph, the post
card, too, can give us the detail in the artwork for transmission to others or re
tention as stimulator of memory. The art course we take and the art book we
read prepare our eye for the ruining activity.
Exhibits and museums are so large, and our time for them so short, that
we develop the habit of skimming by looking for the key works we are obliged
to enjoy, rushing past the ordinary fillers, while ready to stop for a moment be
fore the second-rate pieces that have first-rate details. How can we get any
where, if we are to take each artwork as an integral whole to be examined for
its unique merit? After the first dozen works, we would have to quit for the day.
We might never move out of one gallery of the museum, if we gave to each of
its occupants equal benefit of the doubt.
The Ruining Eye makes our aesthetic life livable. It sizes up a candidate
in a moment, deciding whether to (1) cast it aside on the junk heap of art, (2)
acknowledge some kind of aesthetic unity that persists, as we endeavor to dis
pose of the work, or (3) face the work fully on its terms, because it demands
that of us. Subsequently, we may find fault with the piece to which we have
given our entire attention (3). Instead of becoming totally disillusioned with it,
we are likely to find something of value in it, in a shift to status (2).
The Ruining Eye saves the painting’s aesthetic dignity, and ours. Those
works before which we stopped, because a feature at first glance had significant
interest (2), may reveal themselves to our willing attentiveness to be valuably
whole (3). Or we may abruptly drop them as worthless (1). If time remains, we
can go back to those that we skipped (1) and dutifully attend to them, occasion
ally finding a ruin or a whole that is rewarding (2). These are the confessions of
a numbers-playing museum-goer.
You may confirm the practice by study of the movements and mutterings
of the public at an exhibition. For each visitor, you can work out a floor-plan of
the transit of the body through each room. A time-plan is needed for the view
ing of each work. The most difficult dimension to plot is the vector-plan that
records glances at other works, while the viewer stands in front of one work.
Attention is marginalized and redirected in the gallery’s magnetic field.
Gestures and audible remarks are to be recorded. Other people who are present
present variables that may obstruct the passage of our visitor, share in the pas
sage, or guide it. At a glance, the visitor may know which works are free for
viewing and probably can be dispensed with quickly, while noting which works
are occupied and must be approached with solemn care when they are free.
The curator takes a hand in the placement of objects, with an eye to the
passage of the public. The grand works must be so positioned that many people
can stand before them at the same time. They occupy the dramatic place in each
room. Lesser works and smaller pieces are strung out along lengthy walls
where individuals may sample them at leisure. Works of art respond to one
another. The exhibitor gives thought to what is seen in sequence. A room in an
exhibition is a chapter.
Usually, under the guidance of art history, a few works are shown as pre
cursors of a major piece. Pairing is a visual device to make two works address
each other across two sides of a doorway or of an extraordinary canvas. The
more subtle skills of the aesthetics of exhibition involve peripheral and oblique
vision. The curator can decide to draw the eye to something in the next room,
excite our interest in a piece by an indirect view of it, and attract us to other
works which we would not willingly explore. As long as pieces do not have to
be arranged in strict chronological order, a realm of choice is open to the ex
hibitor. Tasteful hanging of works is a decision about their merits and a plan for
their appreciation. An unspoken narrative guides the arrangement.
Sometimes, the narrative is spoken, or written. Once the exhibit is mount
ed, its highlights are made available by the tour. This is provided by a docent,
printed brochure, posted explanations, or recorded instructions plugged into the
head. The key works surely will be included. The challenge in designing the
tour is to include other works that the viewer might miss. Among these others,
our attention is called to the life of that visual ruin, the detail. The exhibition
catalogue and the postcards for sale reinforce such choices. Museums conspire
with art-books, art-courses, and art-tourism in catering to the Ruining Eye.
The Ruining Ear applies its active selection of unity upon the superabund
ant world of music. In our epoch, more music is available than we could ever
hear, with no end in sound to what is being produced. The cornucopia of music
opens infinitely. As individuals, we possess in our music collections of records,
discs, cassettes, and electronic downloads more than the repertory of any royal
orchestra of the eighteenth century. All-Music Stations on the radio guarantee
that at any hour of life music is playing. With the turn of a knob or press of a
button in our hand, ear, car, or bed, we are tuned in.
Music machines accommodate themselves to wherever we find ourselves:
airplane seat, cafe table, shopping mall, dentist’s office. Music boxes entertain
us when we are overburdened with silence, musical alarm clocks bring us back
to the world from our dreams, musical toilet-seats play for our relief.
De la musique avant toute chose, (“Art poetique,” Verlaine, 1954, p. 206)
We can perform music in our den, study, or living room. Sheet music, in
structional books, and affordable lessons are available. Guitar, drums, recorder,
electronic keyboard—some musical instrument is introduced into the furnish
ings of American life. I play the Appalachian Limberjack (self-taught).
Considering the music that pours out of telephone recordings, passing
cars, joggers, and boom-boxes, we have greater difficulty keeping music out of
our lives than getting it in. Between waking and falling asleep, we spend our
day in a musical world. If we turn our back upon the world for the sake of en
tertainment, music pops up to surround us, in television, video games, the
movies, restaurants, and sporting events. In every sphere of life, we may hear
the Muzak of the spheres.
Hear comes the Ruining Ear to the rescue! It allows us aurally to skim
musical sound without paying it much attention, so that we can face the music
of the day’s activities. Every once in a wile, the Ruining Ear will discover a
passage, melody, refrain, or beat that gives pleasure.
No matter that they are part of a larger work we have not heard in entire
ty. Instead of having missed something, we gain something. Out of the currents
of music that flow around us, we pick up enjoyable highlights. Most music may
come to us not in its sealed wholeness, attentively heard from beginning to end,
without the intervention of other sounds, but in its course, flowing without be
ginning, perhaps without end, interspersed with other sounds, including musical
ones, and subject to the wandering of our attention.
At the concert hall, we attend to the music with as much fullness as it de
mands, unless we are there to take our mind off everything and relax/relapse.
Outside the concert hall, we do not notice the music. Even if we are playing a
tape of our choice or tuning in a concert, lapses of attention occur. The eye is
attracted by the newspaper or the painting on the wall, the ear picks up the con
versation in the next room or the piano practice in the next flat. The pure auton
omy of the music as totally in-and-for-itself is difficult to sustain, without enor
mous effort and preparation by the home-listener.
We are not listeners with both ears. The Ruining Ear listens for us. Musi
cal experience is more impoverished than it might have been in the time when
live performance was its sole means of access. We have lost the integrity of
music, that fullness of coming back to the tonic note from the totally abstract
quest it initiated. Musical form was supremely something of note.
We also enriched musical experience in the twentieth century by making
it instantaneous, omnipresent, and inexpensive. Musical accompaniment is now
possible for every activity of our lives. Our ear occasonally snatches out of the
air elements sensed to bond together. They bound out of the background into
pleasurable focus. The grave integrity of music has been replaced in the hear
and now by a sprightliness and simple accessibility.
To be enjoyable, music need not be complete, if it is catchy. This new
musiculture extends from our response to the classical repertory to our encount
er with the popular and folk currents. The big beat in Rock ’n’ Roll and related
modes is a simplified immediacy that knocks out the likelihood of formal com
pleteness, while it explodes lyrics into scattered shots that may be picked up in
sharp pieces.
To the shouted challenge, “How can you listen to that while doing
something else?”, the answer must be that listening to it encourages doing
something else—walking, driving, reading, talking, drinking—during which we
pick up the music’s beat, surrounding flow, and nuggets of word and sound that
pop up like treasure ships dislodged from the deep. Listening to Rock ’n’ Roll
with full attention threatens ruining our ears, yet the music receives its proper
listening by the Ruining Ear.
Music-makers facilitate the exercise of the Ruining Ear in the hubbub,
hustle-bustle, and hurly-burly of our world. The medley is offered by the dance
band, played on the evening radio, and recorded for home enjoyment. Arias are
extracted from operas and sung as bravura pieces. Recitalists, illustrating the
highlights of their art, play selected movements. The pianist in the cocktail
lounge puts together a few bars of this and that to make a show of answering
requests. But don’t shoot the piano player!
The theme music for a television program may be an extract of a larger
composition. On Golden Age Radio in the United States (ca. 1940-1950), The
Lone Ranger came on to the strains of the William Tell Overture (Gioacchino
Antonio Rossini), while his great-nephew, The Green Hornet, was prefaced by
the Flight of the Bumblebee (Nicolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov). My ini
tiation to classical music.
Films, too, take pieces out of substantial musical works and put them to
use. Every piece of music is a potential theme or background for video, film,
ballet, the spoken word, shopping, or lovemaking. We are led to hear music not
in expectation of its wholeness, but for its nowness, not for its seamless bond to
itself, but for its bond to our moods and activities. Music is no longer the pure
architecture of time. It is the apotheosis of the moment.
The Ruining Palate indulges our taste in attractive food without waiting
for the meal. In the Western world, eating is no longer organized into three oc-
casions a day. In-between, or in place of, these traditional meals, we may eat at
any hour and in any place. In the late twentieth century, America virtually con
quered the world of victualing. Thanks to mass production, ingenious packag
ing, and a heavy dosage of chemical preservatives, we can take delectables
along with us unobtrusively, get them from vending machines, or purchase
them from purveyors nearby. No need to invest a lot of our time while food is
prepared and served. Instant gratification is available to eating, quite unlike
sexual appetites and intellectual thirsts. Between the rumblings of hunger and
its satisfaction arises the greatest American achievement, the fast-food.
We can eat on the run. The prepared food is prepared to pop out at us, and
we serve ourselves. Food, solid or potable, is portable. Eating has become am
bulatory activity. While we walk down the downtown street, our palate is at
tracted to the easily accessible tastes inexpensively for sale. A pizza slice from
the storefront counter, pretzel from the pushcart, doughnut of one of twenty-
eight flavors, ice cream of one of thirty-two flavors, bubbling soft drink in a
cup of ice, hot gourmet coffee in a plastic container, pastry from the street wag
on, whipped yogurt from the health-foods counter, hot dog with sauerkraut
from the sidewalk stall, corned-beef sandwich on rye (with mustard and
pickle), and Bromo Seltzer.
In our self-defense, the palate must be selective, else we would fall victim
to nausea. To stroll through such a gauntlet of assaults is to become instantly
hungry. Hunger no longer is organized before mealtime. It occurs at the drop of
a hamburger upon the grill, the tinkle of the shaved ice in the cup, the whiff of
the garlic and oil from the molten pizza, the glimpse of the multi-colored
flavors of doughnuts or ice cream. For instant hunger, instant food. Nay, instant
food instantaneously incites hunger. Hunger feeds off fragments, unrelated
pieces, none of them a meal, not even part of a meal, each for itself, inconse
quential, indifferent to nutiltion, but promising the entirety of satisfaction.
In America, land of the obese, we give obeisance to Eating-in-Ruins. The
downtown street and its transformation, the suburban shopping mall, hunger for
our gustatory stroll. The college campus is surrounded, if not permeated, by the
purveyance of quick eats. You cannot be a scholar without giving in to the
munchies. The office has its station for coffee breaks. Down the hall is a bank
of vending machines on twenty-four hour duty. The drugstore assures us that
we will not starve to death while shopping, for it provides a food counter. The
big bookstore offers a cafe where we plump down at a table to browse the latest
books and magazines, without having to pay for them. Much of my research
has been done at such tables.
While driving, we may pull into a drive-in eatery. The suburban Strip of
hamburger joints, pizza palaces, ice cream parlors, and chicken castles serves
the Ruining Palate of the automobilist, just as the downtown street whets more
pedestrian tastes. We cruise behind the wheel, while fancy directs the appetite.
The autotecture and signage of the establishments promise ecstatic whole

ness in taking a bite out of their product. “We do it all for you!” is the jingle of
an international chain, whose free-standing arch is a ritual gate to the temple of
hamburger delight. A chicken franchise holds aloft a titanic cardboard basket as
an offering for the gods. The most appealing sign upon the American high-
wayescape is the cone topped with white, soft ice-cream, the torch of happi
ness. The Colossus of Roads. Give me your tired, your hungry masses.
The images spring forward out of the visual flux and speak to the sto
mach. Snatches of music come with them in our memory. The Strip is the re
play of a long series of television commercials. Video and radio, billboard and
magazine tantalize us with a parade of things to taste. We are driven to hunger.
In no other time or culture has food been so immediately at hand. To sat
isfy hunger is easy, but just as easy is to be made hungry again.
I pause here to heat a mug of instant chocolate. Please wait for me. Earli
er, I had a cup of yogurt (boysenberry-flavored). Later, I will try a jelly dough
nut (raspberry). In the next chapter, I may treat myself to an English muffin
warmed in the toaster. After working on the Chronology, I plan to warm a pota
to knish in the microwave oven. Popcorn pops into mind. Buttered.
My line of thought has been interrupted by noticing a boy who walks by,
finishing an ice cream bar. He throws the sticky wrapper on my lawn, near an
old pizza box. Next, he unwraps a candy bar, and throws the wrapper . . . .
Let’s get back to work. We have to face the reality that dinner is a long
way off. I wonder if any chocolate-covered halvah is left in the house. But a
slice of pizza should tide me over.
Reader, you too have been thinking about pizza. The warm fragrant
cheese, on crusted dough wedges, wedges its way into your mind, causing a
soft moistening of your mouth and a slight flaring of your nostrils. Your pupils
widen as if to take in the invisible slice which your hand is ready to handle. The
pizza pursues you, while you are trying to stick to the text without success.
What good is following this raving when you are being consumed by a
craving? “Nay,” you protest, “I am not hungry!” But the text hungers for your
response. The pizza, you claim, is on my mind, not yours: I am only giving you
a piece of my mind. Let’s face it, the pizza is bigger than both of us. It has a
mind of its own. It sinks its teeth into our consciousness. It has eaten its way
into our senses and digestive operations. We detect and respond to the invisible.
We can taste, touch, and smell it. We savor it, save that it is not here. It is
formedible! Hunger has its powers of imagination. Imagine that!
Throw down the book! You have done far more than duty and good sense
demand in reading this far. Not one page further of this theorizing without hav
ing pizza on these premises! You deserve the treat. Do not fear that you will
ruin your appetite for dinner. Confess that you have been developing an appe
tite for ruins, a taste for the fragmentary.
Eighteen
FRAGMENTS OF A CHAPTER ON RUIN

These fragments I have shored against my ruins
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922), Pt. 5, in The Complete Poems
and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952),
p. 50.
1. Religion
The history of religion is the spirited reworking of ruins. Look within any reli
gion, and you will find in its entrails, if not its soul, other religions that it has
meant to replace. You will also find parts that others would salvage and bring
back to the fore. Religion may yet be saved!
Islam has taken in pieces of Christianity and Judaism. Christianity mas
tered Judaism by taking in its Bible as the Old Testament, while keeping out
the Jews. In “the Judeo-Christian tradition,” the hyphen (stronger in French:
trait d'union, “mark of linkage”) is a Christian gesture, of charity or justice,
that Jews greet as not quite kosher (see Lyotard and Gruber, 1999). Christian
churches in Italy may be built on the ruins of Roman temples. In Mexico, they
are built on the ruins of Aztec and Mayan temples. Protestantism arose in pro
test to Catholicism, and, in turn, it was to splinter and be dissected. Thanks to
its schisms and isms, Christianity has an active sectual life.
Buddhism in India found room for much of Hinduism. Buddhism in Tibet
found room for much of Bonism. Buddhism in China found room for much of
Taoism. Buddhism in Japan found room for much of Shintoism. Buddhism in
California found room for much of Beatnikism.
2. Civilization
The “advance of civilization” is the pressure toward new unity from old ruin.
“We stand on the shoulders of ruins!”, Peter A. Redpath once quipped. West
erners are the squatters in the several layers of ruins that define the West. Thus,
we are Roman and Greek ruins, just as Rome is thought to have taken up the
ruin that was Greece. The Renaissance, in turn, thought itself to have rediscov
ered antiquity’s ruins and sought to bring them forth with new life. We have
lost that burst of energy and treasuring of the past. We have lost faith in reason
and the advance of civilization. In the popular view, past civilizations are dead.
But we are rapidly becoming the past.
Ruins surround us. Some, like Christianity, appear intact and thriving
when we look upon them from the outside, though they have lost their power to
bind. Even the notion of Western civilization cracks as inadequate to the
needs of emerging World Consciousness (WC). The West, East, Socialist Bloc,
Third World, Fourth World are ways of dividing the world. The competition
between civilizations signals a global effort to achieve the fullest unity and not
be left behind in ruin. But the destructive power in the hands of competitors
means that, for the first time in history, all civilization stands on the brink of ir
reversible ruin. Or of One World (OW).
3. Ruinations
A people or their political leaders often sense modern statehood as the ruin of
their nationhood. The drive toward national unification, promising peace and
fulfillment, can be the stimulus for war and genocide. At any time, insistent
and conflicting claims to reclaim the pieces that have been severed by interna
tional borders fill the world. On the grounds that the national boundaries in
Africa were drawn by colonial powers, indifferent to ethnic identities, African
states split apart and peoples slaughter peoples.
In Europe, part of pre-World War II Germany is in Poland, another is in
Russia. Part of pre-World War II Poland is in Belarus, another is in the Uk
raine. Part of pre-World War II Hungary is in Romania, another is in Slovakia.
Part of pre-World War II Romania is now Moldova, another is in the Ukraine.
Part of pre-World War II Italy is in Slovenia, another is in Croatia. Parts of
Pre-World War II Czechoslovakia are in the Ukraine, and the country has dis
solved into Czech and Slovakian states. Parts of pre-World War II Finland are
in Russia. Yugoslavia, which survived World War II, as six republics held to
gether by one Tito, is now five or six countries. In 1991, the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (USSR), the second largest land empire in world history,
rapidly dissolved into fifteen countries in Europe and Asia, to the amazement
of the whole world.
My mother, Rose Ginsberg (nee Dreifach), was born in 1904 in the town
of Borislav in the Jewish-populated province of Galicia, then under the control
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. While she was a girl in America, the Empire
was disbanded. In 1919, her hometown became part of Poland. In 1939, Poland
was dismembered by Germany and the Soviet Union. Borislav then became
part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the USSR. In 1941, during
World War II, the Ukraine declared its independence, but it was reintegrated
into the Soviet Union in 1944. With the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the
Ukraine regained its independence and its full sovereignty over Borislav. All
this while, my dear mother lived peacefully in New York.
Ruminations upon ruined nations. When I hear the grating words,
“Greater Israel,” “Greater Syria,” “Greater Iraq,” “Greater Serbia,” “Greater
Albania,” “Greater Libya,” “Greater Guatemala,” “Greater China,” “Greater
India,” “Greater . . . ,” I look for the nearest bomb shelter, the greater the better.
PI. 74. Gun Emplacement, Golan Heights, Syria (Israeli Occupation), 1981
4. Battlefields
We wander around the battlefield, years, sometimes centuries, afterwards, try

ing to reconstruct the human misadventure on the site, including its unimagin
able slaughter. Yet at the Plains of Abraham, City of Quebec, where, on 18
September 1759, the fate of North America was decided, at Gettysburg, Penn
sylvania, where, on 1-3 July 1863, at the cost of 50,000 casualties, the union of
the United States was saved, or at the fields of Verdun, France, where, in 1916,
600,000 people were killed, without winning any ground, I cannot apply the
story to the terrain, though every kind of interpretive aid has been provided.
Instead, I find myself in a fragmented field for which no whole is evident.
At each comer of the site, the world is broken. The battlefield I experience is of
isolated dislocations. Perhaps that is how those who fought and died here ex
perienced it (PI. 74).
5. Caesarean Section
Julius Caesar (ca. 100 BCE^44 BCE), who freely roamed the world, is reputed
to have visited the site of Troy (Ilion, Ilium), where “even its ruins have per
ished” (etiam periere ruinae), and stumbled upon the scattered stones of the al
tar upon which Priam was slaughtered. As a descendant of Aeneas, Caesar in
vokes those (from Latin) “who inhabit the Phrygian ruins” (Pharsalia, Lucain,
1974, bk. 9, pp. 175-176). According to the mythistory, Rome’s founding was
a consequence of Troy’s fall.
Cats inhabit Caesar’s Forum in Rome, while Pompey’s Theater, where
Caesar was assassinated, is the basement dining room of a Roman restaurant.
William Shakespeare (1599) has Marc Antony eulogize the assassinated
Caesar, “thou bleeding piece of earth”:
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man

That ever lived in the tide of times. (Julius Caesar, Shakespeare, 1997,
Act 3, sc. 1, p. 1166)
Caesar’s ashes, that “might stop a hole to keep the wind away” (Hamlet, Shake
speare, 1963, Act 5, sc. 1, p. 398), have disappeared. Gone with the .. . .
6. Archaeology
Archaeology is an art of discovery that gets down to earth. While drudgery

marks its daily labors, archaeology rises to aesthetic heights in the discovery of
a site, treasure, or link in knowledge. The Archaeological Eye sensitizes us to
wondering about every bump, dump, hump, lump, and sump in the world. At
Fragments o f a Chapter on Ruin 359
Novgorod (Rus.: “New City”), in 1993, searchers seek the old city, center of
Russia, “Lord Novgorod the Great” (PI. 75), while at Stavanger, on Norway’s
endless coast, the quest, in 1968, is for the old wooden town (Pis. 61, 76).
When we visit an excavation in progress, the archaeologists become our
surrogates in revealing the ruin by extracting it from the earth and weighing the
import and placement of each stone. Of many tools at hand, archaeologists can
take their pick. But excavation, the hollowing out of the earth to get at some
thing, is mostly tedious work that ends in removing dust with toothbrushes.
Archaeologists get to enjoy the puzzle of assembling the unearthed pieces
into a plausible whole, even if not all the pieces are present. This work goes on
under the tent or in the hut of the field laboratory. The meaning and context
evolve as pieces are united, but how to fit them together may also depend on
the meaning and context in mind. The activity of discovery is interactive.
Materially finding what has been lost is a delight in archaeology. Some
thing missing is restored to the world. In the middle of a midden, someone
else’s trash becomes the archaeologist’s treasure. What is found most often
lacks its original intactness. The archaeologist saves the world from passing
away into ruin by excavating and restoring these ruins.
Archaeologists have a field day in ruins. “Put your future in ruins!”, the
advice given to archaeologists by Robert Jehu Bull (H. O. Thompson, 1985, p.
2). Every tell has a tale to tell. Archaeology is a telltale (see Section 6,
“Archaeology,” and Section 7, “Individual Ruins,” in the Bibliographical Es
say, below). But every archaeological team should include a professional aes-
thetician to raise questions about value judgments and to discuss aesthetic qual
ities. My bags are packed!
7. Psychology of Ruins
Franôis-Rene de Chateaubriand, the fanciful ruin-fancier, expresses the under

lying sense to our appreciation of ruins (1802), in a celebrated passage of re
flection (from French):
All human beings (les hommes) have a secret fascination for ruins. This
sentiment is attached to the precariousness (la fragilite) of our nature, to a
secret conformity between these destroyed monuments and the precipita
tion of our existence. (Chateaubriand, 1966, p. 40)
Death, our death, is the ruin’s greatest symbolism. Ruin invokes the question of
death’s meaning, that is, of life’s meaning.
Henry James, among the foremost psychologists of ruin in his fiction and
travel-writing, puts his finger (gloved), in another famous passage, from
“Roman Rides” (1873), on a forbidden quality upon which ruin pleasure draws:
PI. 75. Archaeological Site, Novgorod, Russia, 1993

PL 76. Archaeological Site, Stavanger, Norway, 1968

Every wayside mark of manners, of history, every stamp of the past in the
country about Rome, touches my sense to a thrill, and I may thus exagger
ate the appeal of very common things. This is the more likely because the
appeal seems ever to rise out of heaven knows what depths of ancient
trouble. To delight in the aspects of sentient ruin might appear a heartless
pastime, and the pleasure, I confess, shows the note of perversity. (James,
1992, p. 147)
While past suffering might flavor all ruins, an aesthetic distancing between the
destruction and our presence usually permits our respectable and guiltless en
joyment. Some symbolic ruins, disaster ruins, and recent ruins of war insist that
we not give way to pleasure. James underscores the living quality of ruins de
tected by heightened sensitivity.
Sigmund Freud developed and explained Psychoanalysis as a mental sci
ence comparable to the practice of material archaeology. Psychoanalysis is the
patient excavation of unconscious ruins. When they come to light and can be
integrated by the I {das Ich), then the patient is whole again. The I is the capital
of wholeness, but the territory it thinks to govern is the marshy realm of the
many, the unconscious. The It {das Es) is alive with ruins. The Over-the-I {das
Uber-Ich) just makes more trouble for us, casting mud in our I, if we don’t be
have properly. Even if we do.
In 1907, Freud wrote an extensive analysis of dreams in a work of ar
chaeological fiction by Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva (1903) (see Freud, 1959). In a
celebrated passage in the opening chapter of Das Unbehagen in der Kultur
(1930) (“The Discomfort in Civilization’’), Freud compares the layers of hu
man psychology to the levels of ruins of the historical city of Rome (see Freud,
1961). Ruin as psychoanalogous. Archaeologist of the psyche, Freud populated
his consulting room with ancient figurines.
Chateaubriand, James, and Freud each explain the secret psychological
life suggested by ruins. For Chateaubriand, our mortality is in the balance. He
will have Catholicism rescue us from it. For James, aesthetic pleasure wins out,
even when we encounter suffering. He will have the craft of narration and the
refinement of imagination transport us to the world of belles lettres. For Freud,
hidden mental entanglements drag us down and muck up our life. He will liber
ate us by a therapeutic humanism that brings to light our mind’s ancient ruins.
8. Nostalgia
Nostalgia is a taste for ruins. It takes its reflective pleasure in the recovery of
fragments from the past for which significant continuity to the present is lack
ing. The past for which we are nostalgic has no place in the present. The ob
jects of our nostalgia are anachronistic and incongruous. We thereby enjoy
what is out joint but at the same time comfortable and familiar. The nostalgic is
a sentiment of saving. We rescue ourselves from the waters of oblivion, for
what we have saved is somehow ours. We cannot be nostalgic about someone
else’s heritage.
Nostalgic experience is soothing, healing, subdued, and sad. In it, the past
remembers us. It restores to us what has missed us. We were absent from it.
When we gaze anew at those childhood trinkets and remembrances of loved
ones that fill our album, drawer, closet, attic, basement, or garage, a reverie/
reverence melds/mends our soul to the fragments. My old teddy bear . . . .
9. Time
The ruin tells us something about surviving time’s passage. Alain, the French
homme de lettres, remarks (1920) (from French), “Also what pleases right off
even in ruins is this power of endurance, made all the more appreciable
(sensible) by the wounds of time” (Alain, 1963, pp. 177-178). We insist on our
historicity when we save the ruin. The ruin conquers history.
Here the past is past, and the ruin is present. It sets us free from bondage
to time, so that we may dwell in the moment’s wholeness. The ruin is a Zen
lightning-bolt that shatters our knit-together world to release the timeless unity.
Time is always r u n n i n g o u t .
But the moment is a time-out. Now is immediate: non-mediated. Not time, but
the moment is of the essence. No time like the present. No wonder that we
come to feel at home in the wonderfilled moment.
The time has come to affirm that the moment is always timely.
Mind Your Step!
You cannot step twice

into the same ruin,
because it has changed
since you were there,
and you’ve changed since you were there.
Therefore, wherever you are,
you’ve not been there before.
Step boldly, then, at every moment,
since each step is for your first—
and your last time.
IO. Ruins Put to Use
A culture may make good use of its ruins in ways related to the original’s pur
pose. France sets an admirable example in using its Roman heritage. Thus, the
aters, as in Autun (Augustodunum), are stages for theatrical festivals; baths, as
in Paris (Lutetia), are venues for recitals; and amphitheaters, as at Nimes (Nem-
ausus), are arenas for bullfighting. Shall we attend a bullfight?
Exit the bull (PI. 77). Enter the sprinkling trunk to stabilize the sands
kicked up by hooves and clotted with blood. While the handlers dash energeti
cally in their blood-red uniforms, the spectators watch immobilely, stationed
here and there on the many levels, giving life to the stone. In shirtsleeves and
hats, they bask in a sun that could become deadly.
A woman spreads her legs across the benches to equalize the heat. The
clustering of the public must be explained by different prices for locations.
That is why the woman has empty benches around her, for she has chosen to sit
back in the first section, while most who bought such tickets have taken the
front row. The railing that cuts off this section is clear. The front row behind it
is filled. Then, up several rows is the third section containing a larger audience.
On all three levels, the concentration of viewers is toward the right, closer to
the middle of the ellipse.
The three levels are carefully laid out for seating and separated from one
another with independent access. You can detect the entrance way to the first
level with a guard standing in it. Another guard stands in the entrance to the
third level, just across from where we are sitting, and on the far right is the
clearest entrance passage. To the left, above the exit, whose gates are held open
for the carcass of the bull, the stands are quite full. They may be thought of as
the boxes, for they offer a prominent location. A metal railing has been fixed
into the cement. Down in front of us, the crowd is so thick that we cannot see
the features of the arena they occupy.
A stadium always offers the spectator the spectacle of people in varied at
tire, occupying a variety of significant locations. Beyond the regular seating at
Nimes is the extemporaneous location of those who have wandered from their
wooden benches to climb the upper reaches and install themselves on the huge
blocks of stone. Yet their seat is not as good, their view not as close, their loca
tion not as convenient. This spectacle provokes reflection.
The benches are not comfortable or distinguished. They do not allow the
arena to speak through them. The wanderers have sought a location where the
character of this arena is evident. Having climbed and selected, they sprawl
with an openness of figure upon their perch. Their attitude reflects awareness
of the immediate presence of the arena.
The benchsitters have their hands folded in their laps. The wallsitters
touch the stone with their hands. While the benchsitters feel wooden backrests
PL 77. Roman Amphitheater, Nimes, France, 1961

and slats underneath them, the wallsitters feel the stone under their buttocks
and under their feet, which may be drawn up to the edge or stretched out over
the surface. These hardy souls are our surrogate explorers of the ruin that lies
behind the scene and the afternoon’s activities. They are clumped here and
there, enhancing the massive stone surfaces.
The enormous access arches with their dark shade speak with titanic vigor
of mass and structure. They give exciting form to the upper level. Yet the pas
sage ways are not visible to the viewers scattered above them or to the people
in rows in the three lower tiers. The ruin plays hide and seek. It disappears, as
we focus on the bullring with its protective fencing, cement wall, efficient sys
tem of exit doors, and modem boxes.
The mechanically efficient sprinkler truck, pride of the municipality
whose name it bears, shares our attention with the passing disposal unit, anoth
er kind of vehicle: blindered horses, also in uniform, dragging out the gory
beast through a cloud of sand.
The Roman Amphitheater of Nimes in 1961 is less interested in present
ing itself as a ruin or an ancient monument than in being an arena for use in
public ritual. But underlying the modern use is the ancient presence which
makes itself felt in the upper portions that impassively contemplate, as they did
centuries ago, the bloody spectacle of contrived death.
The amphitheater at Pula (Pietas Julia), Croatia, a city on the Adriatic
that was destroyed by Augustus and then rebuilt by him, is the scene, in 1986,
of an international film festival (PI. 78). The giant screen is the modern equiv
alent of the ancient games, though the open-air spectacle is reserved for the
cool of night. The audience itself will occupy the scene reserved for ancient ac
tion. They will give thumbs up or down in judging the contesting entries.
Throughout Europe, ruins have been designated as public parks for the
leisure of the public. Consider the ruin as park and playground in Trier (Treves,
Augusta Treverorum), Germany (PI. 79). In 1961, a child bicycles through, and
two gentlemen, at far left, discuss matters on the simple paths that are given
shape by the curvaceous Roman remains. Vegetation on the upper surfaces of
the forms is a gesture of friendship between park and ruin.
We are encouraged to see the stonework as harmonious occupant of its
present context, not in isolation as ancient object. Whence the framing value of
the tree raised above the building’s foundation on the left and that tree under
which we stand whose leaves gently greet the two vertical forms. These enor
mous forms have sculptural weight. Their Line of Destruction activates the up
per edge of the ruin. They harbor good spacing between them.
The child, unknowingly yet unerringly, enters directly under that entrance
space and touches the unmarked center of the white star in the unshadowed
path. The two senior figures, immobilized for a moment, mimic the twin tower
ing projections of stone.
PI. 78. Roman Amphitheater, Pula, Croatia, 1986

PL 79. Roman Baths, T rier, Germany, 1961

A nice touch is the high finish of the substantial tower-base nearest the
child. Formal beauty includes (1) the roundness of that tower, (2) followed at
the next level by the arches, the one on the right blocked while the one on the
left opens to multiple forms, and then (3) topped by the free-standing verticals.
Strong in formal qualities, richly detailed, fortunately related to human activi
ties, and graced with appropriate vegetation, this ruin is an admirable ensemble
in which we stand.
11. People in the Ruins
The presence of people in the ruin that we visit often aids our appreciation by
contributing interesting movement to the immovable stones, serving as foils for
the forms, causing amusing incongruity, and adding color to monotonic monu
ments. Whoever wears a red sweater to a ruin is a blessing! But the chief value
of other visitors is to act as moving centers of awareness within the ruin. What
they detect, we experience. For what they miss, we make amends. Without the
people, the ruin would be empty (Pis. 1, 8, 16, 42, 44, 45, 48, 61, 64, 75, 76,
77, 79, 94). We also learn to look at other people from the ruin’s point of view.
This leads us to see ourselves as the ruin might see us.
12. Ruinscape and the Picturesque
How painters have set the ruin in their landscapes shapes how we seek the ruin
in the lay of the land. Ruin imitates art. Landscape gardening rushes in to build
those picturesque images on extensive estates. The ruin became a landscaping
convention, an estate ornament, along with the obligatory grotto, pagoda, tem
ple, bridge, and tower. Such follies! Ruins were the fanciful diversion of a
stroll, locus for amusement or musing, and artifice that any grand garden
should naturally have.
Frederick the Great arranged classical ruins for his vista at palatial Sans
Souci in Potsdam. Ruin as built, not found. Frederick also left a few ruins be
hind in the cities and battlefields of Europe.
William Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, had ruins built on
his estate at Gatineau Park, Quebec. To Tower Garden, St. Louis, Missouri,
USA, H. Shaw transported the ruins of a burned-down hotel to rest beside the
sailing pond. Thirty-two enormous columns from the United States Capitol,
displaced by redesign of a portico, have been remounted as a magnificent land
scape attraction at the National Arboretum in Washington.
Le Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris (8e) is notable for its design of ru
ins to fit the landscape. In another arrondissement (19e), le Parc Monceau col
lects real ruins and artificial ones. A hemicycle of columns edges the pond. The
columns are used for climbing roses and ivy. The broken edge is carefully
built. Broken columns are dispersed about the park, encouraging people to join
them, by sitting around the edges. An arch is used as a portal for the path. In
1984,1 witnessed the shooting of an historical film that used the arch’s framing
for entrance of the characters. I tried repeatedly to get into the scene as a pas
serby, but I lacked the proper costume. A film career ruined.
The picturesque, as aesthetic category for the ruin, sees the ruin pictorially
as an element within, or else as the organizing feature of, landscape painting
and landscape gardening. The taste for ruins developed visually. Even poetry
and travel description painted pictures of ruins. Thus, visitors to ruins brought
with them the Framing Eye to see the ruin in its pictorial landscape. Three aes
thetic modes of dealing with ruin were inextricably bound together throughout
the eighteenth century and later decades: (1) the Grand Tour as visit to ruins in
site, (2) landscape painting as genre of celebrating ruins, and (3) landscape gar
dening as integrating ruins in the grounds of life.
13. Domestic Ruins
The ruin of an ordinary home strikes many chords in our sensibility, since we
are familiar with the functions and furnishings. In 1983, in the abandoned mill-
town of Val-Jalbert, on the Ouiatchouane River, Quebec, Canada, the roof of
the wooden house has fallen in, tom away the rooms, and dropped outside (PI.
80). The fall has left a forbidding void over which hangs a section of the wall
covering, draped upon unsteady beams. In the next snowstorm, I fear, all will
fall. Tenaciously, the room at the top holds sway, its wall-covering not all tom
away, its enclosure open to the pleasant summer sky. Rain or ruin is all the
same to that room. We admire the room’s willingness to ride the wreckage into
the earth.
The cascade of forms is ominous, for all this that harbored human func
tions is falling forward. Yet everyone safely left the abandoned building in
1927, and we are out of range of its loose material. Our initial uneasiness
caused by the ruin of human habitation gives way to aesthetic ease in relating
the strikingly piled sections. Dramatic lines extend downward from the roof, as
beams have come loose. Behind the prominent materials, just detectable at top
center, is a good old chimney. It peeps out to give a feeling of interiomess to
the mess.
The min has depth and a core. It has thrown in every domestic feature, in
cluding the kitchen sink. Its interior life is suggested by two darkened upper-
floor doorways flanking the chimney and by a gash in the wall on the right.
The poor ground-level window does its level best at holding back the collaps
ing house. The greenery grows apace, making an agreeable buffer for us. The
destructive growth of the house outstrips the ordinary biology of the neighbor
ing plants. Dynamic in falling apart, the min is in astonishing equipoise.
PI. 80. Abandoned House, Val-Jalbert, Quebec, Canada, 1983

14. A Ruin No Longer a Ruin?
I don’t know if Stonehenge, England’s greatest Bronze Age monument, is a

ruin. For centuries, it had been experienced as such. The mysterious place was
reputed to be the remains of a Druid (Saxon, Phoenician, Chaldean) temple
dedicated to bloody rites. Thomas Hardy makes the most of this tradition in the
climax of his novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), as Tess and her husband,
in the darkness of their flight, stumble upon the site, a “monstrous place,” “so
solemn and lonely.” They spend the night here. The sun rises in this temple of
the sun, and Tess is apprehended for murder (Hardy, 1998, pp. 445-449).
But since the 1960s, Stonehenge has been made out to be a precise astro
nomical instrument that is substantially intact, needing only slight adjustments
to continue its scientific functions. Given that interpretation, I have difficulty
detecting brokenness. Instead, as in 1967, I am drawn to precision (PI. 81).
Mystery is eclipsed by archaeoastronomy. Or archaeoastrology? But a black
cloud overhead and a chill wind across the Salisbury Plain switch me back to
the brooding ruin to which the hardy heroine had tesstified.
15. Disaster
Disastrous
Crash,
crush,
crack, crumble,
the world’s in a rush
to take
a tumble.
Disaster is not a likely candidate for enjoyment. Lamentation and regret

are the anticipated responses (PI. 89). But sometimes, aesthetic qualities enter
the response, though these may be entangled in moral sentiments.
Voltaire’s “Poeme sur le ddsastre de Lisbonne [the earthquake of 1755]:
ou examen de cet axiome: Tout est bien’” (1756), argues that “all is not well,”
but that evil exists on earth. From French:
Approach! contemplate these frightful ruins,

These fragments, these scraps, these unhappy ashes, (Voltaire, 1961, p.
304)
Voltaire’s moral outrage is directed against apologists for the great loss of life
who appeal to a theory of benign providence.
Fragment .\ o f a Chapter on Ruin 373
PI. 81. Stonehenge, England, UK, 1967

Though roofs fell in during the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, to the horror
of parishioners and the faithful everywhere, the roofs absence at the Church of
Carmo offers congenial access to the sky on a gray day at the end of 1960 (PI.
82). The arch and circle have been picked clean of clinging matter. The stones
abutting both have been evened out. So, too, the arches that march up the aisle
on the left. The cleaning up and putting back guides us to the purity of Gothic
PI. 82. Church of Carmo, Lisbon, Portugal, 1960
formal construction. The rest is filler of stone. The freed pair of arch and circle
soar above the embedded pair of arch and circle, a protruding ornament linking
the two sets. We turn from the craftwork and stylistic flourish of the details to
the arch achievement of the ruined parts. A sad place when we remember. But,
when we forget, the ruin is an archetype of pleasure.
16. Future Ruins
With one eye to the future, another to the past, contemporary artists have been
building ruins into their works. Thus, the mural by Richard Haas (1986) for the
below-ground concourse of the Smithsonian Institution’s Ripley Center in
Washington is a perspective upon ruins framed by ruined arches. Two of the
Smithsonian buildings, next door, are depicted standing above the ruins. A Par
isian cafe at the corner of Place Saint-Sulpice, the square where Ellen and I
wed in 1962, is decorated with a mural of the square in ruin. James Sterling’s
building for the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (1977-1984) has features that
appear to be in ruin. Endless consumer goods are offered the American public
at the pre-ruined Best Products showrooms near Houston, Texas, and Miami,
Florida, designed by the architects SITE (Sculpture in the Environment).
Ruin is becoming a mode of creative design in the artistic repertory (see
Section 17, “Ruin-Art Creations,’’ in the Bibliographical Essay, below).
17. Funereal
Strolling through cemeteries, we cannot miss the appeal of monuments to tradi

tions of symbolic ruin in the broken column, cracked vase, blasted tree, and
gaping skull. Sometimes, the stones that depict ruin are in ruin. Grave irony.
Funerary reliefs leave their containers, relieved from serving the de
ceased, to take on life, as they enter the museum of art or archaeology. That
such sculptural work may be broken appears altogether fitting.
The ruin attracts the literary soul for its resting place. Pierre de Ronsard is
buried among the ruins of the Priory of St. Come, France. Roses grow around
his tomb. Sir Walter Scott is buried in the family chapel in the ruin of Dry-
burgh Abbey, Scotland. Mist drapes his tomb.
Oh bur-ry me not—on the lone prai-rie,— (Golden Encyclopedia o f Folk

Music, no date, p. 286)
18. Minimalism
At Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, USA, in 1965, a fading impression in the grass

is all that remains of one of the barracks of George Washington’s rag-tag army.
At Woodhenge, England, a Neolithic ruin, discovered by aerial photogra
phy in 1925, a set of post-holes in the ground is given presence by low-lying
concrete insets. We do not know how much had been at stake.
At Ephesus (Selquk), Turkey, in 1965, the Temple of Artemis, the largest
temple of antiquity, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is the lar
gest hole in the ground I had seen. Maximum imaginability.
19. Chance Ruins
Aesthetically speaking, all ruins are the victims or heroes of chance, even when
destruction of the original was intended. We take our chances when visiting a
ruin that may have aesthetic merit or merely be a pile of stones. Sometimes, we
chance upon a monument that we did not know was in ruin. Local residents
frequently use the terms “monument” and “ruin” interchangeably, as if they do
not wish to notice the ruinedness of their monuments. Presumably, the monu
ment would be better if not a ruin. I have often found the opposite to be true.
Many times, I have been told, “You must visit the great temple (church,
palace, castle, fort, bridge, wall, tower,. . .) that is just down the road.” “Is it a
ruin?” “No, sir, it is quite intact!” “Sorry, I must go in the other direction.”
The unidentified ruin I chanced upon in Scotland in 1967 is an organizer
of the countryside, resolutely occupying its hill, and drawing the fields about it
(PI. 83). The earth and sky harmonize, thanks to its uniting influence. The ruin
partakes of the freedom of rambling clouds and rugged vegetation.
Totally at home, though roofless and unoccupied. One side shadow, the
other grained stone, the simplest arrangement. A human equation standing in
the natural elements. The cutout of the roof line is a grand gesture of reshaping
by violent chance. The result: a work of sculpture set upon the earth.
Unidentified Scottish Ruin
On the way to ruin,

I pass you standing in a field.
You bear no sign;
you are not on the map.
Not on my route,
but for you
I will stop a while.
No entrance gate holds you back.
How do you live without such care?
No guidebook, no ticketbooth, no postcards
keep me from your silent truth.
Where have I to journey,
when here
you are
so
in
tact
?
Fragments of a Chapter on Rain 377
PI. 83. Unidentified Castle, Scotland, UK, 1967

20. On-Site
The far-left pilaster of the Trevi Fountain (1762) in Rome has been made to
look in ruin to suggest the power of the falling water.
Difference in destruction, then in excavation and restoration: in 79 CE,
falling ash and debris covered Pompeii, while Herculaneum was destroyed by
molten lava that hardened into rock (PI. 84).
PI. 84. Herculaneum, Italy, 1961
Some wall paintings rescued from Pompeii picture ruins, presumably of

the earthquake that the city survived in 62 CE. Examples are in New York on
the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The ruin continues to be used as a decorative motif on wall covering, for
example, in the Board Room in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington,
as if walls are made secure because they bear the talisman of ruin.
On the wide Eastern rivers of the United States, such as the Susquehanna
and the Potomac, bridges that floods had carried away have left their stone pi
ers to become islands, like stepping stones meant for giants.
Writers sometimes locate the most celebrated ruin of Wales, Tintem Ab
bey, in England, across the River Wye. Why?
The Mayan ruins at Yaxha, Guatemala, are buried under green pyramidal
hills topped by the temples of trees. While at many other sites, we try to imag-
ine the intact buildings the ruins represent, at Yaxha, we can imagine the ruins
covered by the mounds of earth and uncontrolled vegetation.
At Yucatecan ruins in Mexico, signs in Mayan, Spanish, and English ex
plain that they were not built by ancient Egyptians or visiting extraterrestrians.
PI. 85. Pyramid, Edzna, Mexico, 2003
In Lucknow, India, the Residency had been preserved in ruins by the Brit
ish as remembrance of the Indian Mutiny (Sepoy Rebellion, 1857). Now, for
Indians, it commemorates the Indian Uprising.
Abu Simbel (ca. 1250 BCE), the grandest monument of Ramesses II, was
relocated in 1966, in 950 blocks, from the Nile’s banks, threatened by the As
wan High Dam’s rising water, to a higher site on Egypt’s southern border. In
1990, as I stood overawed by the tremendous statues/status of the ruler that
boldly faced the sun and the Sudan, my attention was diverted by the opening
of a small door, from which a guard emerged to smoke a cigarette. Slipping be
hind his back, I opened the door, and stepped into an enormous fake mountain.
Ruins in Antarctica? Indeed, the permafrost keeps stations, ships, camps,
sleds, dogs, and even explorers on ice.
21. Walls
In and Out
Walls wall in
and walls wall out.
Walls fall in
and walls will out.
The aesthetics of walls deserves consideration, for their long-immuring en

durance. Damage and ruin transform walls from utilitarian service to aesthetic
field. In 1995, I enjoyed the cracks patched on the wall of Beijing’s former
Forbidden City (Gu Gong, or Da Nei: “The Great Within”), now the Palace
Museum, as an abstract pattern of broken lines (PI. 86). The wall gives the im
pression that the lines, hand-plastered, surface as its formal expression.
PI. 86. Wall, Forbidden City, Beijing, China, 1995
In Qumran, above the Dead Sea, in Palestine, rough walls sheltered the
ascetic sect that treasured the Dead Sea Scrolls (PI. 87). In 1981, we sense the
work of hands in piling heavy stones under the forbidding gaze of mountains
PI. 87. Walls, Qumran, West Bank, Palestine, 1981

and the burning glaze of sun. An Essenetial scene. (For more walls, see Pis. 3,
9, 19, 41, 50, 51, 54.) Here is a short history of the world, in re-verse:
Up and Down
Walls were raised here.

Here walls were razed.
22. Sun-Burst
When the sun silhouettes the ruin, as in 1999, at Ireland’s Rock of Cashel
(Gael.: caiseal, “castle”), it accentuates the Line of Destruction and offers its
sun-burst to the Framing Device (PI. 88). By walking along the shadow’s edge,
we make the blinding sun move along the ruin’s edge and enter its frames.
PI. 88. Silhouette, Rock of Cashel, Ireland, 1999
23. Ruining
We may take aesthetic pleasure in the ruining of things. Thus, Fanny As-
singham, the well-named bungler in Henry James’s masterpiece, The Golden
Bowl (1904), deliberately smashes the flawed vessel that has stood for an illicit
relationship concealed from her—and our—friend, Maggie Verver:
So for an instant, full of her thought and of her act, she held the precious
vessel, and then, with due note taken of the margin of the polished floor,
bare, fine and hard in the embrasure of her window, she dashed it boldly
to the ground, where she had the thrill of seeing it, with the violence of
the crash, lie shattered. (James, 1952, bk. 2, p. 186).
Destruction as an act of vengeance can bring sweetness with it, even

when killing is intended. Thus, the blinded Samson, his former strength return
ing with a new crop of hair, has the slave boy place his hands on the pillars of
the temple in Gaza, Philistia (Palestine), then he triumphantly brings down the
roof upon his enemies, and himself (,Judges, 16:30). This ruining is repeated as
grandiose spectacle in Camille Saint-Saens’s Samson et Dalila (1877), the one
operatic work in which the tenor is guaranteed to bring down the house.
But the act of destroying something might banish every joy. In anger at
the idolatry of the Jews, Moses smashes the tablets with the Ten Command
ments written by God in Hebrew (ca. 1260 BCE, Exodus, 32:19). Moses had to
go up Mt. Sinai (in Egypt, or possibly Arabia) again. Difficult to understand is
that he came down a second time (Exodus, 34:29). One of the intact tablets (in
Amharic: tabot) is claimed to be in Axum, Ethiopia. The broken pieces of the
original can be ordered by number on the archaeological black market.
24. Sound and Light
Sound-and-light shows staged at celebrated ruins often enact vivid bombard

ments and conflagrations so that we can participate in the thrills of ruining the
ruin. While the programs turn history into drama, and therefore are saddening
and patriotic, they can be aesthetically valuable in highlighting striking features
of the ruin in the dark. The light, not the sound, is worth the ticket.
25. Ephemera
Here this morning; gone this evening. Enjoyment of the process of ruining oc
curs in pinatas, Halloween pumpkins, Christmas cookies, sand castles, scare
crows, snowpeople, ice carvings.
Alexandre Falguiere made a snow statue, “La Resistance,” on the Paris
ramparts, December 1870. Heroic impermanence. Later, he redid it in plaster.
Change of medium. And meaning. Where are the snows of yesteryear?
26. Ruin Sound
The ruin is a trompe Toreille (Fr.: “auditory trick”) that no longer speaks with
authority. It does not trumpet its presence. Yet listen . . . .
Sounds of Ruins
rain
birds
leaves
echoes
whispers
footfalls
stonefalls
windfalls
silence
falls
27. Ruin Music
Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Lizst, Zoltan Kodaly, Jacques Ibert, and Michele
Reverdy have composed ruin program-music. Donald Knaack composes music
for performance exclusively with junk materials. A sound knack.
We sing of ruins:
(1) Joshua fit the bat-tie o—Jer-i-co,—Jer-i-co,—Jer-i-co—Lord,—

Joshua Fit the bat-tie o’—Jer-i-co—An’ the walls come tumb-lin’ down.
(Johnson, no date, p. 18)
(2) Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse, on y danse.
(3) London Bridge is falling down, falling down, My fair lady.
The chorus gravely sways while singing the first, an American “Negro” Spiritu
al. Folk dancers gaily prance for the second, about the half-a-bridge across the
Rhone, France. Children enact a ritual for the third, which culminates in drop
ping to the ground. London Bridge, however, is standing in the Arizona desert.
Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) takes place at an estate
on the edge of ruin (Act 1, sc. 1), where the villain, Enrico, the Laird of Lam
mermoor, finds his affairs teetering. In a desperate act to save himself from
ruin, Enrico forces his sister, Lucia, who loves Edgardo, to marry another, Ar
turo. Her marriage is her ruin. It drives her mad. She kills Arturo, ruining the
wedding night for him as well. Then she dies. Since Edgardo’s love and life are
ruined too, he kills himself. That leaves Enrico defeated—in ruin. Grand opera!
28. Pro-Verbial
(1) A ruin in the mist is not to be missed!

(2) When in ruins, do as the ruins do.
(3) Weltschmerz: rue in ruin.

(4) Upon entering any building, always look for the exit.
29. Language
Language is built upon the ruins of words that have taken root from other
tongues, so what springs from our mouths is the sound of other minds. Our
words contain worlds. We speak in many tongues, as our words play upon us.
Someone else is always speaking through me. The sounds I make are echoes.
Half the words of English come from French; hence, they are Latinate,
therefore literate and easily combinatory. The other great portion is Germanic,
in speech short and gruff, strong and rough. We can say anything in English
two ways, via dual modes. My mind stutters with two tongues.
My ear twists sounds I hear. “Forced airways”: four stairways. “A part
from the whole”: apart from the hole. “Not at all”: not a tall. “Intravenous”: in
fra Venus. “To elicit”: too illicit. “In essential”: inessential. “An expatriate”: an
ex-patriot. “The ice has not been nice”: a nice contradiction when pronounced.
The right to bare arms. Acts of wonton destruction. A breech in the wall!
Self-foolfilling prophecy. Whining and dining. Modorate fragrance. Viscous
circle. Stelae-eyed. Other-wordly. Epic-graphic. Sub-urbanity. Altaration. In-
firmation. Contentmeant. Encyclopleadia. Atomspheric. Loopwhole. Epistle-
mological. Ginsblurb. Magnimousity. Democrazy. De-voted. Re-eclected.
Spliticisms: Textile/tactile, monumentality/monomentality, attention/
a tension, entrance/en-trance, parliamentary/paramilitary.
Ore or oar? Fore for four! To a vale, to a veil, to avail! Vane, in vein, all
in vain! In form, in format, in formation, information! Where ruins wear the
ware of wear! Engineers curse rivers by damming them. We are not yet out of
the woulds. This book suffers from its poofreading. Let me attend to such
wittischisms/witlessisms at my disgression.
30. Enrichment
Porcelain ruin of a castle or sailing ship for the home aquarium, a treasure sub
merged in our living room. Broken glass, buried for centuries in the sands of
Syria, is prized for its iridescence. We value the fine lines that crack the glaze
of Korean celadon porcelain. You can bank on it: the one-Limpira banknote of
Honduras pictures Cop&n, the two-Quetzales bill of Guatemala shows Tikal.
31. Anecdotage
(1) Alexander Pope designed the image cluttered with ruins for the title page of
his Essay on Man (1733-1734).
(2) Hubert Robert was saved in the nick of time when someone else with
the same name was called to the guillotine.
(3) Bernard Berenson, the art historian, favored “ruins yet unruined.”
(4) Manol Millares (1926-1972), the Spanish artist, tore into the unpaint
ed canvas and sewed it into three-dimensional forms.
(5) Spyridon Marinatos died in 1974, falling off a wall in his excavation
at Akrotiri, the Bronze Age ruin (“The Pompeii of Greece”) on Santorini
(Thera, Third), that may be Atlantis. He is memorialized at the site.
32. Grin and Bear It
I once found the skeletal remains of bears in a cave in California. Staring at the
bare bones, I pondered the Aesthetics of Bruins. The Stylites, like St. Simeon
(fifth century CE), whose style of life was to dwell alone atop stone pillars in
the desert, form the Ascetics of Ruins. If reading this book has ever put you to
sleep, then you are entitled to call it Anesthetics of Ruins.
33. Added Verses Versus Adversity
I/Aye, Ruin
A ruin,
in our world
in ruin,
I would make
the world
ours,
whole,
home.
This and That, From Here and There
Ruins from the sky:

meteorites
Ruins from the earth:
fossils
Ruins from the sea:
seashells
Ruins from the body:
bones
Ruins from the mind:
schnizola9(Embm#ZW£8”furefc@luGine:rzl.ubertkadid’lie%nudnikle71ji
34. Museum of Ruins
We find ruins in museums of art and archaeology. Ruins have been turned into
museums, and some museums have been turned into ruins. As yet, we have no
museums of ruins. What we need, you now must agree, is an international mu
seum, ruined or not, to harbor ruins in all the media and provide interpretive
aids for appreciating the role of ruins in life. You hold in your hands the mani
festo for creating such an institution.
35. Ruinitis
I am at my wit’s end, because I have failed to introduce the following words

into this book: ruinology, ruininstance, ruinaccessibility, ruiniforme (Fr.:
“ruinlike terrain’’), uniformruin, runeation (to read the world as a field of
ruins), ruinier, ruiniest, ruinated, ruinatious, ruiniferous, ruinosity, ruinocerous
(a wild beast thought to inhabit ruins), ruinaction, ruinactivity, ruinanimate, ru-
inarticulate, ruincomparable, ruincoherence, ruindeed, ruindependent, and,
above all, ruinaesthetic.
36. Obsession/Optsection
These have been the pieces that can find no peace. I have certainly given you a
piece of my mind. Piece be with you!
You can see how this insistence upon the ruin threatens to extend to every
field in its quest to incorporate the whole. The ruin, I argue, is central to the un
derstanding of television and theology, photography and pre-Socratic philoso
phy, anthologizing and conceptualizing, seashells and world destruction.
No end to where we may find, or make, ruin. It is available as a central
thread to tie together disparate things before they disappear. We have been re
luctant to recognize the primacy of the ruin in life, because of our quest for
wholeness. We want more than just ruins. But once we begin looking at/for ru
ins, the whole world comes to look like a ruin!
Ruin as topic, topos, commonplace (a place for finding and filing and
filling), theme, motif, leitmotif motive, image, metaphor, analogy, archetype,
allegory, conceit, convention, complex, nexus, paradigm, project, position,
pose, posture, proposition, password, passkey, passport, proverb or platitude,
presentation device or poetic inspiration, symbol or symptom, tradition or
touchstone, trope or schtik, mystique or plain old obsession.
Though insistent and exaggerated, my theory of ruins, you must admit, is
not wreckless. It stumbles through life, which, in the final chapter, we will al
low to catch up with, and perhaps get away from, us.
Nineteen
MEDITATIONS ON HUMANITY, SELF, AND

THE WORLD AS RUINS
Ruine hath taught me thus to ruminate
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 64 (1609), A Casebook on Shake
speare’s Sonnets, ed. Gerald Willen and Victor B. Reed (New York: Tho
mas Y. Crowell Company, 1964), p. 66.
The time has come to explore the largest sense of ruin by facing ourselves. Let
ruin call the tune, as we turn our mind to existence. Meditation is rumination
upon ruination. As a Doctor of Philosophy, I am licensed to prescribe medita
tion as medication for chronic fragmentality. Let us organize our treatment in
seven sections, each given its tone by an epigraph that might also serve as our
epitaph. Here comes serious stuff. For adults only. Your ID will be checked!
1. The Fall
In human life time is but a point, reality a flux, perception indistinct,

the composition of the body subject to easy corruption, the soul a spinning
top, fortune hard to make out, fame confused. To put it briefly: physical
things are but a flowing stream, things of the soul dreams and vanity; life
is but a struggle and the visit to a strange land, posthumous fame but a
forgetting.
Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, bk. 2, sect. 17, trans. from Greek
by G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983),
pp. 16-17.
Humanity is the greatest ruin. Mythology and theology, philosophy’s hand-

mades, identify us as Fallen. The Golden Age preceded our history. It is the
happy state we left behind.
With all that we have done and become, why have we been labeled as Fal
len? Are we not the being that Rises, goes beyond itself, overcomes the terrors
of the world, would know everything, and knows no limits? The chorus in
Sophocles’ Antigone (443 or 441 BC) chants in celebration (from Greek):
Of many wonders, nothing in the world is more wondrous than humanity

(anthropos)l
Who makes a passage across the engulfing waves and billows of the gray-
surging sea before the blustering wind,
And wears away that highest-ranking of the gods, the imperishable, inex
haustible Earth,
Who taught itself language, thought like wind, disposition to civic order,
And how to take shelter from the inhospitality of the icy open air and the
shafts of pelting rain.
Ever-resourceful!
Who contrives succor from unmanageable/unimaginable diseases,
Who never sets out without resources for whatever may come,
Though only from Death can make no escape. (Sophocles, 1994, pp. 34,
36)
Our physical form has proved admirably suited to inhabit the Earth from
jungle to desert, mountain to plain. Against the natural elements, we have op
posed modes of shelter that permit us to prosper no matter the climate. Air con
ditioning, central heating, and flush toilets are among our greatest achieve
ments. We fly through the air with the greatest of ease. We have sent people
beyond the atmosphere of the earth to the moon, and even brought them back
alive. We have cured hiccups, replaced hearts, and brought bodies back from
momentary death.
We have accomplished as much on earth as the gods might have. We are
the divine, not the fallen race, when looked at from a dog’s point of view,
though not that of a cat.
In our intellectual and imaginative accomplishments, we are to be further
admired. We have invented the infinite ingenuities of mathematics and lan
guage. Computers probe the universe’s secrets for us. In the arts, we have creat
ed works that would surpass the handiwork of the gods. Homer, Shikibu Mura-
saki, Shakespeare, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Jane
Austen, Vincent van Gogh, Margaret Bourke-White, Pablo Picasso, Martha
Graham, Katherine Hepburn. Job could say to God, “What is your great Behe
moth or mighty Leviathan compared to these?” (cf Job, 40-41).
Hamlet exclaims,
What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in facul
ty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like
an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the
paragon of animals! (Hamlet, Shakespeare, 1963, Act 2, sc. 2, p. 159;
gender not intended)
We have discovered how to feed and clothe all human beings, though we
have delayed the implementation. We have so sharpened scientific mastery
over matter and energy that we can split the very atom. The human animal,
without the claws and fangs of the tiger or the hide and bulk of the elephant,
with the pressure of a finger can incinerate the Earth.
Meditations on Humanity, Self, and the World as Ruins 389
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world

That has such people in’t! (Miranda, in The Tempest, Shakespeare, 1997,
Act 5, sc. 1, p. 1684, gender intended)
Humanity stands out magnificent upon the stage of Being, but topples
nonetheless, according to the classical Greek vision, for we are given over to
pride (hubris) and become victims of our fate, which springs from our character
{ethos). We can only fall because we have risen. The tragic lesson of being hu
man. Excellence (arete) is the incentive. Nobility of character remains, al
though it may lead us to the tragic error that brings the roof down upon us.
In the Christian vision, the roof has already been brought down. History
begins with the expulsion from Eden, the Fall from Grace, ruination of the per
fect world. We have a history because our nature condemns us to misery. Our
inhumanity is the constant theme in the story of humanity.
The Fall (Lat.: lapsus; Fr.: la Chute; Ger.: der Siindenfall) = Humanity is
tainted from birth. The sins of the parents are visited upon the offspring, a sick
ening notion. Mortality is the punishment for all of us {cf St. Paul, Romans,
5:12-21; St. Augustine, 1966, bk. 12, ch. 22, p. 110; bk. 13, chs. 1-4, pp.
134-135; bk. 14, chs. 11-12, 14, pp. 323-334, 343-353).
Christianity is a condemnation of the world. We are at fault for being bom
into it. We bear the cross of the world. Salvation lies elsewhere. Our only hope
is another world. Riders on the dirt together, we cry out to God, “Stop the
world! We want to get off!”
We inquire into the fault, error, sin that brings us to ruin. Sin is the Chris
tian necessity. The guarantee of the human Fall, it sets the stage for redemption
through Christ. No Fall, no Redemptor: it is as symbol as that. A world not
given over to sin is able to correct its errors, thanks to exemplary embodiments
of the ethical life. But a world embedded in sin cannot lift itself up by human
effort alone. God help us!
Whence comes this sinfulness that requires the gracious intervention of
the divine? The first human beings commit sin in Eden and then enter the world
with sin. In place of Eden, the mortal world is given Adam (Heb: “human be
ing” [generic] or “man” [gender-specific]), his mate, and their descendants, as
the punishment for sin. Our life is a curse. “I curse the day I was born,” would
cry Job, the model of righteousness {Job, 3:1-3). Adam’s sin is Christianity’s
cleverest inspiration/interpretation/insistence/instigation/inheritance/invention.
The crucial passage in Genesis (3:19) (from Hebrew) is:
The human being {adam) will return to the ground {adamah) from which
Adam was made. Thou shalt return to dust ( 'apar), for thou art but dust
{cf Job, 21:16, 34:15; Psalms, 104:29, 103:14; 1 Corinthians, 15:47; Ec
clesiastes, 3:20, 12:7).
The Creator’s death sentence upon the created. The red ground of the Middle
East, such as at Aden (Eden?), gives way to dust and clay. In Isaiah, 64:8, hu
manity is clay of the Potter. In Genesis, 3:19, while pronouncing sentence, God
is playing upon words. God, what a play on words!
Why is this terrible curse of mortality to descend into countless genera
tions, passing from Adam eventually into every innocent babe? What evil can
be so great as to scourge the entire human race? Let us eavesdrop upon an off-
the-record theological dialogue (deilogue?) between two of my old colleagues,
CJB and PAM.
The Theology of Ruin
CJB: So Adam became the Fall-guy by disobeying God’s command. Why did
he do that?
PAM: It was at the urging of his mate.
CJB: And was she opposed to God?
PAM: Not really, but she had tasted of a forbidden pomegranate and wished her
mate to do likewise.
CJB: Why?
PAM: Because it tasted good, I suppose.
CJB: What could taste so good as to draw someone to break God’s command?
PAM: The taste was intoxicating and yet insatiable, for it was of knowledge.
CJB: Knowledge of what?
PAM: Knowledge of everything. Knowledge has no end. No final edge to know

ever comes. The man and the woman began to know one another, and they
would know all, even God.
CJB: Why was this forbidden?
PAM: God only knows.
CJB: How can seeking knowledge, even of God, be against God’s will?
PAM: I don’t know. But, like you, I would like to know. I suppose this is a sin
of being human.
CJB: Sin or nobility? To seek knowledge, to search for truth, even when forbid
den, isn’t this the highest human deed?
PAM: Not in God’s eyes.
CJB: Does God, then, miss something in the human being? Can God know
what not being God is like?
PAM: God knows all. Only God can know all. The efforts of all others are in
vain. God knows the human being through and through. God understands our
sinful nature.
CJB: Did God understand, indeed, know in advance, Adam’s disobedience?
PAM: It must be so, for if God did not know, then God would have been fooled
by a mere creature. No one can fool God.
CJB: God knew that the human creature would disobey and hence would be
punished terribly for the sin?
PAM: Yes.
CJB: Then, is the Original Sin Adam’s or God’s?
PAM: I don’t follow you.
CJB: Where is the kindness, goodness, or justness in creating a being that God
knows will disobey the command God gives, leading God to sentence the un
born offspring to death? Capital punishment for everybody!
PAM: You are blaming God for Adam’s free choice. God made Adam, but
Adam made the mistake.
CJB: Did not God make a mistake as well in letting Adam fall/fail? Adam was
imperfect and susceptible to error.
PAM: God is the sole perfection. The Deity deigned to make human beings,
which naturally would have imperfections. But God endowed those creatures
with Free Will. God did not coerce their obedience. They were free to choose.
CJB: Or did they choose to be free? Was God jealous of their freedom? Resent
ful of their power? Angered by their independence? If God knew what making
beings who were free meant, then why could not God accept their freedom?
Why punish for disobedience the being that freely seeks knowledge?
PAM: You would measure God by the yardsticks (or metersticks) of human
questions. This is symptomatic of your incessant yet imprudent quest for
knowledge. Questioning, my dear colleague, can lead you astray.
CJB: Is questioning itself a sin, the sin?
PAM: Not necessarily. But you must recognize that answers will not come to
match the understanding of the questioner. God is outside the power of the hu
man intellect.
CJB: Does this excuse God for inhumanity?
PAM: You are too interested in blaming God, while the sin is Adam’s.
CJB: Should not the sin of the creature be visited upon the Creator instead of
the offspring? Was not God an accessory before the fact? May we not indict
God as the chief law-enforcement official engaged in tainted entrapment?
PAM: Let us get it straight. Adam was told not to do such-and-such. What it
was does not matter. God had some reason for the prohibition. Adam chose, un
der the urging of his mate, to do it. The prosecution rests.
CJB: And humanity be damned! But if the man (Heb.: is) listened to the wom
an (issah), he was following the wishes of his dearest companion. “Madam, I’m
Adam,’’ forward and backward. Being companionable and agreeable to his
mate was only human, not to be construed as rebelling against God. This is an
extenuating circumstance that the judge should consider.
PAM: It clouds the issue. The Supreme Judge has decided. The key to the case
is that Adam was responsible. The human being must place obedience to God
above interhuman relationships.
CJB: Why on earth must the human being do that? God made woman the com
panion that man could not live without. Both the woman and the man were
created in God’s image (Genesis, 1:27). Marriage is the splice of life. Surely
God knew that one spouse would listen to the other instead of following a
pointless rule laid down by a third party.
PAM: Third party, indeed! The rule was for a good reason. It kept the human
beings from ruining themselves by being unruly. And in God, Adam had a
good companion, for God too walked in the Garden of Eden.
CJB: Then God now walks there alone. The decadent creatures have been
chased from the divine garden (Gr.: paradeisos). Doesn’t God miss those com
panions? Weren’t they the finest things in the garden? How good a companion
was God in not forgiving a natural error, banishing the creatures, and plaguing
the generations of their offspring with death?
PAM: God was harsh. It was the first case of human disobedience. God showed
that a higher standard would have to be followed. Adam is the lesson for hu
manity. Those who keep the faith are cherished by God. God loves goodness.
CJB: Good God! If some legitimate reason existed to forbid the act, then God
could have let the natural consequences of that act trouble the human beings,
until they saw the error of their ways. They would have freely amended their
behavior, apologized to God, asked forgiveness, and chosen not to disobey in
the future. That would have been a scenario fit for composition by God.
PAM: Human beings have exactly the possibilities of reconciling themselves

with God that you describe. The punishment of the first man and woman makes
humanity’s story possible. They were afflicted by the natural consequences of
their act, for their sufferings were the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
CJB: What did they learn?
PAM: They knew sorrow. They knew each other carnally. They discovered
sexual enjoyment and shame. With it came childbirth, whose pains the woman
was to know, and child-rearing, whose heartaches father and mother would suf
fer. From their children, they learned of death, which awaits all Abel-bodied
men and women.
CJB: In other words, human beings discovered being human, and this saddened
their hearts. Or do you mean that God condemned these creatures to become
human as their punishment?
PAM: Human nature did change with the Fall, due to an act for which we were
totally responsible.
CJB: Wei But a better claim is that the serpent was to blame. If the man was
persuaded by the woman, she was persuaded by the serpent, and the serpent
was a creature of God. What good God would create a serpent to give evil
counsel to God’s finest creatures, so that they would suffer for it? They were
bedeviled. Let God ask forgiveness in confessing, Mea culpa.
PAM: Temptations occur even in Eden. Blame not God for the urgings of evil.
Obedience to God overcomes evil. God can do no wrong.
CJB: Did God do the right thing in creating humanity?
PAM: The Creator is always right.
CJB: How can you be so sure?
PAM: Faith.
CJB: Why does evil exist, if God is all-powerful and good?
PAM: That old question is for God to answer, not we human beings.
CJB: God! Answer!
PAM: Do not demand. Believe!
CJB: Believe what?
PAM: That though the world does not make sense, it does make sense, thanks
to God.
CJB: The sense that you would have God give it makes the world a temptation,
trial, and punishment. A ruin of what Eden was. A wasteland unfit for human
habitation. I wish Robert Ginsberg were here to tell us about the Earth as ruin.
PAM: He doesn’t know anything about theology! We are better off not listen
ing to that crackpot rave about ruins. If I understand your heart, you hold
against God that the world is a nightmare for humanity.
CJB: Yes, that is it, exactly.
PAM: Then God answered the plight of humanity by sending God’s only off
spring to save the offspring of Adam and the newly named Eve (“[Mother of
the] living”). Thus, the Original Sin was a Fortunate Fall,/<?/ijc culpa. Cheer up!
CJB: Christ! Why did God wait so long!
PAM: God’s ways are unfathomable, but they are to be praised.
CJB: Praise God for thousands of years of human suffering before Christ and
even afterwards? Is God a sadist?
PAM: God is merciful. God gave human beings ample opportunity to save
themselves. Then, outdoing humanity in love, to save them for Eternal Life,
God gave God’s own Son (John, 3:16).
CJB: By being crucified. Not a pretty story.
PAM: Life on earth is not pretty, and it ends in death. True happiness, which is
immortal, is to be found elsewhere, in the hereafter, the afterlife, God’s coun
try, the City of God (St. Augustine), the Kingdom of Heaven, far from the hu
man realm infected with sin and susceptible to ruin. As Franôis-Rene Chateau
briand says, we must recognize in God (from French), the “sole sovereign
whose empire knows no ruins whatsoever” (Chateaubriand, 1966, p. 40).
CJB: If I were God, I would do things differently on this colony, Earth.
PAM: With imperfection, emotion, and vengeance!
CJB: Perhaps, though I would try for justice, love, and healing.
PAM: Practice these devotedly on Earth, and you may be rewarded in Heaven.
CJB: In Heaven’s name! Earth is my home.
PAM: You wish to make God over into your image, an old sin of being human.
CJB: Here is one for your Sindex: Perhaps God sins by not being human
enough.
PAM: Enough! You are not inquiring to learn the truth that will set you free
(John, 8:32). You question to reject the truth. Who are you to challenge God?
CJB: I am Cain Job Byron.
PAM: The curse is upon you and all human beings! It is lifted only by Christ,
so help me Jesus, or my name is not Paul Augustine Milton.
2. The Redemption
Heaven
Heaven is not the earth

made anew:
it is the ruins of the earth
gazed on
compassionately.
Montri Umavijani, poem no. 29, in The Peripatetic of Paradise
(Bangkok: Prachandra Press, 1980), bound with A Thai Divine Comedy.
The Christian lesson of being human is that we can rise to another life by rec
ognizing and overcoming our fallenness. We are down, but not out. We climb
an endless ladder to good, one wrong at a time. This is an achievement that
falls outside the reach of most people, without a divine helping hand. Alone,
humanity cuts a miserable figure against the backdrop of Being.
The central image of the Redemption is the story of Christ. Jesus, so the
story runs, is God’s only-begotten child (b. 4 BCE), divine and human. His
presence among human beings was given over to pious teaching, deeds of lov
ing kindness, and comportment of gentle purity. In other words, Jesus was the
divine human being, the new Adam. As such, he might have sufficed as model
for humanity to follow.
But that was not the end of the tale. Perfect goodness was to be shown as
having no place on Earth. Jesus was denounced for sedition, arrested, interro
gated, condemned, beaten, tortured, paraded, and nailed through the flesh to the
cross until dead (in April, ca. 30 CE).
The cross is the crux of Christianity. The Crucifixion is the centrality of
Christ in humanity’s sad story.
In this unspeakable suffering, Jesus cried out,
Eli eli lema sabachthani?
The words were in Aramaic, Jesus’ native tongue. Some hearers mistook the ut
terance as an appeal to the prophet Elijah. But the words are repeated and then
translated in Greek, a strong sign of their authenticity, in the late first century or
early second century CE by the Gospel writers Saints Matthew and Mark:
Thee mou Thee mou, henati me egkatelipes? (Matthew, 27:46; cf Mark,

15:34; see New International Version, 1976)
From Greek:
My God, my God, Why hast Thou forsaken me?
No answer. Jesus screamed and was dead. End of the story. Christ’s last
words said it all.
These closing words, in their Hebrew version, were the beginning of a
Psalm (22:1), where they served as a rhetorical question answered by David,
for it is not too late for God to succor the believer who “trusted in God that God
would deliver him’’ (22:8). But for Jesus, the invocation remains an unans
wered question and thereby a lamentation. Or else, the answer comes from
within Jesus, as his incarnate humanity expires in the final agony, the Passion.
St. Luke’s ending (23:46) subverts the whole story with these words,
which are not followed by a scream:
Father, into your hands I commit my spirit (Pater, eis cheiras sou para-
tithemai to pneuma mou),
St. John’s account of the Crucifixion contains none of the taunts of the
mockers, none of the agony and abandonment of the dying. He only cites, as
Jesus’ last word, without reference to God (19:30):
It is finished (Tetelestai).
No scream. In St. John’s Gospel, this pronouncement, a judgment, not a cry, re
flects Jesus’ sense of duty (cf 4:34, 5:36, 17:4). Mission accomplished!
In the text of St. Luke, we find a later insertion (23:34):
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing (Pater, aphes
autois, ou gar oidasin ti poiousin).
And, attesting to Christ’s composure, Jesus comforts his fellow crucifixants

(Luke, 23:43).
In St. Matthew (27:43), Jesus appears to be defeated by his tormentors,
and his God, too, is defeated:
He trusted in God; let Him deliver him now, if He wishes (pepoithen epi
ton theon, rhysastho nun ei thelei auton). (cf Psalms, 22:8)
For what God could this be that allows an innocent Son to suffer at the hands of
His enemies and die unsuccored? The alternatives are: (1) the God of Jesus
lacks the power to intervene, (2) God lacks the goodness claimed for God, or
else (3) Jesus is not worth the efforts of the divine. Since Jesus has been per
fectly good, the third alternative comes to this: God is cruel, unloving, or in
different toward him, which reduces to the second alternative: God is not good.
Jesus makes the discovery on the cross that the God whose goodness he has
taught, and in whom he believed, is not with him. Good God! God has failed.
Islam substitutes someone else on the cross for Jesus (Isa), since Allah,
the One God, would not be well-served by arranging the crucifixion of this man
CKoran, 4:155). The prophet is saved by God the Merciful.
Sticking to the Gospels, taken as history, Jesus’s last words, in his human
form, reveal that we human beings are abandoned in our need. Only evil, suf
fering, and death remain for us. This overabundance of horror breaks the heart
of the broken body on the cross. Jesus’ scream expresses the excruciating in
sight. No more terrifying or piteous moment is present in the Greek tragedies.
The dead body is taken down on Golgotha (Aram.: “the place of the
skull’’ = Lat.: Calvaria) and buried. It has no supernatural powers, for if it did,
it would have saved itself, according to the onlookers’ irrefutable logic:
Save yourself, if you are the son of God, and come down from the cross
(soson seauton, ei huios ei tou theou, kai katabethi apo tou staurou) (Mat
thew, 27:40; cf Mark, 15:30; Luke, 23:37)
Others he saved; himself he cannot save. . . . Let him come down now
from the cross, and we will believe in him (allous esosen, heauton ou dy-
atai sosai. . . . katabato nun apo tou staurou kai pisteusomen ep ’ auton.)
(Matthew, 27:42; cf Mark, 15:31)
The decisive moment has passed. It is finished. The Son of God was only
human. Jesus is dead and buried.
The last chapter, Resurrection, might appear a pious addition to the trage
dy, like the tacked-on ending to the story of Job which restores his losses and
justifies his ways, or like the afterthoughts upon Greek heroes which places
them in the heavens. Someone is always adding a chapter after the unhappy
story has ended, for they see it as a ruin demanding rectification. We refused to
believe that James Dean, Elvis Presley, and John F. Kennedy are really dead.
But such an easy addition has not been made to the text of the Gospels. They
are built as stories of Resurrection, the distinctively Christian world-view. Not
the life and death of Jesus, but Christ’s death and Resurrection is their plot line.
If Jesus’ tragic death is too great for human beings to bear, they shall re
joice in his Resurrection. Thereby, God is saved. So is humanity. But only by
faith in God. The suffering of Jesus was for all our sins. Jesus knows what the
righteous believer suffers at evil hands. Hence, Jesus is the loving intercessor
with the Lord on our behalf. The Passion was a plan, whereby God sacrificed
God for the good of humanity, instead of requiring human sacrifice to God.
When the poet, Edward Young, exclaims (1797) of the Crucifixion,
.. . that nail supports

The falling universe!!! . . . (Young, 1975, p. 73),
he hits the nail on the head. In the Crucifixion, God teaches the supreme lesson
of compassion. God has been willing to suffer as a human being in the Son’s
flesh-and-blood form. Hence, we have not been forsaken. The torture and cruel
death of Jesus has served a wonderful divine purpose. No matter what hard
ships await us, we are saved, if we believe.
We each have a cross to bear, but we each may hope for resurrection. As
Dylan Thomas proclaims in 1941, during World War II:
And death shall have no dominion. (Thomas, 1957, p. 77)
Hallelujah! The righteous who are tortured on Earth will be rewarded after
death as “the blessed.” They will walk together in the Kingdom of Heaven, a
paradise greater than any Eden on Earth. “The final enemy, death,” is destroyed
by God in the Eternal Life, says St. Augustine (411 CE), the lusty Berber pagan
who became a saintly bishop in North Africa and a Church Father and Doctor
(Augustine, 1966, bk. 12, ch. 22, p. 110).
The Gospel is a radically reworked form of Greek tragedy. That tragedy
reached its culmination when the defeated protagonist came to self-awareness
and so doubly suffered. For the Greek, the man, Jesus (Iesous), dies in supreme
agony, deprived on the cross of his life and his god. Goodness is condemned in
this god-forsaken world.
The Christian vision transforms the Crucifixion from tragedy to mystery.
(1) The Fall, (2) The Redemption: Christianity’s one-two punch. This version
forsakes the world as given over to imperfection but embraces with ecstasy
heaven’s prospect. Holy sublimity overcomes tragic terror. The Greek vision of
human nobility gives way to a portrait of human ignobility. The world is a
charnel house. It makes our flesh creep.
The Jewish view is that the last words of Jesus (Heb.: Yeshua [ Yehoshua,
“God is help”]) of Nazareth are the agonized appeal to righteousness from the
depths of human suffering. A world in which the innocent suffer and are exe
cuted is unacceptable. A divinity ought to make things right. The righteous
have the right to divine recognition; otherwise, the world is given over to the
evildoers. Jesus does not call out to his fellow human beings.
God must answer for the unmerited suffering. Jesus does not curse God
and die, the advice given Job by his mate (.Job, 2:9). Instead, Jesus dies with a
question: “Why?” The demand for justification. God is called to account on the
cross. No answer.
The final sound is the scream of the dying man. Jesus is Job given over to
Satan unto the death, but, for Jesus, no voice comes out of the whirlwind. Only
a darkening cloud. This time, God does not enter the dialogue. God is silent
witness of the immolation of God’s Anointed One (Heb.: Messiah; Gr.: Chris
tos). Jesus has been forsaken by God, though he has not forsaken God. To the
last unbearable moments of living, Jesus calls on God’s infinite goodness and is
aware of his own finite loneliness. Jesus screams and is dead. C'est fini.
The Jewish understanding of the tragedy is that no answer comes. The
Jews are still waiting for the Messiah. The supposed resurrection is a weak con
solation for an injustice that cannot be justified. While God may have ulterior
reasons, these are not evident or just. No one, not even God, can justify the tor
ture and crucifixion of the purest person. We come to the crux of the matter.
No ethical grounds will permit this. Any reasons alleged by the divinity to
suspend the ethical would be incomprehensible. The ethical life is the highest
commandment. When God ordered Abraham to prepare to sacrifice—murder—
(Hebrew commentators use the euphemism, akedah, “the Binding’’) his son,
Isaac (Genesis, 22:2), Abraham should have answered, “No, Lord, this I will
not do, even at Thy command, for the Lord must dwell in justice, even as the
followers of the Lord.” That he did not speak up is the incomprehensibility of
authentic faith, according to S0ren Kierkegaard.
I can’t understand it. Can you?
For the Jew, the ethical overrules any presumably ulterior reasons of God.
The supreme tragedy of Jesus as a Jew is God’s silence. The horror of life on
earth is that human beings may be fiendishly exterminated without God raising
a finger, though they have dwelt in righteousness and praised God. The Jew, Je
sus, the new Job, a non-Jew, is the first victim of the Holocaust.
Christianity, charges Friedrich Nietzsche, in his Genealogy of Morals
(1887), is a Jewish invention. The Jews get blamed for everything! Jesus was
not a Christian. The Jew, Saul of Tarsus, at first a Christian-basher, became a
Christian, ca. 37 CE, reborn, on the road to Damascus, as Paul. The doctrines
of Resurrection and Eternal Life hereafter appealed to the weak. Christianity,
following the lead of Judaism, according to Nietzsche, inverted the truth and
values, making the strong evil and the powerless good. The slave morality
taught the equality of everyone before God. The oppressed and impotent were
comforted by the vengeance to be meted out upon their tormentors in another
world. Heaven’s glory was the consolation for life’s misery. The other world
was reverse image of this one.
According to Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the perverse course of morals, the
Christian vision did not develop through the ages as an ennobling ideal to uplift
life. It grew as a self-inflicted hatred, corrosive with the venom of rancor
(Ressentiment) directed against true moral fiber. The history of Western civili
zation is the tale of a disease. The human being has evolved, to use the Darwi
nian term, into a sick animal. Nietzsche laments (from German), “Oh, this mad
and sorrowful beast: humanity!’’ (Nietzsche, 1967, p. 235).
We have made ruins out of our nature. We are living the big lie. Nietzsche
admonishes us that the phantasm of the other world has blinded us to the here
and now, the vitality and mortality of our being. The tragedy is that we have
fooled ourselves and hence not lived the noble, heroic life that is possible,
though accessible only to the few. Christianity committed the sin of making hu
manity out to be Fallen. The rectification represented by the Resurrection is the
Crucifixion’s crucial fiction.
The Existentialist view of tragedy is that we are alone. In the absence of
God, we are the Absolute. But we are absolutely not able to do all the proper
things that we need to do to support the ethical life. Not that nothing exists for
us to do, but we cannot do much. No sanction exists for the ethical, no guaran
tee, no reward. Our responsibility extends to all humanity, says Jean-Paul Sar
tre (1905-1980) in his post-War manifesto (1946), insisting that Existentialism
is a Humanism (UExistentialisme est un humanisme, Sartre, 1966). But he rec
ognizes that our capability is finite. We are totally free. Yet each choice impli
cates everyone else. The endless variety of choices of what we could be threa
tens to overwhelm us. Freedom is dreadful. No escape.
The leap toward the divine is also a choice for which we are responsible,
as an act of bad faith with ourselves. We cannot put off the burden of respon
sibility on an Other, on something over which we have no control. Human na
ture, the way things are, history’s inevitabilities, and God are all excuses.
“There ain’t no excuse!” insists Existentialism. God’s existence, or nonexist
ence, does not matter, for we are responsible for ourselves. Our limitlessness
surpasses our limits. Anguish, forlornness, and despair, for Sartre, are the three
dubious graces of existential recognition.
To be human is to be burdened with being free. Others oppose freedom
and humanity. The gas chambers are always being readied somewhere. Existen
tialism is an optimism, claimed Sartre, before he turned to other, dialectical,
ways of optimizing human life. Yet the existential vision of the heroism of liv
ing is also a picture of a world whose conditions defeat humanity.
Suicide is the logical thing. In a life that can have no meaning, why not
kill ourselves?, asks Albert Camus, during the Occupation, as the fundamental
question of his Myth of Sisyphus (Camus, 1942, p. 15). Suicide would rescue us
from the burden which is the absurdity of life, while we make a parting protest.
Philosophical suicide is our freely chosen act of refusal to the meaningless. As
humanity’s victory over life, suicide appears meaningful. It asserts life’s value
in the absence of life’s value. Suicide seeks to preserve life’s value.
A self-negation is at work. We, who insist on value and protest against its
absence, are about to remove ourselves from existence and thus surrender to
absurdity. The most valuable protest against life is to live. The answer to ab
surdity is the irreducible surd of our being human. To live is heroism. We are
the meaning-full beings of value in a meaningless universe devoid of value.
Camus finds the symbol for our status in the mythical Sisyphus, con
demned for eternity to roll a rock up the hill, only to see it fall back down. Si
syphus lives without hope, in Hades, yet smiles. Absurdity to cap absurdities. A
hell of a guy, he could have had a career in philosophy! We are bound to the
hell of life on Earth, in a godless universe, shivering without hope, and destined
for death. Yet we, too, may smile. What the hell, live life!
Camus was killed in an automobile accident (1960) at age 47.
The horror of existence cries out through the voices of religion, philoso
phy, and literature. To be is to be terrorized by Being. The question is whether
simply to be (Sein) or to be human (Dasein). One response is to become a ter
rorist, for this way of life rides the crest of the destructivity that lashes the
world. The terrorist joins the front lines against Being, as the first shot of
violence. The terrorist’s being is flung against the world. Protest by destruction.
Terrorism is an attitude of horror at the world. So great is the terrorist’s
outrage that it vents its rage on tearing out the offending order. The terrorist
feels violated by the world and retaliates by violence. By doing so, the terrorist
lives on the edge of destruction by the world. The violent act that smashes the
world appears to reclaim it, and the terrorist appears to regain that one life by
losing it in the shootout with the world.
Terrorism is an anti-philosophy of the demoniacal. Its chief desire is to
spread terror. The terrorist may spout slogans, but is no theorist, for reason it
self is a primary target. The heroism of terror is killing and being killed. Techn
ically speaking, terrorists do not commit suicide, a self-regarding, though self-
negating act. Instead, they use themselves as bombs to commit mass murder.
Terrorists exclude, nay, attack gradual change, for it presumes decency
among beings who are rational. The terrorist is a fanatical killer of the trinity of
the rational, ethical, and holy. But ecstasy may occur in going up in flame. Ter
rorists enjoy their work done in the name of gory.
You may object that my characterization of terrorism has mistaken it for
bad old-fashioned anarchism. The anarchist raises violent hands against the
world order, whereas the terrorist uses violence to accomplish the aims, per
haps legitimate, of some party in the world. Terrorism, therefore, is the
violence that springs from disordered hope. And whereas the anarchist is likely
to be an atheist, the terrorist may be a fervent believer in divinity.
You are certainly entitled to my own opinion. The distinction you have
just drawn misses the anarchistic heart to modem terrorism. The terrorist may
destroy out of a sentiment of hopelessness. Terrorists might not adopt violence
because of the likelihood of a party’s success. Instead, terrorist acts often set
back the advance of the cause. The appeal to divinity as justifier of the immola
tion of bystanders is a further affront to world order and a sacrilegious exulta
tion in inhumanity. If no religious or political doctrines were at hand, terrorists
will invent them as unholy covers for their savage actions against humanity.
To these desperate extremes of life and death, the old Stoic attitude pro
poses a sobering alternative. Calm yourself, is its prescription. Banish terror,
violence, and despair from your mind, for there they do their worst. Take con
trol of your soul. You may find peace within it. Renounce seeking it in the
world. The soul is world enough. Conquer it and thereby reign supreme. Hope
not, fear not. No gods or demons exist. Death is your only fate. Death awaits us
all. None of us will get out of life alive. No need to fear death, then. Or inflict
it. Be above the horrors and tragedy of the world, while you live in it.
No haven, no heaven exists, but tranquil harbor lies within. Detach your
mind from your body. Sit patiently inside. Your self cannot be harmed, only
killed. Only your body may be crucified. A great consolation! How you die is
immaterial. What matters is how you live. Live decently and with detachment
from the world. We cannot save the world. It is a perpetual stream of violence
and absurdity. Don’t let it trouble you.
The Stoic view, finally, is troubled by the unmerited suffering of others,
wanton violation of justice, and violent disruption of peace. The Stoic’s eyes
fill with tears, as if a divine witness to a world gone mad, “for the world,’’ as
Matthew Arnold observes, in “Dover Beach” ( 1867),
. . . . which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; (Arnold, 1979, pp. 255-256)
Renunciation is also the Buddhist strategy in a world that otherwise over

whelms. At least, we may conquer the world within. Peace of mind is achiev
able in the chaos of happening. We reach something substantial in the stream.
We must follow the ethical life as prerequisite to tranquility. The world is built
on a foundation of suffering. The breakthrough is release from the world.
Rebirth, to live again in an animate form upon the earth, offers little con
solation. Life leaves us with a bad taste. The tasteful thing for us is to leave life
for good. Though improvement is possible from life to life, the highest goal is
to be free of living. Enough of life! By breaking the shackles of life, the abso
lute, eternal, immutable is attained. Nirvana is the knife thrust of perfection into
the organic flow. Against life, is Nietzsche’s condemnation of Buddhism, for its
rejection of this-worldliness, which, to him, is the only worldliness.
Yet the compassionate bodhisattva, Avalokitesvara, on the verge of ful
fillment, stays the salvation and opens his heart to fellow human beings, suffer
ers still in the world. In China, this male figure becomes the female Mercy
God, Kuan-yin, “who observes or listens to the pleas of devotees.” A vision of
exquisite nobility for a world of excruciating suffering.
The carousel of these visions whirls around, blurring whether the inade
quacy of being human is intrinsic to humanity or unavoidable due to the world.
The debates rage over the millennia. They break into our chain of thought,
making ruins of all our projects. They flare up to consign human beings to the
fire. Religion is always ready to settle the clamor.
The Stoic emperor, Marcus Aurelius, crucified Christians for placing their
resurrected Christ above the Roman Empire’s official gods. Christians burned
Jews in the “act of faith” (Port.: auto-da-fe), for not believing in the resurrec
tion of their fellow Jew. Muslims spread Allah’s word by the sword, denounc
ing Christian and Jew for straying from the one God. Christian Crusade an
swered to Muslim Jihad. And vice versa. Or, reverse vice.
In Persia, Muslims massacred the Baha’is who suggested a broader frame
work for encompassing many beliefs. In India, the killing of a cow near a tem
ple is a surefire initiation of retaliatory killing of Muslims by Hindus. In turn,
killing a pig near a mosque leads to slaughter of Hindus by Muslims.
History is the immolation of peoples by faithful adherents, pious reform
ers, and dedicated missionaries. “God save me from religion!”, cries the infidel.
Answers to inhumanity have been proposed without God, though traces of
the religious attitude may linger. The terrorist explodes in rage against the dev
ils who rule the world. Terrorism is redemption by bloodshed. An obscene an
swer to a world left unredeemed by any divinity. In the acts of violence sicked
upon humanity, the terrorist rises to the status of creator (sic). Sick!
The Stoic who renounces the godless, meaningless world to savor tran
quility within becomes godlike. The inner world, an individually-made cosmos,
is placed in order. The world’s shipwreck is a spectacle for the detached con-
templator. Read today’s newspaper as if it deals with another world.
The Existentialist who throws out the excuse of God as Creator takes
God’s place in creating a human self. Absent the Absolute, we find ourselves in
charge. Absolutely.
Marxism systematically dispels all the God-talk as the fumes of an en
trenched class that enjoys this world while paying its laborers with the wages of
a promised world. Otherworldly justification for this-worldly suffering is a
strong weapon in the hands of the economic rulers of the world. It keeps peace,
except when war is desired, and assuages the conscience of the rich while they
live off the fat of the land. God is the supreme instrument of oppression.
We must overthrow God-believers, believe the Marxists, and place on
their throne the downtrodden of the human race. The world of justice and
equality with plenty for all must not be put off to the skies but is made possible
by action now on the Earth. Life is meaningful, preaches the prophet Karl Marx
(1818-1883), for today’s struggle has its inevitable fruition in a heaven on
Earth. Marxism replaces the divine redemption with the guarantee of historical
process. Sin is not inherent in human nature. It is a socially-induced idea. Hu
man nature is malleable and will receive its final shape from history’s irresist
ible movement in which we are to take an active hand.
Marxism shatters contemplative detachment to require that we jump into
history with attachment to mass activities of upheaval. It blurs/buries the indi
vidual in the process. All-overcoming history replaces all-knowing God. The
article of faith. The world at any historical moment is a ruin for us to over
throw. Marxism inverts the Christian doctrine of the Fall. From our miserable
condition, we shall Rise to the Golden Age. The Marx-given iron law of Dia
lectical Materialism is an answer to Jewish reverence for the God-given Law.
For every godless case for life, a thousand god-filled responses are of
fered, including this one contributed by a beginning student on a final examina
tion: “God certainly created the universe, because the highest form of life is the
human, and we sure as hell couldn’t have done it!” All these visions see the
world as a ruin or a ruining force, though most of the views propose a mode of
struggle or a plan of soul to save ourselves from ultimate ruin. Life among the
ruins may have some value. The world has always raised this challenge for life:
Come, see if you can make sense out of me! Think yourself into rescuing
your life by some mighty unity that overcomes this horror, tragedy, suf
fering, and indifference that is your damned world!
Human beings have met the challenge in a billion ways, making whole the
world’s ruin. But whichever way we turn, death has a way of turning up.
3. Death
Eat Well,
Stay Fit,
And Die Anyway
American Bumper Sticker, 1994
The time has come to turn to the gravest matter, the greatest miner of them all,
that Big Bummer, Death. Koheleth, the Teacher, tells us (from Hebrew):
Everything has its designated time

Every thing has its season, and every event under heaven its time:
A time to be bom, and a time to die (Ecclesiastes, 3:1-2)
Death is essential to our definition as mortals. Without Death, we would not be

living creatures. That is the inescapable truth, and the truth will kill us.
Every birth certificate is completed by a Death certificate. No matter how dead-
icated to life, we have been cast in the die of mortality.
While God remains dead silent, Death answers. Death wins out, as we
lose all human accomplishments. Death, be thou proud, for thine shall be the
kingdom and the gory. And Death shall have dominion. Our home, the Earth, is
our grave. We will all be gathered into the interment camp, the cemetery.
Once, at a philosophical meeting that I attended, where intellectual differ
ences flourished with excessive fervor, a speaker introduced herself, “I am
dying.” After the hush that followed, everyone attended to her every word, un
willing to miss anything of it, because those words had special merit in spring
ing from her mortal insight. Her speech entered our hearts, for it came from the
heart. We concluded the discussion without further waste of words.
I do not remember what session this was or what topic had been in disp
ute. I do not know the woman’s name or what became of her. Presumably, she
died. Yet she might still be alive. I have often thought that when a serious sub
ject is under deliberation, all speakers should preface their contribution with the
prerequisite to working heart-to-heart, “I am dying.”
We are all dying. Humanity, I regret to report, is condemned to Death.
When Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s The Red and Black (1831) encounters a
condemned refugee in a salon, he can see how exciting living under a Death
sentence must be. Unknowingly, Julien too lives under such a sentence. He will
soon lose his youthful head in love and then on the guillotine. We all live, on
borrowed time, under the sentence of Death. It is later than you think. The
deadline for each of us is fast approaching. Dust thou be, headed for dustbin.
What a capital thing is life! If life is the Big Enigma, Death is the Total
Enema. Death hurts us to the quick. Life is not quick enough to escape Death.
Though we fight to the Death to stay alive, Death is dead-set against us. Death
announces, “This way to the exit!” No matter who our Guardian Angels are, the
Angel of Death slips past their guard. Death takes great pains. And death is
whimsical. Death the hunter; humanity the prey. Prey tell, what sport! Death
tracks us down and stops us dead in our tracks. Death is slow when we would
be done with it, yet swift when we look not for it.
Only Death truly enjoys the world. We are Death’s chief entertainment,
often its chief minister. Death is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Mordant/
morbid deadpan humor. Grim Reaper? No, the grimace is on the victim’s vis
age. Death grins. Never did human being greet Death with laughter. “Death
laughs at all you weep for,” observed Lord Byron in 1823, in his Don Juan
(Byron, 1949, Canto 9, no. 11, p. 315). Within a year, at age 36, he was dead.
Death, the sleep without dreams, from which we never awaken to say, “Good
morning!” “Mortality weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,” confessed
John Keats in 1817, in “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (Keats, 1950, p. 108).
Four years later, at age 25, he was dead.
Death throws dice with our lives. Read ’em and weep! Never say die? The
fatal die is cast. No matter what cards life deals you, in the last hand, Death
plays the trump. Before we can place the decisive wager for eternal survival,
Death cries out at the gaming table, “Rien ne va plus!” The croupier in the
black cape rakes in all your chips, commanding, “You can’t take it with you!”
Death is in deadly earnest. If you think you can survive life, you are dead
wrong. No use challenging Death to a duel for life; your opponent is a dead
shot. Don’t bother asking, “Death where is thy sting?” You will be stung by the
Big Stinker when your time has come.
On life’s Superhighway (Autobahn, Autostrada, Autoroute, Autopista,
Interstate, Motorway, Freeway), Death suddenly signals
We can never afford the toll that Death takes. Ask not for whom the toll knells.
No matter what itinerary we follow, we always come upon a dead end. When
we try to sail away to the Blessed Isles, we are stuck in a dead calm. We reckon
upon a beautiful voyage in this world. Dead reckoning. Death, the traveler with
the universal passport, gloats,
I’m even in Arcady! (from Latin, seventeenth-century motto)
How can we bear to live with Death? Even God would wonder about that,
when contemplating the human being. How can we greet each day, knowing
that one of these days, sooner or later, we will die? Always too soon. Avoid an
untimely death? Everyone’s death is untimely, no matter when it occurs. Why
plan ahead, when Death is laying its plans for us?
Why live, if I am to die ? The oldest question in the world, and the one that
every human being must answer. Answer it as if your life depends on it. It does.
You do.
“Do you know that this could be your last hour? Death is standing behind
your back!” (from Swedish), shouts the Death-intoxicated monk who appears
in Ingmar Bergman’s classic film, Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal,
1957). The folk entertainment, in which a clown (Nils Poppe) has been playing
Death, comes to a halt on the beat of an approaching drum. Death’s more faith
ful players trudge into view to the dreadful drumbeat and the frightful fumes of
incense. Beating themselves with whips and bearing a cross, they halt, as the
monk, Anders Ek, in one of the finest moments in world cinema, harangues the
astonished folk:
You obstinate fools, don’t you all know that you’re going to die today, or
else tomorrow or the day after, because you’re doomed (domda)? Do you
hear what I’m saying? Do you hear the word? Doomed! Doomed!
Doomed! (Bergman, 1998)
I hear you, brother.

In the midst of our plans for the future, Death comes knocking at the door
to announce, “There is no tomorrow!” You will be dead as a doornail. Yiddish
proverb: “Life may be no more than a dream, but please don’t wake me up!”
Experts on why buildings fall down warn: “life is dangerous and always ends in
death” (Levy and Salvadori, 1992, p. 88). The Great Equalizer cuts everyone
down to size. The coffin is the measure of humanity. The scythe sighs for thee.
Death strikes down every lover of life, every lover, beloved, life. To give
ourselves in love is to reserve ourselves for grief.
We loved with a love that was more than love,
wrote Edgar Allan Poe in 1849 of “Annabel Lee” (Poe, 1938, p. 957). A few
months later, the philandering, penniless, litigious, alcoholic, suicidal, ob
sessed, depressed, delusionary, disillusioned, delirious poet was dead at age 40.
Well, we were born to die,
concedes Capulet, philosophically, in Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare, 1997,

Act 3, sc. 4, p. 1126). Here are additional lessons that we must learn:
Catechism of Death
What must I of necessity do in life? Die.

What is the cause of Death? Mortality.
The answer to all of life’s questions? Death.
What is the essence of life? Dying.
In conclusion? The grave.
Then, what shall I do with my life? Drop dead!
We, the living, bear Death within. The skeleton, our most intimate ruin, is
the backbone of our living flesh. We incorporate, incarnate, encase it. We are
skeletons fleshed and ambulatory for the moment. The skull, Death in a
nutshell, “that ruined palace of the mind” (Bulwer-Lytton, no date, p. 414),
when placed upon the desk or in the hermit’s cave, was the simplest grave re
minder. Memento mori, morbid moment: you too are a skull that gazes upon a
skull. One day, your skull may be gazed at by another. No bones about it.
Alas, poor Yorick!—I knew him, Horatio; (Hamlet, Shakespeare, 1963,

Act 5, sc. 1, pp. 395-396)
Hamlet’s homage to the court jester who had befriended him when a child. Lat
er in this act, Hamlet will die in his friend Horatio’s arms.
Good night, sweet prince, (sc. 2, pp. 452-454)
Skulking about in life’s scullery, Death is always cooking up some form

of skullduggery. Of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), exhumed in
1970, the scientists reported: “Inside the skull was only a dusty substance’’
(Barry, 1998). Rene Descartes’s skull was found in storage at the Bibliotheque
Nationale in Paris. He did not have a call number. St. Thomas Aquinas’s skull
is on display at the Eglise Saint-Semin in Toulouse, France. Empty.
Our imagination personifies Death as dressed in our bones with black
cape and scythe, an unsettling recognition that Death dwells within. The horror
in its painted face is the horror of our face when dead. Each human being we
meet is a walking skeleton on the way to the bone pile. The skull and cross-
bones: danger of Death, warning of poison, emblem of piracy. This threatens
us, thrives upon us, is us.
On the painted panels of the covered bridge (Die Spreuerbriicke) in Lu

cerne, Switzerland (1626-1635), Death, the elegant skeleton, intercepts pas-
sersby in the stream of life: the beautiful woman, pious cleric, mighty king.
“Death, the sovereign’s sovereign’’ (Byron, 1949, Canto 10, no. 25, p. 341).
Death asks, “Going my way?’’ Before we can answer, we are carried away. A
bridge connects these lives, and it is wilder and thornier than had been thought,
“the only survival, the only meaning’’ (Wilder, 2003, p. 107), for it is Death.
Thanks to Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen’s discovery (1895), we may see our
skeleton, the hidden shape of our Death, an X-rated event. While we watch,
more dead than alive, our bones move about. How macabre. The Dance of
Death accompanies our every movement. Life is an expression of Death.
Life, says Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), in The Tragic Sentiment
(Sentimiento) of Life (1913), is a perpetual hungering (el hambre) for life,
hence a yearning for Eternal Life. The living force refuses Death. We thirst for
immortality. But the reason has its reasons of which the heart knows naught.
That each of us is to die is the simple fact of life. Irreconcilability arises in eve
ry human being, for we cannot help but be driven toward what appears unat
tainable. We live in profound dissatisfaction, whence “el sentimiento trdgico.”
The human being, according to Doctor Unamuno’s diagnosis, is gravely ill, “un
animal esencial y sustancialmente enfermo” (Unamuno, 1967, pp. 38-39).
This expert opinion seconds Doctor Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the poor pa
tient, though he traced the etiology of the ethical illness to the perverse inver
sion by civilization of the life-force, the will to live, or better, der Wille zur
Macht (“Power Drive”). The prescription for attaining health is to release the
force within by a transvaluation of values. Life may surge forward in the vigor
ous actions of the self-liberated few, the Ubermensch (“Super-Human,”
“Superman,” “Over-man,” gender intended).
For Unamuno, the fault is not in our civilization, nor is the remedy a re
lease of yearning. The tragedy of being human is that we, like Don Quixote,
dream the impossible dream. “Dream on!”, insists life. “Live and die!”, ex
claims Nietzsche in his biotribe. “Live, live, live!”, shouts the force that Una
muno studies. The answer to being human, observes Unamuno, appears to be
faith, the belief in the impossible against reason, hence, by virtue of the absurd.
Faith tells me the good news, the gospel truth, that I shall not die, I will live
forever in my selfhood. Thank God!
But, reflects Unamuno, how can I live forever in the irreplaceable dis
tinctness that is my self, a self of flesh and bone, when I know that I will soon
turn into a corpse, then a skeleton, and, finally, dust? Reason insinuates the pry
ing questions of unassimilable doubt. We are tom between faith and Death.
Life is a disease that always proves fatal. Sorry, no cure for it. Life en
courages us, “Keep on going, even when you’re dead!” Death answers, “Even
when alive, you are dying!” Life is deadlocked. When Death calls upon us, we
refuse to go, protesting, “Over my dead body!”
Death is the injustice the universe commits against humanity. We who
conceive of, and cherish, the universe should not be killed by it.
Death rushes in where angels fear to tread. Death’s long bony fingers
reach underground and to the mountaintops. They pluck us out of the skies and
smash us upon the waters. Death strikes in sleep, erasing our last dream of the
world in the dead of the night. Death attacks us with such pain and fright that
we do not even know if we are alive. The earthquake that destroyed much of
Mexico City in 1985 ripped away the walls of apartment buildings, as Death
went after families (PI. 89). At the comer of a living room, an unattended flow
er pot remains, now out-of-doors, awaiting watering.
Though we may live in safety, resolved to face Death when it comes, the
haunting thought of Death comes to us unbidden and taints the joy of the mo
ment. The American war-poet, Alan Seeger, confessed during World War I,
I have a rendezvous with Death, (Williams, 1945, p. 77)

Meditations on Humanity, Self, and the World as Ruins 41 1
PI. 89. Apartments after Earthquake, Mexico City, Mexico, 1985

He kept the appointment, a year or two later, on 4 July 1916, at age 28. Though
we are all penciled in the appointment book, Death keeps it under lock and seal.
Hamlet sizes up the logical possibilities of when Death will come:
If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be

not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all. (Hamlet, Shakespeare,
1963, Act 5, sc. 2, p. 439)
Yet he is not ready for the fatal thrust that comes within minutes. Nor are we
ever ready. Maybe Fyodor Dostoevsky was ready when he stood before a Firing
squad in 1849. But at the last moment, he was reprieved. In place of execution,
he had the good fortune to be sent to Siberia for nine years. Only after we have
died could we know exactly when we were to die. But “Dead men tell no tales”
(gender not intended). Long before Death arrives, we have felt its presence.
The brave woman or man dies once; the rest of us, a thousand times.
Death is that Other who follows us like our shadow. Death witnesses and
overhears our dealings with the world. Every once in a while, we glimpse our
silent companion, behind our shoulder. Death slows our hand; it is the unshake-
able hesitancy in living. The dye of mortality taints the fabric of our lives.
We turn away from Death in a thousand ways, yet, as Sophocles saw,
“only from Death we can make no escape” (see p. 388, above). Life is a game
of hide-and-seek with Death, but, like the Knight (Max von Sydow) who plays
chess with Death (Bengt Ekerot) in Bergman’s Seventh Seal, we know who al
ways wins. Death takes the Knight the night of the very day their game began.
“It is not life that is sweet, but death that is awful,” a hag says on the fatal
day in the Pompeiian melodrama of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (no date, p. 360).
Nay, Death is awful because life is so sweet. Immortality would be the death of
Death. Eternal Life: that’s to die for! Life always tries to head toward immor
tality, but mortality lies dead ahead. Deathless life would be “inconceivable, in
credible, and impossible,” to steal a phrase from Austen. Since immortality is
beyond belief, we need a miracle to believe it. Believing it is a miracle!
Egyptian civilization had such a magnificent obsession with the joy of life
that it did everything possible to live again, building protective pyramids for
royal tombs by the labor of thousands, providing the deceased with food and
symbolic servants (shabtis), preserving the skin and bones of the corpse, drag
ging the brains out of the skull through the nostrils with a hook, and storing the
squishy viscera (kishkas) in matched containers of smooth alabaster. Seeing
this wonderful folly, as we climb the pyramids, enter the tombs, gaze at the
mummies, and stand before the beautiful Canopian jars filled with pungent
dust, we applaud this world-culture for its life-affirming spirit in going this far
with the mania for eternal life. Good show! But we recognize this effort is a no-
brainer. We would not give in to the same impossible dream, would we?
Meditations on Humanity, Self and the World as Ruin 413
In polite American usage, we say the deceased have passed away, mean
ing that they have passed on to another, better, life. When I die, alas, I will be
dead and gone. In a word, ceased. C ’est la mort!
We pin our hopes to what might survive us: our loved ones, good works,
reputation, fellow humanity, publications. Consolations for dying. We transfer
our title to them. Though reduced to a dead body, we live in them. The matura
tion of the human being involves learning to displace its life-force on those
things that may continue living. May the force be with you! Given the sureness
of Death, we live for them. Those we love will bear our love in their hearts un
til they die. What better place to be after I have ceased to live? C ’est Vamour!
Life is the adventure of finding things worth living for in the assurance of
Death. Sometimes, only at Death’s door do we find that meaning. Thus, Leo
Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), the story of a petty bureaucrat to whom
nothing meaningful happens in life, who has missed life while living it, until
dying brings him to see life for the first time. Too late? Better late than never.
Better to die than never to have lived. That’s my philosophy.
The question does not arise for those who die young. They are regretted
as having had everything to live for, yet the Greeks called blessed those who
died young, untainted by the poisoned thought of Death. Romeo and Juliet em
brace Death ecstatically, as if it were the full flowering of their love. Poor kids,
better for their love that they die this way than live to maturity.
Fig. 9. Vulture, Edzna, Mexico, 2003
Death is the acid test for what makes life worth living. Yet Death is the
least acceptable thing in life. “Death, most our dread,” exclaims the poet Young
(1975, p. 23). Death is the enemy of all things human. Only Death liberates us
from itself. “In the midst of life we are in death,” the Book of Common Prayer
of the Church of England tells us (Church, 1982, p. 338). But I would answer
on behalf of the living, “In the midst of Death, we are in life.” Recognition of
life’s value is stronger than recognition of the necessity to die.
Sigmund Freud finds that the unconscious It (das Es) within us cannot
conceive of its negation. The I (das Ich) cannot reason with its It. Id and I are at
odds. Identify—IDEntiFY—us as a disharmonious ENTITY: /dentity, /Dentity.
I warned you that your ID would be checked! Oddly, we move toward Death
fearing it and not accepting its necessity.
From Freud, we learn of the transference of attachments by our psycho-
illogical power of reversal. The story of Adam and Eve, with which we began
these meditations, transfers the blame for each person’s mortality on all of us,
for being bom human, beings bom to die. The story of Adam’s sin, for which
we are not guilty, is not the cause of our Death. Instead, our Death is the cause
of the story, by means of which we unload responsibility for our undeserved
Death on God. The Redemption adds to God’s responsibility by redeeming us
from Death. Nice work, if you can get God to do it!
Yet, assured of Death, we need not preoccupy ourselves with it. That is
Death’s occupation. Death takes us from life when we die, but we need not let
it take life from us while we live. The certainty of Death certifies my life’s val
ue. Each day that I live is a treasure rescued from Death. Existentialism has
taught me that the reasoning, “Because I am going to die, my life has no
meaning,” is an inexcusable excuse, to be answered, “Because you are living,
give meaning to your existence!” But, you might caution, “What if existence it
self has no meaning?” (I mean to address that question in Section 5, below.)
Philosophy begins in meditation upon Death, thought the Stoics. As the
problem for human thought, Death is no abstraction, no mere conception. Un
like Universal and Ideals, Death descends from the lofty air of speculation and
kills us, you and me. Philosophical rigor, of whatever school, always ends in
rigor mortis. Why, then, are we bothering about mins, when we, too, will be
turned to mins? Why bury our noses in this book, when we are to be buried
sooner or later? What can sticking to these pages profit you or me?
I may already be dead. What a revoltin’ development this is! Even if I am
dead, I know one thing with certainty: you are reading this book. Well, at least
this page. And I must therefore take responsibility for you. You hold the mins
of my thought and life in your hands. Let me borrow your mind for my voice
and flex my mind through your eyes, as we continue our journey, despite
Death. You save me from Death. Regrettably, I cannot return the favor. But I
will endeavor to help you savor life.
Whoever writes a book joins hands with Death, for it is meant to have life
after Death chimes in. While writing takes life, opportunities must be left in ru
ins. I cannot dig in my garden, if I am digging my grave in these paper castles.
Life calls and Death knocks, but here I am stuck between them in the mid
dle of an incomplete chapter. How will it end? Help me to find the final unity
that brings together the pieces. This book should have one of those happy plotz.
I am dead serious about this. Let us put our self to the task and not give up,
though Death is hot upon our trail and is accustomed to have the last word.
4. The Self
I thought
I was
a ruin,
but I’m only a stone
smashed from the ruined block
of a mighty temple.
From Dutch: Ivo Silloc, Rui'nes (Oudenaarde: Vita, 1971), p. 36.
I am a wreck. I am not what I once was. Even when I was whatever I was once,
I was not quite what I would be. Thus, I am fallen, not from a golden state, the
prime of life, in which I flourished, but from some grand vision of myself, a no
tion of the best I could be. I have disappointed myself. I could have excelled in
several ways, but I did not excel in any way. Opportunities abounded. I had
many good chances. Doors opened.
But I woke in an old ruin that the winds howled through; (“The Curse of
Cromwell,” Yeats, 1956, p. 302)
I did not achieve what I thought I could, what I think I ought.

According to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550), Leonardo da
Vinci, on his deathbed (1519), expressed regret at failing to develop fully his
artistic faculties (Vasari, 1946, p. 26). The poor genius, Vasari tells us, died in
the arms of his last patron, Francis I, King of France. Though the King was
probably away at some other chateau that day, it makes a good story. Si non e
vero, e ben trovato. In 1961, as a young man, I stood in the bedroom at Am-
boise where this scene was reported to have happened, and I forgave Leonardo.
Back in the same room in 1986,1 wanted to be forgiven.
Professionally, in my life work, I am incomplete and sinking. I regarded
neglecting an opportunity for self-improvement or contribution to others as
nearly a sin. I see now that I followed the easy paths for selfish goals. I took
from others for my own good. I am merely a minor member of the profession. I
did not fulfill the trust placed in me, say, to produce books that have value to
human beings. I have only let loose,
bare ruin’d quires
in the words of Richard Tillinghast’s nostalgic campus poetry (Tillinghast,

1981, p. 5) that echoes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 7 3 .1 have added to the burden of
paperwork, not to the body of knowledge.
The time that is left is only a handful of moments, and I have grown set in
my ways, sitting in the ruins of ambitions. I recognize with heartache that I will
not receive the Nobel Prize, although I drafted my acceptance speech at age 21.
Before me is a list of the books unwritten, articles unfinished, plans un
touched. Even this Ginsbook, a monster with insatiable maw and flailing tail, is
unpublishable. “If I only had the time,” I tell myself, time and time again. But
the pieces of my life are swept up by time, “the old vacuum cleaner,” in Edith
Wharton’s phrase. I might have reached for success, but my reach fell short. I
could have been a contender.
So much of my professional life is only getting through the day’s routine.
I am shuffler of papers, not a scholar. Author of memoes, not of memoirs.
Grader of examinations, not a teacher. Member of committees, not committed
member of society. Guilt accompanies my lack of perfection.
I have reason to believe that I am not alone in such self-critical reflec
tions. “Nobody is prefect!” is the framed caution that sits on my editorial desk.
Many people are obliged to face the wreck of their life-efforts and then pick up
the pieces to start afresh. We make those agonizing reappraisals of our life, as
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said about American foreign policy. Such
appraisal has greater poignancy when we feel that time is running out.
“What have I made of myself in all these years?”, we ask. “And what
chances do I have left for making something better?” Not to ask these questions
every few years is to miss part of our humanity, for we must critically judge
who we have been, and creatively decide who we are to become. We are less
than what we would be. Assuredly, we are surds, the shards for the archaeology
of the self.
We are the ruin of that self we might have been, the leftover self of the
self that has not been. Our life is the possibility of endless novels. Yet it has ac
tualized none of them to satisfaction. Those other plots that were within our
grasp are fictions that haunt our reality. The art to life consists in making the
best we can out of ourselves. That is truly to be creative, for it is self-creation.
But when we look back upon this, our self-creation, we have to confess that we
could have done a better job. We aim higher than we accomplish. We accept
less than we aim for. Our life is a compromise, the ongoing adjustment between
what we must be willing to accept and what we insist upon willing.
We are a ruin, surging/surding toward wholeness: a drive toward whole
ness that lives in ruin. To be human is to be between. We are the In-Between
(Ger.: das Inzwischeri). We cannot reach final things,
Perfection
Eternity
Absoluteness
Certitude
Enlightenment,
or rest in partiality. We live on, but in the valley of the shadow of dearth. What
a hero is a human thing! A restless absurdity and lovable fool. Stumbling about
in the field of ruins, we bump into one another as fellow ruins.
Sometimes, we must make a complete break with the past, when nothing
there is worth taking with us. Yet the past has a way of reappearing, as Robert
Mitchum discovers in the film Out of the Past (1947). His laudable efforts to
lead the quiet life of a garage mechanic in a small California town are smashed
by the return of violence, passion, and intrigue from his unfortunate past.
“Along comes the past,” Joseph Cotten discovers in The Battle of the Bottle
(1956), as his convict brother, Van Johnson, turns up and hits the bottle.
The ruins of our past live on and surge forward into the unity we make for
ourselves. The Existentialist vision wherein we are free to remake ourselves at
every step is a recognition that we are ruins on the go. We work not from noth
ing, as God would do in making our essence; we work from our existence. For
us (from French), “existence precedes essence,” and we are that subjectivity
which “flings itself (se jette) toward a future” (Sartre, 1966, pp. 17, 21, 23).
Time is running out. This is the essential insight in the stream of life that
distinguishes middle-aged maturity from youth. For youth, time lies ahead. Life
strides toward fullness. The deathless It holds greater sway over the worldly I.
Middle age recognizes that the time ahead is too limited, and the best of times
may have passed. Life pulls inward. The defenses of the entrenched I hedge in
the exuberance of the reckless It.
The Crisis of Middle/Muddle Age is the awareness that the dreams of
youth lie in ruins, while the unity we may yet make of ourselves is likely to fall
short. The Middle Age Crisis lasts from 23 to 73. We get over it by growing out
of it. Aging gracefully is the art of growing as a ruin. The only alternative to
growing old, the crusty philosopher Iredell Jenkins quipped, is being dead.
Aging is the imprint of death upon the flesh. This body in which we pa
rade about the world is headed for the tomb. That is the grave consequence of
being alive. “This long disease, my life,” attributed to Alexander Pope.
Some people, as they age, take on the character of the remains of what
they once were. They are the ruins of themselves. This celebrates who they take
themselves to have been. It is also an excuse for not being who they would be.
“In the old days,” “When I was in my prime,” “When I really was myself,” ex
press nostalgia for a past identity. American etiquette requires playful depreca
tion of ourselves as we grow older. At cocktail parties, we speak of how we
have gained weight, lost memory, and acquired backaches. Urbane decay.
Aging Gracelessly
The breath comes slowly

the eyes need correction
the hair turns gray

the shoulders sag
the back aches
the dentures are more fillings with teeth in them than teeth with fillings.
The hearing weakens

the memory slips
the hair comes out
the belly protrudes
the joints ache
the legs trip us up
the cholesterol accumulates.
The spirit sinks

the skin splits
the heart murmurs
the back stoops
the vision fades
the urine bums
the gums rot
the breath gasps, groans, and stinks.
The lesions are legion

the spittle is clotted
brittle are the bones
the mind wanders
teeth fall out
the liver leaks
the head pounds
the muscles sprain
the gall bladder has the unmitigated gall to get stones.
Deafness creeps in
digestion fails
excretory control is gone with the wind
we are covered with rashes, blisters, and stains
bones do not mend
we cannot sleep
we cannot stand
we are bed-ridden
we fall out of bed
we kvetch incessantly of our aches and pains.
“This was a human being,” you may say, “who suffers the plagues of Job, and
finally, too late, is touched by the finger of death.” This, reader, is what awaits
us under the happy appellation of Death by Natural Causes.
The body is meant to die. So intimately are we attached to it, that we re
gard our body as fixed and secure, the continuity of ourselves. Each morning,
when we gaze in the mirror, that same body assures us of our selfhood. But the
body is decaying from moment to moment, advancing on its way to our disso
lution. The human body will die by its inherent limitations, if it not killed soon
er. The organism has built-in obsolescence. Guaranteed to fall apart. Inferior
design. Who put that useless appendix in there? Lifetime victims of consumer
fraud, we are long-lived only by accident. Life, you will be the death of me!
How strange to be a philosopher in a living body, though better that it be
living than not. The mind-body distinction weighs upon the philosophically-
minded. The baseball player at age 40 is finishing that career, whereas at 4 0 ,1
was still in the early stages of being a philosopher. At the age of 60, when the
body enters its last stretch of life, the philosopher’s mind is just approaching
maturity. “Give me a few more years of life,” says Confucius (from Chinese),
so that having spent fifty years in study . . . , 1 will avoid big mistakes
(Confucius, no date, 7:16, p. 143)
Give me another fifty years!

The philosopher works from within the mind’s freedom and observes the
sad contrast with the material body bound by laws of decay. The philosopher
knows the body, this dead weight, to be a ruin. The mind ensconced within is
also a ruin, condemned to linkage with what cannot match its scope. We are the
mental ruin that sits in the rooms of a bodily ruin. Give me more room! The
more the mind turns away from the suffering, weakness, and mortality of the
particular flesh, to probe the universal and the universe, the more it senses the
uncanny presence of its home. No matter what my mind thinks, I am embodied.
As minds, we are incongruities in our bodies. But all this talk of mind and
body is a deception, shouts Nietzsche, for no self exists other than this body!
We must learn to philosophize with the body. Dance is the best teacher of phi
losophy. Solo. Pas de pas de deux (Fr.: “no dance for two”). Driving a wedge
between body and mind is another act of otherworldliness whose unworthiness
consists in ruining the organic unity of the person. To philosophize is to ruin
the human being.
Alas, poor Nietzsche went insane at age 45.
How terrible a recognition that we are like gods in our minds and animals
in our bodies. We reach to the stars, and we will be covered by the earth. We
may have ecstasy and leprosy. We are a tragic combination, a strange ruin that
struts and frets upon the stage of the Earth. We need soul.
The soul is Being’s innemess, the essential of the self. It is discoverable

and discussable. Whence the feeling of its independence, its separateness in
principle from body, the castle in which it reigns. This agreeably suggests exist
ence non-temporally, hence immortally. The Ba (Egypt.: “soul”). Ka? (Egypt.:
“spirit of the body”). Ha! (Brooklynese expression of spirited skepticism).
The soul is but one soul among others, a republic of souls. The soul rec
ognizes within itself the souls of others and the soulfulness of Being. Being
speaks to the soul that has opened. Human community resonates in the chamber
of the solitary soul that has burst its iron bonds. Socrates thought of philosophy
as a life-long practice of dying by separating soul from body. This was a grave,
if ironic, mistake, for it is a fatal practice of living. When we die, we would
miss most the soul, that intimacy of selfhood.
Yet I have to hold my soul together with duct tape. It crumbles as I stum
ble, like some wisp o’ of the will. “My very soul has become a ruin,” one of
Poe’s characters complains in his prize-winning story, “Ms. Found in a Bottle”
(Poe, 1938, p. 125). Poe himself was just such a character. After being found
lying in the street in a stupor, in Baltimore, 1849, he died a few days later.
We try to take stock, get hold of ourselves, put things back in order, patch
up who we are, make another shot at getting through life. We hold ourselves to
gether by memory. Memory is the weft and woof of consciousness. “Woof!
woof!”, it barks to get our attention. Without memory, the mind is a sieve. To
remember is to dig up ruins from the underground of mind. An event, a person,
a place, “a stone, a leaf, an unfound door,” as Thomas Wolfe puts it in a memo
rable epigraph (Wolfe, 1929, p. 2). Memories are made of things like this.
Memory murmurs. It rounds out images. Memory is the smoothing and
soothing of the past to make it presentable and palatable. We are what our
memories permit us to be. The vast ruining whirlpool forever grinding things
down below lets some things out to bob up and down in the sunlight of mind.
Bob now! To re-member is to put back into mind something in new unity. Re
membrance is the embrace of the reshaped. What is my life but these memories
that I try to summon, seize, and order? The past within summons me, seizes my
attention, and proposes order to my thoughts. Memory pushes me forward.
Memory is one of the highest arts of ruin, for it selects and redeems. It
deems what is worthy of appearing to mind. Our memories are the womb of
value. We may call the full moon to mind when no moon is present. Memory
barks at the absent moon: bow-wow! Who let that dog back in here?
In the darkest abyss, we may call to mind the loving presence of another
far away and possibly forever gone. The saving image of the beloved holds to
gether the prisoner’s humanity, so we learn from Beethoven’s Fidelio (1803-
1805) and Viktor Frankl’s concentration-camp memoirs (1946). And remember
this: what will you and I soon be but memories, hopefully in the heart of our
loved ones?
Memory can pluck the ruin from oblivion and pin the whole upon it.
Thus, the closing page of Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), a heartbreak
ing story of foolishly unfulfilled love:
and if the moment had been fated to pass from them before they could
seize it, he saw now that, for both, it had been saved whole out of the ruin
of their lives. (Wharton, 1984, p. 317)
But memory fails us. It spreads a sad spectacle of ruins of what we have
experienced. Memory dims. The life of what was and who we were fades with
it. I make lists of things that I should do, but I forget where I put the lists. On a
wall in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1984, I saw this graffito: “Memories just
fade away.” I wanted to photograph it for my research, but I kept forgetting to
bring my camera. The writing completely faded away. Lost. But remembered.
We forget ourselves, carried along in the stream. Our faulty faculty of
memory makes a wreck of us. My memory is not an information-storage and
retrieval system, like some machines I know, but a dark, flooded warehouse.
We are moving toward that oblivion of an uninhabited earth in which no
one will be left to remember us. Unremembered, we will have lost our member
ship in the human community.
Memory may be the curse that conscience lays upon us. But cursed be the
one, like Charles Dickens’s “Haunted Man’’ (1848), who has lost all memory
and hence all meaning. Memories do not haunt that unfortunate hero. Their ab
sence does.
Our records are scattered pages, intermittent photographs, neglected ob
jects, old clothes. Where is the innerness that gave these meaning and unity?
The person is a phantom dwelling among its concretions. Memory is a gifted
excerpter. It plays tricks upon us. We want the full story.
We are all participatory observers of our own life. We try to grasp the
whole of who we are and what is happening, but that is another moment in the
flow of our life. To know the whole story of our life would oblige us to become
God. You wouldn’t mind that, would you? But God would mind it!
“Know Thyself!”: the impossible injunction of the Delphic Oracle. “What
do I know?”: Michel de Montaigne’s skeptical motto affixed to his library. “A
little learning is a dang’rous thing”: Pope’s inviting caution. “We knowers are
unknown to ourselves”: Nietzsche’s knowing self-diagnosis (Nietzsche, 1967,
p. 177). “Knowing is not enough!”: Ginsberg’s ignorant conclusion.
Autobiography is an art of self-selection. A heroic attempt to make sense
out of ourselves by putting our life back together in a story. A retroactive self-
creation, autobiography wishes to be divine as self-creator and as contemplator
of the self created. But autobiography is always unfinished business. Exercised
from within a standpoint in our life, autobiography is a greatly extended
n o w
pressed upon the past. The life changes that has written its own life and sent it
forth. A new life is available, freed from the one that was led. The next chapters
are lived, not written.
Our autobiography may become a tool for our biographer. In the autobi
ography, we try to give the best sense of the whole from our knowledgeable po
sition. Then come the biographers to set the story straight, correcting our partial
version and giving to our life a whole of which we never dreamt. Save us from
our biographers!
In the middle of life, we cannot know the whole of life. Always loose
ends, further moments, and more memories. Even if we put a bullet in the head
as the last line of our autobiography, we would miss reading the work from
start to finish. If we had read the work up to the last line and then pulled the
trigger, we would miss entering reflections on the whole of what we had read.
The ultimate frustration in life is that we cannot enter our reflections upon
our death. The only way I will be able to attend my funeral, a once-in-a-lifetime
event, is as a corpse. I will not to be allowed to make even a few well-prepared
remarks upon the occasion. Though we can offer advance thoughts and careful
accounts of the process under way, the moment of death escapes the art of the
autobiographer. The story that integrates a person’s death and life can only be
told of a corpse.
A story of the whole, the biography, is not the whole story. Biographies of
famous people continue to be written, because more information comes to
hand, and new vision comes to inform the story. One life-story is embedded in
endless contexts upon which we may draw for fresh treatment. Although James
Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) gives you more than you would ever
want to know about someone you might never want to know, Johnson’s life,
and Boswell’s, has been brought back to attention by subsequent biographers.
What a spectacle is the human being: driven toward wholeness, but living
with newness each day, and heading into death’s arms. If we turn our back to
the world, seeking contentment of the soul, the world, discontented, comes af
ter us, sooner or later, to make its selection and declare, “You’re it!” (PI. 90).
That’s Life
A wild rose grows

from the ash box
(rotted and ashen),
unasked for,
and unanswerable,
at Dachau.
PI. 90. Ash Box, Concentration Camp, Dachau, Germany, 1985

But I can hope, can’t I?

Hope is the last folly of being human. Wisdom does not succeed in shak
ing it off. Hope is life’s commitment to living with death’s certitude, without
giving in to faith. Upon the field of passing ruins that is the world, hope springs
eternal. Hope is hopelessly irrepressible. Against all hopes arises hope. At the
last moment, before utter destruction, we may find hope. Hope comes unhoped
for. When we have run out of everything, hope remains.
To hope is to insist, against our knowledge, upon making the meaningful
prevail in the flux of the destructive. Hope salvages the ruins of Being by
means of the love of life. Hope fills the heart and makes us whole, even as we
are lost and about to be tom asunder. Hope may well be the last joy. Well, then,
enjoy it, while it lasts!
Though we may lose hope, it has its own ways of finding us. Hope comes
home. In it, we find ourselves. To abandon all hope is, oddly enough, to open
ourselves to the return of hope in its shining forth. Hope is the inexpungability
of value as the human shaper of Being. The hallmark of our humanity sur
rounded by, but not surrendered to, the indifference of what is. Mark it well. It
makes a difference.
Hope is the commitment to what is evidently unlikely. Well-founded ex
pectation is not hope. Hope is unfounded expectation. Hope is possible because
human beings can act creatively and thereby accomplish the unlikely. Hope
(Port.: a esperanga) is the human answer to the despair (Port.: a desesperanga)
of Being. Battered by Being, we may have nothing left to cling to but hope.
Hope is built on nothing stronger than hope, our last great hope. Nonethe
less, hope may be too insubstantial to pin our hopes upon in making whole this
fragmented life. “It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, or to succeed
in order to persevere,’’ Robert Maynard Hutchins used to say, borrowing from
William the Silent (Hutchins, 1963, p. 105). Hope is the tattered raiment of our
humanity, a useless schmatte (Yid.), the most beautiful of absurdities.
Hope Against Hope
Against Hope, I made fast

the gates of my soul.
These walls, that turret, this moat,
I built to shut out lingering Hope.
Now, having dwelt securely within,
these many dry years,
I turn from my life’s work,
for whatever it’s/its worth,
and find beside me, alive and whole,
smiling Hope.
5. The Meaning of Existence
Amid the ruins of the present life, in which the person sees nothing
(nichts), at the same time the feeling and the consciousness of his own
inner nothingness (Nichts) awaken within him, and in the feeling of this
twofold nothingness, he lets flow, just like a Scipio amid the rubble of
Carthage, the compassionate teardrops and soap bubbles of the future
world;.. .
From German: Ludwig Feuerbach, Gedanken iiber Tod und
Unsterblichkeit (1830), in Werke, 1, ed. Erich Thies (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, “Theorie-Werkausgabe,” 1975), pp. 92-93 (gender not
intended).
What does it all come to? What does it all add up to? What does it all mean?
What is it all worth? These are the cries of being human flung into the teeth of
Being. You are on lifelong trial for the meaning of your life, no meanial task.
The universe has now been called to the witness box. Here is its testimony
against humanity, recorded by Koheleth (from Hebrew):
Meaninglessness (hevel) upon meaninglessness

Meaninglessness upon meaninglessness
All meaningless! (Ecclesiastes, 1:1-2)
This is not a matter of vanity but of vapority. Wasted breath. We are a question
mark and an exclamation point, gasps in a fleeting gap between eternal silenc
es, the temporary punctuation of Being. Make your point and be gone!
The modem condition of alienation is being-apartness, being a part with
out a whole. Self-alienation is an unshakable incompleteness. Come again?
William Butler Yeats hit the bull’s-eye in 1921 in “The Second Coming’’:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; (Yeats, 1956, pp. 184-185)
Yet we are the universe’s timeless unifiers, we billions of disunited persons un
der sentence of death. We can never get a handle on the whole. We cannot find
an Archimedean point to give us the leverage to lift the whole. Wholes are fig
ments; fragments are all. Between each one of us and the unimaginable whole
is the dynamic imbalance of Being.
Autobiography, biography, and history are retellings of human experience
to make sense out of the whole. Art, an even greater reshaping of what exists, is
a perpetually fresh unifier of the world. Religion is given the task of uniting the
human and the divine, bridging the gap between their mutual isolation.
Science is also a story told to take account of all that exists. Science has
always aimed at intellectual mastery of the universe, by understanding its work

ings and foundations. Thales, with his water principle, and Albert Einstein,
with his unified field theory, sought the elusive story of the whole. The princi
ple upon which everything operates, matter’s origin, energy’s destination,
space’s structure, Being’s identity: these underlie the scientific quest. Repeat
edly, reputedly, we approach success. A new particle, calculation, laboratory,
or research grant may do it! Nu? (Yiddish expression of skeptical impatience).
Science advances in the faith that Being (personified as “Nature”) is intel
ligible and everything ultimately is related. Scientific progress also means find
ing pieces, quirks and quarks, that do not fit the puzzle. Large domains of astro
physics, subatomic physics, genetics, and psychology remain detached. Science
at any moment is the exact state of our ignorance concerning Being.
Philosophy is the highest art of dealing with the whole. Final questions re
dound to what Aristotle called “first philosophy” in his work later given the ti
tle Metaphysics. The metaphysician within each of us asks, Does a whole exist?
What is the whole? Where is the whole? What is the connection between this
part and the whole? Such questions start from the experience of the part. Parts
are abundant. I keep bumping into them. Being impinges upon us in fragmented
fashion. If parts exist, then a whole must exist, so we reason. Part and whole
are coreferants, correlatives, core relatives. The partness of the part is due to its
not being the whole. If no whole existed of which it was the part, then the part
would be whole.
But a multiplicity of parts bear no evident relationship to each other. Sup
pose that more than one whole could exist of which these are different parts.
The wholes exist wholly apart. Something like a world filled with worlds or
monads may make up what is, no two such worlds ever meeting. We could fur
ther argue that the supposed parts with which we started are themselves such
worlds rather than parts of something else. The whole idea of whole may have
to be tom apart. Let me get my hands on it!
Being is the name of the whole, all that exists, according to philosophic
usage. But, for Being to be, say Lao-Tzu and Martin Heidegger, non-being is
necessary. To be or not to be, that is the answer. All that exists, according to
Lucretius, is matter composed of primordial entities (primordia rerum) and
void (inane). No third is possible, for if it existed, then it would have to be one
or the other: particles eternally moving amid nothingness, without beginning or
plan. The absence of a design for the whole is a vision of endless combination.
Being, alone, would score zero for conduct.
“What does Nothing do?”, asked Heidegger in 1929, and answered, elo
quently, “nothing.” “The Nothing nothings” (“Das Nichts selbst nichtet,” Hei
degger, 1981, p. 34). The Logical Positivist, Rudolf Carnap, promptly pounced
upon this pronouncement as the epitome of the worthlessness of metaphysics.
He would have nothing of it, as he pursued the ambitious project of “Overcom-
coming Metaphysics by Logical Analysis of Language” (Carnap, 1931, sect. 5).

I have been trying to make something of the passage for several years, but I
keep coming up with nothing.
The difference between “nothing” and “nothingness” is nothing to speak
of. Perhaps philosophy has had too much ado about nothing. It all comes to
naught. Nothing to it, you might say. Nothing doing! Emptiness, epes,mu,
nada, neant, nechevo, Nichts, niente, nihil, nothingness, nulla, nullity, ouden,
tipota, vacuity, vacuum, void, zero, zilch, zip, 0, 00.
Oh, I got plen-ty o’ nut-tin’,—An’ nut-tin’s plen-ty fo’ me. (D. B. Hey
ward, D. Heyward, I. Gershwin, and G. Gershwin, 1992, p. 20),
sings the good-hearted hero in America’s greatest opera, Porgy and Bess.
In his ponderous tome Being and Nothingness (L'Etre et le neant), Sartre
makes the sensible case that nothingness is a distinctively human invention
(Sartre, 1943, pp. 47-52). Without us to set it in mind as necessary limit or
companion to Being, nothing, a haunting notion, would not exist.
The paradox appears to be solved when we understand nothing, just like
everything else, as a value. Thus, value inquiry can really make something out
of nothing! I proclaim the value of nothing, at bottom, is to set off the inestim
able worth of being human.
Protagoras, of Abdera, the first professional Sophist (ca. 490 BCE-ca.
421 BCE), boldly asserted (from Greek):
The human being (anthropos) is the measure (or “standard”: metron) of

all things, of those that exist, that they are, and of those that do not exist,
that they are not. (Diels and Kranz, 1934-1937, vol. 2, fr. 1, pp. 262-264)
As a later-day sophist, I put it this way:
Humanity is the measure of all values.
That is indisputable, if by values we mean evaluations by human beings.

The philosophic questions continue: What is the point of Being? What is
Being driving at? Why is Being? What does Being want from us? We mortal
beings dare to question everything, including all our answers. More troubling
than the unanswered question is the unasked question. Since our questions
spring from our unifying mind, they might not fit the universe we wish to
know. Our interrogatories may be thrown out of Being’s court. Because our
mind follows forms of thought, we are committed to unities before we seek
them. Immanuel Kant revolutionized philosophy by keeping this in mind.
No way exists of eliminating the shaping of the mind upon what it seeks. I
am a think that things. Our questions are our intercourse with Being that en
gender the answers. The answers are always our offspring. Sometimes illegiti
mate. A philosophy of the whole is imperative yet impossible. We cannot be
content without it; we cannot be content that we have it. Being would have to
be in our grasp and outside it. To be human is to be caught between, as part
without whole, and to seek the ever-eluding whole. Being, then, is a perpetual
flow of the ruined that goes past our passionate longing.
Consideration of the ruin touches upon the relationship of whole and part
that has often concerned philosophy and art. Artists have striven to construct
the part so that the whole emerges from it: pars pro toto. The part may have its
life, reflecting the whole, while sitting in the whole. If we smash such a work of
art, we lose the original whole, yet we may still possess it in the life of its part.
We do not imaginatively reconstruct the missing whole on the basis of the
piece in hand. Instead, what was a part speaks for the whole. But we can retain
a part that did not reflect the original whole yet that speaks for itself as a fresh
whole. For an artwork to be sundered apart is not necessarily to have been de
prived of wholeness.
We can philosophically explain that a whole may exist, which, upon loss
of some of its parts, does not thereby lose its unity and identity. However, the
loss of some kinds of parts, or of a quantity of parts, can mean the loss of that
whole by its transformation into something else that no longer has the same
principle of unity. We may view the part, on the other hand, as part removed
from the whole, with no new identity. To speak of the part remaining intact,
though the whole has been destroyed, makes sense. We may also view the part
without reference to its prior function and relationship. Then we view it as a
whole. Explication de texte is that scholarly method of delivering the whole of
a literary achievement out of a pregnant part.
For my part, I am pleased to announce that the whole breaks in upon the
soul by a spiritual release, an intuition (Henri Bergson), not an intellectual act.
The prepared soul finds what it has been looking for (better, it finds us). “Tat
tvam asi” pronounces the Hindu scripture (Chandogya Upanishad, ch. 6, sect.
9, verse 4): “That thou art.” In a more pungent rendering of the Sanskrit,
You’re it!
This does not have the same sense as the utterance on p. 422, above.
The wholeness is already at hand. We missed it by looking elsewhere.
What we see elsewhere are fragments as figments. No observation of them will
ever knot together the pieces into the all. We are deceivers of ourselves.
The self, our hard-core identity that stands over against everything else, is
the biggest deception of the Self (Skt.: Purusha). The subject subjects itself to
irreducibility that alienates itself from the true Self. Surrender the illusion.
Pluck the I out of the self. Put the self back on the shelf. Ergo, let go ego. The
fullness of Self overcomes all disunion. The seeking self that is within is the
great Self we have sought out. Atman is Brahman. Perfection is achieved. One
is all. All is one. One and all are all the same. God and one are one in the same.
The moment of this simultaneous epiphany, theophany, and apotheosis is
the end of time. The eternal occurs. The vagaries of change, which bring every
thing to ruin, dissolve in the immutable core of the Absolute. Supreme joy. Fin
al peace. This is it! This is all there is. The alpha and omega. Nirvana. Union.
OMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
The Hindu emphasis is on the long process of advancing over the course
of several lives to the Final release. The Buddhist emphasis is on the access by
everyone, even women, in this life. Nothing holds us back, except ourselves.
We may achieve Nirvana in the course of our life and continue living in this
body, a remarkable retention of the finite being with access to the infinite. We
enjoy being free of life, and we also remain alive. Deathless but mortal.
If Buddhism, by its revisions and excisions, simplifies and clarifies the
way to union in Hinduism, then Zen (Jap.: Zenna; Chin.: Ch'ari) does likewise
with Buddhism. With the power of a lightning bolt, Zen smashes Buddhism and
throws away the Buddha. If you meet the Buddha coming down the road, runs
the Zen admonition, “kill him!” (cf I-Hslian, 1963, no. 6, p. 447).
The disciple who sought enlightenment, sitting endlessly but to no avail in
meditation before a statue of the Buddha, confessed this frustration to the Zen
master, who then seized the piece of wood and threw it into the fire. The disci
ple instantly reached enlightenment. When I first read this story, I jumped up
and threw the page in the fireplace. Nothing happened to me.
Enlightenment (Jap.: satori) may come by the sudden leap that is no
method (Gr.: methodos, “going down a road”). Zen discipline is meant to dis
arm the mind. We cut through the paths by discovering that we are already at
the goal. The whole is everywhere around us, nay, it is us, if we only open our
eyes to it. Our mind, alas, often gets in the way of our eyes, our ears, and our
heart. Mindfulness sticks to the mind. Don’t mind it!
The secret to Zen is that it has no secret. There, I have let the secret out of
the bag! What is the Buddha, that is, what is enlightenment?, was authoritative
ly answered by Zen master Unmon (tenth century CE) (trans. Sumiko Kudo):
A shit-stick! (Jap.: Kan-shiketsu\ Shibayama, 1984, p. 154)
Zen is a spiritual bridge between the profane and the sacred. The eschato
logical becomes scatological. “What does the enlightened person do?”, may be
answered, “eat, defecate, urinate, and sleep” (cf I-Hsiian, 1963, no. 5, p. 446).
The whole appears in the mundane. A too rigid attachment to the sacred may
keep us from it. Zen’s iconoclastic blows ruin our conceptual defenses, smash
our theoretical battlements, rend asunder that line drawn between ourselves and
what is. “Hear and know!” insists theory. “Here and now!” shouts Zen.
Once, I was sitting in a place of such natural beauty, in Japan, that I did
not want to leave. The Zen book I had been reading sat closed on the bench.
Then, I noticed someone else who had been sitting silently nearby, enjoying the
same setting. Our eyes met. The stranger nodded. Finally, I felt the time had
come for me to go, for I had gained the most from the beautiful scene. As I
gathered my travel gear, the stranger spoke: “I see that you are a devoted stud
ent of Zen and you have deeply experienced this wonderful place. I have just
come from a place even more wonderful, the most wonderful place on Earth,
where enlightenment instantly occurs. Would you be interested in going there?”
“Please tell me how to get there!”
“It requires a long journey. To get there, you must give up many things,
including books and words, presuppositions and postsuppositions. But if ever
you succeed in arriving, your life will be forever changed. And you will have
infinitely more than what you have experienced today.”
“I am ready! Where is it?”
The master whispered in my ear so softly that I could barely hear: “Here.”
The whole is in front of your nose. Zen tweaks the nose. Zen is an aesthet
ic way of living, not an ascetic escape from life. Zen need not be entranced
contemplation. It may be the keen engagement in activity, the immediate grasp
of the whole that reenters from moment to moment. Zen brings the whole back
into every part of life. In the Western tradition, something imperfect cannot be
come perfect, but in the Zen non-tradition, something “imperfect” is already
perfect. Open your mind to it. Better, open your mindlessness to it. Best, open
the mindlessness in which it and you are one and the same.
Eastern spiritual traditions stress attainment of the godhead by individu
als, not the Divine Being’s glory. Western traditions try to come closer to God
who is infinitely distinct from even the blessed. If blessed, we are in the pres
ence of the whole. In the Eastern outcome, we are the presence of the whole.
The stem God of the Jews sets the Law in place for human beings to fol
low. Obedience is the part allotted to us. The Creator is one thing, we another.
A dialogue might occur between the two, or, more likely, a dialogue on behalf
of the two created by the human being. The distancing is not overcome. Ours is
not to grasp the whole but to fill the human part. Human beings and God are
uneasy partners, bound by bad experience and a shaky promise.
Christianity breaks that solitude of the human being, teaches the supreme
law of love, and offers the God-human Christ as intercessor. San Juan de la
Cruz (St. John of the Cross, 1542-1591), though incarcerated and lacerated, but
to be named a Church Doctor, sings of rapturous union with God, as if bride
and bridegroom. The Otherness of the divinity, though embraced, is not en
gulfed in the mortal self. In alternate versions, from San Juan’s Spanish verse:
Culminating Perfection Consummate Perfection
Forget creation, Creation forgotten,

Recall Creator, Creator recalled,
Attend within, Innerness attended,
Loving the Beloved. The Beloved beloved.
(“Suma de la perfection,” Juan de la Cruz, 1947, p. 57)
Martin Buber points to the I-and-thou encounter as immediate mutual

presence. Not objective, observational proximity, but subjective community.
Yet in this sharing, which may occur between us and animal, human being, or
God, the I remains I, while the Other retains its integrity. Dialogue, not coales
cence. I and thou each exist, although bonds no longer restrain each of us from
awareness of the other. We are not in union, though we are together. Together-
being (Mitsein) is a special beingness of Being. Between Being and not-being
is the possibility of together-being. Here we may become fully human beings
by together-being with all that we can, including the absolute Thou.
The puzzle of the one and the whole troubles the student of mysticism:
(1) Does the individual self disappear or become reinforced?

(2) Does the Absolute stand over against us in full glory or become us?
(3) Is our highest awareness of the Supreme Being or of the supremacy of
Being?
(4) Is the whole to be found in every truly one-to-one encounter or only
in a one-to-whole meeting?
(5) Do we at last enter the whole, or do we score a whole-in-one?
(6) Is humanity, as the indefatigable questioner of the indifferent uni
verse, the elusive yet inescapable answer?
(7) What does the meaning of Being mean to we beings of meaning?
(8) What is Being? Or, who is Being?
(9) What is what?
(10) Who knows?
(11) Eh?
(You may look for the definitive answers to all these questions, in Chapter
Twenty-Five, below.)
Psychologists, like William James, have presumed a common experience
underlies the language of mystics, but several distinct happenings are likely.
We might view these as stages on the way or obstacles to overcome. Disagree
ments arise about final goal and best way. More than one way (Chin.: tao\ Pali:
pada) aims at the whole, yet more than one whole appears available. Weigh the
way, as we make our way back to the world in time for its destruction.
6. World Destruction
I and the World
I step confidently
into the I,
and fall suddenly
smack into the world.
I step gingerly
out into the world,
and fall flat,
tumbling over myself.
The world comes calling
upon me,
and finds itself
at home,
even as I sit
weeping
lost
and alone.
While we explore the spiritual exercises that might bring us and the whole to
gether, a project of building otherworldly castles in the air, according to Nietz
sche, the world is about to be destroyed. The world ruins/runs on,
Keeping time, time, time,

In a sort of [Ruinic] rhyme, (c/ “The Bells,” Poe, 1938, pp. 954-957)
Pieced together, the world has whirled around without peace.
The World As I Know It
Fragment Figment
Fiction Friction
Fraction Faction
Fluxion Fragmeant
Weapons that can destroy the world are ready for release at a moment’s
notice. They may be fired automatically/atomically in retaliation for an attack
that no one will survive. The long-standing defensive posture, temporarily sus
pended, called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), gave the principal op
ponents the assurance that their opposite number would be utterly destroyed in
any Nuclear War (NW) between them, even if one side is suddenly defeated.
To know that the evil ones will not triumph in our defeat is satisfying. No one
will triumph in Nuclear War. Everyone will be defeated. There was method in
this madness, for it was meant to deter everyone from starting a Nuclear War,
since that is a war that anyone will lose and no one can win.
The only trouble with this posturing is that the world would be assuredly
destroyed if Nuclear Weapons (NUKEWEEPS) were put to use. Despite this
undesirable consequence, known technically, in military circles, as Maximal
Collateral Damage (MAXCODA), Mutually Assured Destruction is likely to be
reinstituted in the early twenty-first century between new adversaries. After all,
it got us safely through the twentieth century, didn’t it?
The scenario for World Destruction (WD) is not limited to the mutual an
nihilation of major nuclear powers in Eurasia and North America. Their allies
and other nuclear powers all over the globe will be targeted. No reason for the
planners to leave out Patagonia, Tasmania, and Lesotho. Why should these sur
vive to rule the world that we have otherwise systematically destroyed? That
would be unfair! The final bombs will melt the nuclear-free continent of An
tarctica, just to make sure the Other Side does not get away with doing it first.
Not all the destruction will come from the targeting. The tidal waves,
boiling oceans, atmospheric fireballs, poisoned clouds, and fallout of ultraviol-
ent radiation that will rain for 400 sunless days will catch up with anybody ac
cidentally left alive. People who might be sheltered in the depths of the earth,
under the sea, or out in space, in anticipation of the Destruction, will be sought
out by pinpoint laser Takings and smart small-megaton bombs (SMARTIES) to
assure that the enemy cannot start over and hence win the world decades later.
Should anyone nonetheless survive and be able to get out of the mine shafts or
submarines, they will find the earth devastated and unlivable for 60,000 years.
If they are fortunate, they will die right away.
The weapon is at last in hand that assures total and permanent defeat of
the enemy, all enemies, present and future, and that means all friends, neutral
parties, and ourselves. We can now fight the War to End All Wars (WEAW), a
twentieth-century dream. This means that war is only ended by ending humani
ty. Though the major powers proclaim that they have no intention of destroying
the world in the course of destroying one another on the grounds of legitimate
self-defense, they will take pains to see that no one escapes. For the first time in
history, the whole is within reach, that is, the destruction of the whole.
In a few hours of indescribable spectacle, history is brought to an end.
This is the way the world ends, not with a whimper but a bang. The Big Bang
Theory of Cosmic Origin has its heyday in our rapid approach to the Big Bang
of World Destruction in which we will lose the whole shebang. The Death-of-
God Theology fades, as we enter the Death-of-Humanity Anthropology.
The Muslim Resurgence is accompanied by the Islamabomb. The Land of
Israel is in the hands of the Jews, as is the Land of the Palestinians, and the Is
raelis also have their hands on the Kosher Bomb. India has the Gandhi (Indira
and Rajiv) Bomb. Pakistan: Answer-to-India Bomb (wrapped in cashmere).
Russia: World (Mir) Peace (Mir) Bomb. China: Great Leap Forward Bomb.
France: Force de Frappe Bombe. Great Britain: Royal Bomb. The United
States: God Bless America and Make the World Safe for Democracy Bomb.
South Africa: Ex-Apartheid Multicultural Reconciliation Bomb. North Korea:
Ultimate Permanent Reunification Bomb. Iran: Also-Ran Bomb.
Waiting in the wings and soon to be announced are the Mafia Bomb,
United Drug Lords Bomb (laced with cocaine), Japanese Industrialist Cartel
Bomb, Arab League Solidarity Bomb, Right-Wing Patriotic Terrorists of
America Bomb, Swiss All-Neutral Neutron Bomb (chocolate-coated), Smor
gasbord Bomb of the Nordic nations, Taiwan Independence Bomb, Ukrainian
Friendship Bomb, Down Under Bomb of Australia, Canadian Good Neighbor
Bomb/Bombe de Bon Voisinage, and Brazilian Bombshell.
Death gets the last laugh. Posthumorously. Posthumanously.
Military leaders take pride that their defensive efforts might destroy the
world hundreds of times. Presently existing weapons, according to my estimate,
could destroy the world 877 times. Some optimists, downplaying the threat, say
only 876. How strange to hear talk of a new generation of Nuclear Weapons,
when the present stock suffices to terminate all future generations of humanity.
The Nuclear Club (NUC), initially limited to two, then three, later four
members, has thrown open its doors in the true democratic spirit. Everyone can
join, though first they are expected to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NUNPROT). With enough money, raw materials, and scientific training, any
body can make the bomb. Nations without sufficient resources to make their
own bomb can pool their efforts with others. Bombs may be bought, stolen, or
received as humanitarian donations. Gift-wrapping is without charge.
Multinational terrorist organizations are preparing to use Nuclear Wea
pons. So many parties are in possession of so many weapons that the first ex
plosions which trigger the retaliatory strikes that end the world will likely
emanate from unidentified sources. After we are all destroyed, we would not
know who started it. The War Crimes Trial afterwards would not be able to lay
the blame. The likelihood of accidental initiation grows daily. This Reign of
Terror will be followed by the Rain of Terror. Rename our planet Ruin.
Pride of the universe, we are the inventors of suicide, deicide, genocide,
anthropocide, biocide, geocide, omnicide,. .. you decide.
Parting Shot
The universe will have lost its meaning,

When it has lost its human beings,
For who will be left to say what it means?

Being will be silenced when we are gone,
For who would remain to give it voice?
The world will not weep when we have made ourselves extinct,
For only we can shed its tears.
The totality of the coming event stares us in the face, although numerous
escape hatches appear in thinking about it. We are not inclined to think about it,
because it is unthinkable. The mind cannot quite handle the notion of Total Hu
man Destruction (THUD, the most acrimonious of acronyms). The reality of
this nightmare is so unreal that we push it out of mind. We would rather go the
movies. We are told survivors of Nuclear War will occur, hopefully on our
side. This is grounds for increased defense-spending. Yet it leads to increased
offensive preparation on the Other Side, and our side.
A peaceful lull sets in every few years. Detente takes the pressure off.
While we are at temporary ease, the apparatus remains permanently in place,
awaiting Final War (FW). A new defensive measure is touted, along with a new
offensive device. But the Other Side will develop its offensive riposte to our
defense and its defense to our offense.
To think that a definitive defense can be created against Weapons of Mass
Destruction (WMD) is offensive to human understanding. Human ingenuity is
surely gifted enough to overcome any defense against its capability to extermi
nate the species. “Ever-resourceful!” (Sophocles).
Hope, then, fixes itself to a radical reorganization of the human species to
do away with all such weapons and war itself. One World (OW) or none (0)!
Einstein’s formula. Given the ultimatum, obstacles appear insurmountable in
rebuilding the world without war. A kind of trust would be needed whose glob
al absence is institutionalized in the system of sovereign states and competing
alliances. Even if a thaw occurred in international relations and a growth oc
curred in consciousness of Worldwide Humanity (WWH), the technical prob
lem of disarming the 21,013 Nuclear Weapons is fraught with such hazards that
a mistake, oversight, misgiving, or violation might shatter the process with an
initial explosion that elicits retaliation and thence World Destruction.
A thousand ways exist of not facing the threat to the world. An easy hope
fulness and a preoccupied activism dwell on what may and can be done, with
out staring too deeply at what is about to happen. It is already happening. Just
as we may call drawing and aiming the pistol part of the act by which the fatal
shot occurs, so we may regard targeting and readying the Nuclear Weapons as
the process of World Destruction under way.
Nuclear bombs and missiles are not alone in humanity’s arsenal of Wea
pons of Mass Destruction. The ABC of WMD—Atomic, Bacteriological, and
Chemical—is being expanded by the DEF, GHI, . . . XYZ. We are mastering
the alphabet of World Destruction. In the supermarket of superweapons, na

tions and terrorists will shop for such goodies as Laser, Electronic, Supersonic,
and Psychic WMD.
According to the Gospels, the good tidings is that the world is soon to be
destroyed. Be of good cheer; the end is near!
Wake up! It is nearer than you think, and that is not so good. What is the
inevitable death of the individual compared to the hellfire that would incinerate
six billion people? We die doubly thereby, in our private humanity and our uni
versal humanity, as individual and species. “Terminated with extreme preju
dice,” in the jargon of the assassination bureau of the United States govern
ment. Whatever we were to leave behind for others as we are extinguished from
Being is lost, for everyone else is equally extinguished. All that is human is re
duced to nothing. Humanity is the something that nothings.
Death is the ultimate loneliness, severing the individual from the world
and the land of the living. The world dies for each person at death. At least, we
keep a toe in the world by being remembered. This anticipated memory of us is
a comfort of love. But with World Destruction, nobody will be left to love us,
once we are gone. Love ends with the world.
The American poet-artist, Kenneth Patchen, asks,
What Shall We Do Without Us? (Patchen, 1984, color pi. 37)
The horror is unbearable, because we cause it. Humanity: the Supreme

Suicide-Bomber. We are struck down by our hands, not by an errant comet,
exploding sun, unjust deity, or uncontrollable virus. Death, which none of us
want, is inflicted by us upon all of us. We recognize that this self-destruction is
undesirable, unmerited, and unnecessary. Hence, we are engaged in a tragedy
of unstinted megatude. What is the killing of Abel, Isaac, Ishmael, or Jesus to
the killing of all humanity? We are dizzied by the thought. In his pre-War nov
el, La Nausee (1938), Sartre wrote of the nausea that may accompany Being.
Now we know the nausea attached to this vision of non-being. We are all shook
up by “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces” of which Pascal spoke (see
p. 261, above). As Einstein exclaimed in 1945, when informed of the destruc
tion of Hiroshima by one atomic bomb,
Oy veh!
Marked with the stigma of mortality, we have invented the worst form of
death: our suicide as a species. We thereby deny our value. We have driven
ourselves to that act of seeming logic, critically analyzed by Camus, which we
do not choose. We cry out against World Destruction, while taking steps to
ward it.
The classless society and stateless world, of which the idealistic Marx
dreamt, is at hand in the dead society and the humanless world. All will be
equal: equally dead. Perpetual Peace = Universal Graveyard. Above the shop of
humanity, place the signboard:
Going Out of Business!
Added to the horror is that the future is prevented from occurring and the
past is forever lost. What good are these thousands of years of culture? To what
avail all the love that lived in human breasts and at death was deposited in other
hearts? The noblest sacrifices down through the ages will count as naught. This
Final War makes all previous wars pointless. No matter how many times the
enemy was defeated, the enemy has recovered to become ourselves. Whatever
was won is lost. Whatever we built ruined. History annulled. History, as Carl
Sandburg suggested, is a bucket of ashes. We will have kicked the bucket.
“And that’s the end of the world news,’’ the BBC World Services an
nouncer said, with imperturbable aplomb and perfect diction, on 28 May 1990,
as I was drafting a plan for World Peace. We have reached the critical juncture,
the limit condition of our existence, what Karl Jaspers calls the Grenzsituation.
We teeter on the edge of non-being. The vision of going over the edge assaults
the imagination. The heat will be so intense that our burning bodies will liquefy
and vaporize.
O, that this too too solid [sullied/sallied/soiled] flesh would melt, (Hamlet,
Shakespeare, 1963, Act 1, sc. 2, p. 41)
Brighter than 10,000 suns, the fireball will suck the oxygen out of the at
mosphere and out of our lungs. The wounded will be blind, voiceless, and skin
less. No one will be left to kill them mercifully. Bodies will be blown into one
another, squirming in undifferentiated agony like worms in a crushed can.
Madness will be the only comfort. No vision of hell in its centuries of haunting
the imagination will match what we will have done to one another. Hierony-
mous Bosch, make way for Hydrogen Bosch!
Millions of people who died in the past, pointlessly, sometimes in pain,
may now be recognized as fortunate. The Nazis murdered six million Jews in
the Holocaust in about six years. In as many hours, six billion people will be
burned to death in the Earth’s oven. The world as ash box. Adolf Hitler would
have been ecstatic. At last, it gets rid of the Jews. But you don’t have to be Jew
ish to be exterminated. The Final Solution for the world has finally arrived.
We are engaged in creating the Final Ruin. It is totally unworthy of us.
The burned-out world will be no proud monument of what we were, no noble
gesture of what we had achieved. The aesthetic sense is revolted by any sugges
tion that charming patterns and delightful unities will occur in the ruins. The
world will be a melted, burning, radioactive wasteland. Past civilizations could
leave something striking behind to move the hearts of other people. Ruins were
handed down. No one will be left to be moved by what we have destroyed.
The very thought ruins the moments of peace and joy that come to us. I
look out upon the little sticky green leaves of early spring, the fresh-painted
white porches of Victorian houses across the street, the black and white child
ren of the daycare-center, holding hands as their guardians lead them on their
daily stroll into the world, and I realize that all this will be wiped away in the
first incinerative waves.
These shelves of books, which surround me, and into which the lifeblood
of so many people entered over the centuries, will leave no word behind. This
book, reaching its end, will shortly not exist. You and I, who have trod together
down some thorny paths and shared a few moments of life, will be as if we had
never been.
This gives pause for thought, nay, poison for thought. We have introduced
Universal Death (UNID) into the background of all our experiences. Every mo
ment is fatally ruined. We stand accused of inflicting the Fall upon ourselves.
We are the animal addicted to its ruin. Even lemmings leave survivors. We are
the Destroyer. So great is our power of destruction that we are employing it
against the most valuable thing we know in the universe: our humanity. No
pleasure in this ruining. No whole to be taken hold of in the process. All whole
ness is negated.
The only consolation is that the human species will have ended its folly
and suffering. The history of this being, in Macbeth’s words (1606),
is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (Macbeth, Shakespeare, 1997, Act 5, sc. 4, p. 1385)
Life is meaninglessful, meaningful-less. A perverse pleasure might occur in

knowing that it will soon end. We will all die together, because we cannot live
together. Since no one will survive you and me, we will not be missing any
thing. For the first time, the world will go out of existence with the dying indi
vidual. We will all be dead to the world, and the world will be dead hereafter.
No one comes after us. That’s it.
To love the world, learn to live with a broken heart. If completion occurs
in Total Human Destruction, that THUD is aesthetically unsatisfactory. The
one adventure story we do not want ended is ours. Humanity is the usual sur
rogate for the dying human being. We want the possibility of others thinking
well of us. The last consolation in dying unsatisfied is that others may make
sense of the fragments, so that a satisfying unity emerges to our departing life.
Though we are not around to enjoy that unity/eulogy, we may still look forward
to it in the final moments before ceasing to exist.
Thus, in death is hope, even amid hopelessness. The hope is that our life
means something, has a value, can be instructive or otherwise useful. Though
not having been all that we wished to be, we feel, upon dying, that life has not
been in vain. Even the person who commits suicide, in taking arms against life,
is trying to affirm something of value in that person’s action. All these tenuous
hopes and meager consolations are torn away from our heart by the coming
death of all human beings. Everyone’s life is smashed, with no one left to put
the pieces together.
We are the species living under the death sentence (Swed.: domda,
“judged,” “punished,” “condemned,” “doomed”) that it has passed against it
self. This is the extra burden placed upon our individual mortality. The one
constant truth for all humanity has been that we are each going to die. What dif
ferentiates the present generation from our predecessors is that we also bear the
cross of destroying the species. If such a thing as sin exists, this is it. Killing a
god might be forgiven by humanity, but we cannot forgive killing humanity.
Yet we are assuredly embarked on that deed. We are responsible for our
extermination. Efforts exist to attribute the blame to the culprits among us: the
rulers, greedy, hostile, thoughtless, doctrinaire, military, otherworldly, Other.
But they are our fellows. The blame is upon us for failing to control them or
guide them to the light.
Looking for an escapegoat, we also cast blame on the System, economic
order, communication gap, uneven distribution of resources, violence of tele
vision, limitations of education, inhibitions of tradition, intolerance of religion.
Yet, at heart, we know that human beings are victims of ourselves, not of cir
cumstances. We allow circumstances and systems to get in our way.
The destruction of the world falls upon our head, if we fail to stop it. You
and I are not actively engaged in killing humanity. We repudiate such activity.
Why, we have signed petitions against Nuclear War. Are we absolved from the
responsibility and relieved of the guilt, so that we can enjoy with a free heart
the few moments remaining? Acts may be of omission and commission. Our
obligation is to do more than we have been obligated for. The Destruction
renders obsolete traditional theories of obligation. You and I are obligated to
save the world. Let us rise up and dust ourselves off to get to work, before the
Destruction dusts us all off. If you will not try, then the task remains mine.
To be human requires action to save the world. Such action is without ex
pectation of success. It need not be accompanied by hope. We may act to the
limit of our lives, because it is right. Absurdity at the heart of absurdities! The
surd is the unanalyzable, irrational, individual, indivisible, indivisidual. The
ruin. Absurdly, we may stake our lives in taking action against the Destruction.
Without further adieu, I will now get to the end of all this.
7. Fond Farewell
Saving Grace
I tried to save the world

and failed:
The world was too much
for me.
I tried to save my soul
and lost:
I was not enough
for myself.
I gave up trying to save the world
and my soul,
And lived among them
at a loss;
Until one day my soul and the world
found me,
And then
we were saved.
Face-to-face with these horrors, staring the horror of ourselves in the face, we
see alternatives loom up for living with these three final ruins: our lives, hu
manity, and the world. The Knight of Faith, who has given an otherworldly
pledge, says, “I told you so!” Humanity all along has been sinful, the world is
inherently unsatisfactory, and this puny thing, my life, is nothing compared to
that other life to come. This has all been a matter of ruins. The final ruining is
about to occur. We should make our best effort to prevent it, for such self-
destruction is sinful.
But our self-destruction has been built into our sinful being. We are ruins
who one day would bring about our total ruin, the biggest Fall of them all. This
spectacle of our depravity sickens the soul and causes fear and trembling. We
denounce the world and humanity, and we turn our soul instead to that salva
tion that will keep us whole forever
This passionate belief in the heavenly realm, existence of a rewarding
god, or possibility of union with the grounds of Being is a decisive rejection of
living in the world. It takes a heroic stand against ruin, by insisting that every
thing about us is in ruin. We are the last ruins upon the earth, which we are
about to turn into our final ruin. Only in another world, or beyond all worlds, is
the wholeness we seek. The burning image of escape from this condemned
world is Everlasting Life. Optimal illusion. I’ll see it when I believe it!
I fear that to believe with all your heart in our immortality is to deny hu-
inanity’s essence, which is to live with all your heart as a mortal being. “What
could possibly console a human being for being mortal?”, you ask, just as every
human being has had to ask. Life itself, life as a human being, this very mortali
ty which is our infinite value, I answer.
The leap of faith becomes increasingly difficult to make, when the abyss
yawns to its endless depth. Before, only my finitude was at stake, only the mor
tal gambol/gamble/gambit of my being, in the quest for the infinite and immor
tal. Whatever choice I made, whatever chose me, the rest of humanity went on
its way. That was BD, Before the Destruction. Even then, Pascal and Kierke
gaard had a rough time of it, though the faith that they had had had been in
God. That is not easily said. Or had.
Now that we are Living With the Destruction, LWD, all humanity sits on
our shoulders at the moment of leaping. Faith feels the weight of the billions of
the innocent about to die. A divinity that permits this Destruction seems unwor
thy of faith. We, the billions, are the voice of Job, unanswered. The Destruction
is the greatest blow against faith.
Faith struggles valiantly to rise from its crippled state in time to receive
the Destruction as its last rites. The terrifying thing is that no faith will be left
once it happens. Humanity’s last cry may be:
My God, my God, Why have you forsaken us?
A species of clear-eyed despair regards otherworldliness itself as a ruining

of our vital energies. To this despairing view, the plea for salvation is the final
obscenity. “Thank God, I am an atheist!” exclaims the embittered viewer of a
godless universe ruled by chance. To the Knight of Despair, the Destruction is
heartless. Ruination is the way of the world. We are the victims of Being.
We have to end sooner or later. It has been a long reign. Did we really
think that we would outlast the cockroach, the rat, and the cancer virus? Death
pulses in the veins of life. We live in vain. A unique animal, we are the su
preme valuer. We insist on making sense out of our lives. We have beaten back
death over the ages, so that each mortal may live a fuller life. Given the certain
ty of our individual death, we have discovered the wonder of humanity.
Now we approach that certainty of humanity’s death. Human dignity is
thereby ruined. By causing our extinction, we reduce ourselves to worse than
beasts. We, who have grown to be like gods on earth, bring total ruin to what
we are, to what we might become. Though we may try with our last breath to
avert the Destruction, we are crushed by the Despair. This is the recognition of
the pointlessness of being human. The joy has gone out of the world. With it
hope. Love of life turns sour and curdles into hatred for the Destruction. We
weep for humanity, we who are its last ruins, cursing the universe which blind
ly bore us. All comes to ruin.
Otherworldly faith and despairing encounter with this world spring from a
profound rejection of the world. Each is a self-defeating prophecy, a refusal to
accept the world for what it is and can yet be. The Knight of Faith would flee
what is here and now for the eternal hereafter. The Knight of Despair cannot
flee but cannot live in peace here and now. Caught between refusal and no es
cape, this knight dwells in despair.
For both heroes, the world is ruin. The Knight of Faith concedes that the
world has always been a ruin and could never have been otherwise. The Knight
of Despair sees that it could have been otherwise. The ruin was too much for
us, or we were too much for ourselves. We take the responsibility for failure.
To faith appears the sin of which we are guilty. To despair appears the tragic
recognition that we have made the mistakes that bring on our extermination.
Each form of knighthood might be regarded as a stage by the other. Faith
needs the alternative of despair to fly with wings of passion. If no ruin exists to
cause despair, faith is not called upon. In the face of despair, faith sees the chal
lenge. Faith, then, is the answer to despair over ruin, for it believes, incredibly,
that all will be made whole.
Yet despair sees faith as a desperate flight from what is of most passionate
concern: the world’s ruin. Faith gives the lie to the ruin and thereby further ru
ins who we are. That Knight who is in World-Despair (Weltangst) is not sur
prised that the other Knight who takes flight in faith falls back into despair. In
turn, the Knight of Faith is not surprised when the Knight of Despair is lifted up
by faith. Each may wish upon the other the true enlightenment. Though each is
benighted, I wish a pax upon both their houses!
These two extremes of Living With the Destruction are reinvocations of
those attitudes toward ruin that we have studied, under the names of the Classi
cal and Romantic views (Chapter Sixteen, above). The Knight of Faith, the
Classicist, believes that the ideal, which is definitive wholeness, though invis
ible, is accessible to human faculties, thanks to the grace of God. The whole,
which is indestructible, descends and absorbs us. Hence, nothing really was
ruin. The Knight of Despair, the Romantic, feels the terrible destructive force
that underlies all, ourselves and our world, and that erupts in meaningless chaos
to make everything a ruin. These two versions of the aesthetics of ruins are also
visions of the disaesthetics of World Destruction.
Between the alternatives of faith and despair are others to be sketched as
modes of Living With the Destruction. We have met several before, when the
problem was that simple case of our individual death. Simple case, indeed. The
Stoic position is sober acceptance. Keep calm in the face of annihilation, it
counsels. Live with dignity, be at peace. This view presumes the world is a ruin
not worth our agonizing over. The only thing of value is our soul. This is the
self-sustained attitude toward ourselves, not that eternal soul treasured by the
Knight of Faith. Yet this attitude is a terrible rejection of the world. To live
Meditations on Humanity, Self and the World as Ruins 443
PI. 91. The Dome, Hiroshima, Japan, 1987

these final moments safe from despair is to cast the world out of our heart and
sever our supposed dignity from shared humanity. The Stoic refusal condemns
everything except its act of refusal.
The terrorist may smash out against the coming Destruction by acts of
fresh destruction. We might as well get in our last licks. The terrorist acts out of
rage, not despair. While the Stoic refusal of the world is quiet and quiescent,
the terrorist refusal refuses silence and dignity. It insists on violent protest. The
protest can never be satisfied. If we are all to be destroyed, then the terrorist is
willing to destroy as many of us as possible.
Terrorism is an unshakable faith in the unredeemability of the hated order
that continues, not in the redeeming unity of a world to come. The world and
humanity are ruined. The terrorist, enraged, gives them extra kicks to make
more ruins out of them in the terrortory of horror. Terrorism takes out its hatred
on others, because of its horror at the incompletability of what is. Terrorism is
hopelessness brought to revenge. Given access to Weapons of World Destruc
tion, the terrorist, of no matter what clan, would jump to push the button.
Somewhere in the field of possibilities, we must erect the defenses for
Living With the Destruction. Choose, before it is too late. Your life depends
upon it. The question is aesthetic and eschatological, for we have come down to
last things. Meditation upon ruins leads us to the metaphysics of being human.
The great attitudes of the Classical and Romantic emerge before us as two
roads that diverge in the woods/woulds: the paths of faith and despair. But we
have learned to make ruins out of extreme positions, to find a fresh way in the
dark. As we stumble among the ruins of programs for living, wandering closer
to the edge of that Universal Death which will consume all programs and all
life, we may find in our hearts the way to live fully without faith or despair.
Nothing is more appalling than the inhumanity of we human beings. But
nothing is more appealing than our humanity. Instead of rejecting the defective
world as a ruin, we may embrace it for its abundant richness as a ruin. Faith de
nies death. Despair denies life. Yet we may live with death, including, if need
be, the THUD of Total Human Destruction just down the road.
Earth’s the right place for love . . . . (“Birches,” Frost, 1979, p. 122)
Invest our love in this world. No other world is ours. This one is world enough
for me. If you find the world too bitter, then you had best make it better. That,
too, is my philosophy.
Despair dwarfs action because of the gigantic image of failure. Oppose
Angst with Ankhs. Hopeless? Maybe. Despairing? No! Armed with the joyous
sense of life (el sentimiento gozoso), act for the rightness of the action, not be
cause of the probability of success. That is the improbable beauty of morality.
The best revenge for having to live in a world shot through with injustice
and threatened with Destruction is to lead a just life and set the world on the
path to peace. We should oppose World Destruction with our every effort, even
if it were impossible to stop. This act is no counsel of despair, because its end is
blunted. It is a deed of passionate freedom, because its choice is meaningful.
The world may be destroyed, despite ourselves. But we will have been truly
ourselves, despite our destruction.
The Knights of Faith and Despair throw up their hands too soon. They see
the world as falling so far short of their values that they will have none of it.
We ourselves fall short of who we insist we should be. To be human is to be
dissatisfied with who we are. But to know who we are is also a satisfaction. My
work is not done; my work is doing. I am, at any moment, a living fragment,
but I am, at every moment, a vital unity. I am the unifier of the universe. So are
you. Welcome to the universe!
The triumph of being human is in choosing to be of ultimate value and in
taking our stand against the Destruction. Let us not deny the Romantic insight
that Destruction flows beneath everything, but let us link arms against the tide.
To be human is to stand against Being’s pitch and grain. Let us accept the
world as a ruin, but with passionate embrace. Love the world in its imperfec
tion, for what it is and for what we can make it become.
We cannot grasp the whole of Being, but we can grasp the power of being
human. The human is an improbable being: this we can know with certainty.
Yet we are Being self-transcendent. The universe is thinking of itself in your
mind this very moment. What do you think of that!
What we could have been is slipping quickly out of our hands, but it fills
our hearts. We are human begins. Becoming is the true Being of being human.
Being becomes you! Who we are becoming is really who we are. We can do
better. We better do better!
If I am a ruin under the sentence of the Destruction, and you are one like
wise, then we need not compound our lamentation but flourish in together-
being. For in the descending darkness, we stand revealed as fellow-beings. Af
ter all, we are members of the same family, the descendants of Eve and Adam,
or, going further back, the remnants of the Big Bang, the womb of Being. The
dark is light enough to discover our kinship. A time whose idea has come. Our
hearts need not break at the brink of Destruction. They may open to their brim
with love.
You shall love your crooked neighbor

With your crooked heart. (“As I Walked Out One Evening,” Auden,
1945, p. 198)
We are here as upon a sinking ship, and, while we work the pumps to the
last, take heart in our togetherness. Let us get it all together as together-with.
Wonder begins in solitude and culminates in togetherhood. The human being,

about to blow itself into nothingness, is not alone but sensible of its together-
being. Solidarity may overcome our solitarity. Let our humanity be rising, not
fallen. No need to abandon one another in despair or call upon a silent deity.
Make of our hearts the home to the holy. We are already engaged in a sacred
activity: living. We are here, and we may cry out together,
My humanity, my humanity, thou hast not forsaken me!
On the sinking ship, we may still know the wind’s wistful whistling, the
night’s star-strung splendor, the daybreak’s heart-warming radiance. Each day
a blessing. We cannot sail on forever. But the journey is worth the ruin. Lord
Tennyson’s aging Ulysses proclaims (1842),
Death closes all; but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done, (“Ulysses,” Tennyson, 1951,
p. 89)
Shipmates on the Planet Earth! Through meditation, which is the media

tion of mind with the world, we have come to the following conclusions. Well,
I have come to them. No, to be truthful, for a change, I started with them as
foundations. The meditations above supported what I already knew. Well, what
I already believed. As for you, though I have tried to bring you along every
schlepp of the way, you will have to make the final steps yourself, now that we
come to the parting of our ways. Consider these, then, not as conclusions that
bring our voyage to an end, but as beginnings for leading your life anew.
(1) To be human is no sin.
(2) Life is worth living. Therefore, live it joyously, as if you will never
have the chance to live it again.
(3) The world is Eden enough. Love it like home. Knights of Humanity,
rise up to save it!
(4) Death is not a punishment. It is a given, the given. Its certainty is a lib
erating invitation to live fully as a decent human being. We are the mean
ing of life. Since our lives are a moment of dying between infinitudes of
nothingness, what are we waiting for? Make the most of the moment!
(5) Mortality is the living foundation of morality. Since we are all going
to die, then everyone’s life is priceless and irreplaceable. The highest obli
gation of every human being is to prevent the destruction of every human

being. Let us wear our mortality upon our sleeve as a badge of honor. We
take arms against death by taking one another in our arms.
(6) Nothing can redeem humanity faced with nothingness but itself, our
selves. Whatever imperfections beset the self, the self does itself justice in
doing the right thing. The right thing is to save the world. That it may be
doomed is no reason to give up saving it.
(7) Infinite joy may occur at any moment, this one included, when Being
bursts in to fill the heart with all the strength of wholeness.
One Moment, Please
This moment
springs forth
as a whole,
immovable and timeless,
out of the roaring flow
of time’s ruinousness.
The aesthetics of ruins teaches us that beauty is close at hand in the mid
dle of decay and destruction. In the realm of ruins, unity springs from the hu
man soul to make wholes that delight us. The aesthetics of ruins is an instruc
tive paradox. Having tasted of its experiences, we may turn with a fresh heart
to this plunging stream of our dying planet that sweeps all away before we take
a decisive step, to this titanic explosion of pieces rushing into nothingness,
which is the unmeaning universe, and to ourselves, this incomparable ruin of
ruins. We may then step boldly beyond desperation and world-abandonment to
fulfillment as human beings.
This meditation on ruin, this extended metaphor for reflection, this meta
physics of ruin, informed by aesthetic experience, has been written for you out
of love. Dear reader, may you redeem Being by giving it meaning, and, in lov
ing life with all your heart, may you know for an endless moment
perfect bliss.
WORKS CITED
Monuments encountered on the way.
Note: This list of references that are made parenthetically in the text does not include
works quoted in epigraphs. Works discussed below in the Bibliographical Essay
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CHRONOLOGY OF RUIN
Dates are pebbles we throw into the river of time to mark our passage be
fore we are all washed away.
Note: This sketch of events is not of the construction of monuments, but of de
struction, discovery, recovery, excavation, restoration, representation, interpre
tation, and celebration. “Discovery,” as cited here, generally refers to the awak
ening in Europe and North America to ruins that may have been known locally.
Illustrations in this book that are related to the sites are signaled parenthetically.
1. Before Common Era (BCE)
19999997996, 1 January, early morning. The Universe: Big Bang violently dis
perses the ruins of everything. We are all remnants of the event.
99996 (ca.). Earth: Human beings (Homo sapiens) begin to spread across the
world. In the Biblical account, 5764 (ca.), Eden: Expulsion of Adam and
Eve from paradise on earth, and entrance into the world, cursed with mor
tality, due to the Fall (Genesis, 3:19-24).
5596 (ca.). Black Sea: The Deluge (Genesis, 7-8). Wet basements abound.
Search for Noah’s Ark will come to preoccupy arkaeologists.
5555 (ca.). Babylon: Construction suspended of the Tower of Babel (Heb.:

“confusion”; Genesis, 11:4-9), due to proliferation of tongues. Thereafter,
human beings babble on. The ruin may be a ziggurat near Baghdad.
1500 (ca.). Aegean Sea: Santorini, volcano explodes, destroying many Minoan
settlements, Europe’s oldest civilization (PI. 21). The disaster is mytholo
gized as the loss of the island of Atlantis.
1260 (ca.). Jericho: Joshua supervises the blowing of the trumpets, and the
walls come tumbling down (Joshua, 6:15-21) (PI. 27).
1184 (ca.). Troy destroyed by the Greek coalition.
480. Athens: The Acropolis sacked by the Persians.
448-395. Athens: The Acropolis rebuilt, at the instigation of Pericles (PI. 38).
4 (ca.). Bethlehem: Birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Artistic tradition portrays the

site as a ruin.
2. Common Era (CE)
62. Pompeii: Earthquake; the city rebuilds.
70. Jerusalem: Temple of Herod destroyed by the Romans (PI. 41).
73. Masada: Jewish Zealots defeated by the Romans (PI. 40).
79, 24 August, 10:45 AM. Mt. Vesuvius erupts, destroying Pompeii and Hercu
laneum (Pis. 2, 12, 84).
90 (ca.). Delos, the sacred island, abandoned (Pis. 5, 93).
150 (ca.). Pausanias, Guide to Greece, in ten books.
410. Rome: Goths sack the city and leave their bad name behind.
413-427. St. Augustine writes The City of God, developing the doctrine of the
Fall of humanity and triumph of the heavenly kingdom over the ruin of
this world.
455. Rome: Vandals sack the city and leave their bad name behind.
747. Jericho: Palace, built by Caliph Hisham, destroyed by earthquake (PI. 26).
1506, 14 January. Rome: Statue of LaokoOn discovered, a turning point in taste

and theory. Now in the Vatican collections.
1554. “Longinus,” On the Sublime, dating from the first century, discovered
and published.
1558. Du Bellay, Les Antiquites de Rome.
1559. Scotland: St. Andrews Cathedral turned into ruin by the Reformation
(Pis. 46, 48, 49, Fig. 5).
1586. Santo Domingo, the center of Spanish imperialism in the Caribbean,

sacked by Sir Francis Drake (PI. 92).
1687, 26 September, 7 PM. Athens: Parthenon shattered by explosion of Turk

ish powder magazine in shelling directed by the Swedish Count Koenigs-
mark, serving in the Venetian army under Francesco Morosini (PI. 38).
Chronology of Ruin 455
PI. 92. Colonial Ruin, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 1991

1689. Germany: Heidelberg Castle destroyed by the French in Palatine-Orleans

War (PI. 9).
1738, 1 October. Italy: Excavation starts at Herculaneum, marking the begin

ning of systematic archaeology (PI. 84).
1740. Italy: Paestum (Poseidonia), the Greek colony, discovered in a swamp.
1745. Piranesi, Vedute.
1748. Italy: Excavation begins at Pompeii (Pis. 2, 12).
1755, 1 November, All Saints Day. Lisbon destroyed by earthquake, about

20,000 victims (PI. 82). Consternation reigns throughout Europe.
1756-1757. Panini, “Roma Antica,” imaginary gallery of ruin-paintings and

sculpture.
1758. David Le Roy, Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grece.
1764, 15 October, evening. Rome: Edward Gibbon sits “musing amidst the ru
ins of the Capitol” and decides to write his History o f the Decline and
Fall o f the Roman Empire. He completes writing of it toward midnight of
27 June 1787. It is published in six volumes, 1776-1788.
1766. Lessing, Laokoon, oder, iiber die Grenzen der Malerie und Poesie.
1771. France: Desert de Retz, de Monville builds dwelling in the form of a

huge ruin-column.
1786. J. H. W. Tischbein paints portrait of Goethe, posing among the ruins of

the Roman Campagna.
1789, 14 July. Paris: The Bastille seized by the people, beginning the French
Revolution. Demolition of the fortress-prison begins shortly thereafter.
1791. Volney, Les Ruines.
1796. Hubert Robert, serving as Curator of the new National Museum of the
Louvre, paints short-term view of improvements to the Grande Galerie,
and then the matching, long-term, “Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie
en ruines.”
Chronology o f Ruin 457
1798. Egypt: Napoleon’s military expedition, accompanied by scholars, leads

to thorough study of monuments. Outbreak of Egyptomania soon follows.
1800-1804. Athens: Parthenon Marbles removed under the direction of Lord

Elgin and shipped to England.
1811. Chateaubriand, Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem, celebrates with verve the

Romantic ideal.
1812. Byron, Childe Harold.
1816. London: Select Committee of Parliament holds hearings on the artistry,

mode of acquisition, and value of the Elgin Marbles. Parliament approves
purchase on behalf of the British Museum.
---------. Goethe, Die italienische Reise, celebrates the Classical ideal.
1820. Greece: Melos {Milo), broken statue of Aphrodite (Venus) discovered.

Acquired by the Louvre.
1821-1829. Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire.
1824, January. At the height of Graecomania, Byron arrives in Missolonghi to

assist the liberation of Greece. Dies of fever, 19 April.
1834. Bulwer-Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii.
1835. Macao: St. Paul’s Church bums down, leaving facade as ruin (PI. 8).
1836. Thomas Cole, series of paintings, “The Course of Empire.”
---------. Texas: San Antonio, Remember the Alamo!
1841. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan.
---------. Ireland: The Hill of Tara, Daniel O’Connell, “The Liberator,” holds
“Monster Meeting” of an estimated million Irish people (PI. 15).
1845. London: The Portland Vase, a masterpiece of Roman glass, smashed but
then restored.
1846. Dickens, Pictures from Italy.

1849. Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, in which the Assyrian
ruins confirm Biblical references.
1850. Cambodia: Angkor Wat, Hindu temple complex, the world’s largest
religious monument, discovered by Father Charles-fimile Bouillevaux.
1869. Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, spoof of travel literature, with visit to
ruins around the Mediterranean.
1870s. Greece: Excavation at Delos, home of the Delian League of Greek

city-states, by the French School of Athens (Pis. 5, 93).
PI. 93. Monuments of Delos, Greece, 1974
1871. Southeast Africa: Great Zimbabwe discovered by Carl Mauch.
1873. Turkey: Hissarlik, at presumed site of Troy, Heinrich Schliemann exca

vates “the treasures of Priam.”
1877. Greece: Mycenae, Schliemann excavates “the treasures of Agamemnon.”
1879. UK: Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies founded.
1881. Turkey: Nemrut Dag, the field of colossal heads, discovered in Anatolia
by Karl Sester.
1883. Egypt: Restoration of Luxor begins (PI. 43).
1893-1896. Rome: Colosseum, interior laid bare (PI. 37).

Chronology o f Ruin 459
1899. Crete: Knossos, beginning of excavation—and reconstruction—of Palace

of Minos by Sir Arthur Evans.
1901. Crete: Goumia discovered by Harriet Boyd Hawes (PI. 21).
1906. USA: Mesa Verde National Park established in Colorado.
1907-1911. Java: Borobudur, restoration of the stupendous stupa architecture,

the largest Buddhist shrine in the world.
1911. Peru: Machu Picchu (Quechua: “old mountain”), the “Lost City” of the
Incas, discovered by Hiram Bingham.
1922, 29 November. Egypt: Valley of the Kings, Howard Carter and Lord Car
narvon open the tomb of King Tutankhamun, the archaeological sensa
tion of the century.
1926. Virginia: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation begins restoration of the

Colonial capital.
1927. Quebec: milltown of Val-Jalbert abandoned (PI. 80).
1945. Neruda, “Alturas de Macchu Picchu.”
1947. 6 August. Japan: Hiroshima, First Annual Peace Festival held at the
Dome in the Peace Park (PI. 91).
1948. Kenya: Gedi declared a National Park (PI. 65).
1949. USA: National Trust for Historic Preservation chartered.
1950. Rome: Rail Terminal by Montuori and Calini (PI. 54).
1952. Jericho: Kathleen Kenyon excavates the multiple layers of the city walls,
revealing many falls (PI. 27).
1953. Macauley, The Pleasure of Ruins.
1962. Hawaii: Pearl Harbor, U.S.S. Arizona Memorial dedicated.
---------. England: Coventry Cathedral, having been partially rebuilt, is con

secrated. Features donated from around the world.
1963. Berlin: Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church completed (PI. 53, Fig. 6).
1963-1965. Israel: Masada, excavation by Yigael Yadin (PI. 40).
1966. Tunisia: Tamerza abandoned due to floods (PI. 22).
1967. Israel takes control of East Jerusalem from Jordan (Pis. 41, 55).
1968. New York: Temple of Dendur, having been dismantled in Egypt, in
stalled in Metropolitan Museum of Art.
1971. Iran: Persepolis, Shah Reza Pahlevi throws a big bash to celebrate the
2,500th anniversary of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. In 1979, the Shah
flees the country, and the monarchy is abolished.
1972. Madrid: Temple of Debod, having been dismantled in Egypt, installed in

the Parque del Oeste.
1974. Mortier, La Poetique des mines en France.
---------. China: Xian, discovery of terracotta army in vast tomb complex of Qin
Shi Huangdi, the first Emperor of China.
1978. Mexico City: Beginning of excavation by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma of

the Templo Mayor in the Aztec complex of Tenochtitlan (PI. 30).
1989. Berlin: The Wall is torn down by Germans on both sides of it, signaling
the collapse of Communism, the end of the Cold War, and the reunifica
tion of Germany. Fragments are kept, sold, and presented as gifts.
1997-1998. Los Angeles: Exhibition at the Getty Center, “Irresistible Decay:

Ruins Reclaimed.”
Today. You are reading this book—to your astonishment!
3. Uncommon Error (UE)
Date not yet determined. Solar System: Third planet from the Sun destroyed.
Appendix
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY ON THE

LITERATURE AND IMAGERY OE RUIN
Books are ships afioat in the shapeless sea of night.
Until recently, few writings in aesthetics had been devoted to ruins. But we
may find many contributions to the aesthetics of ruins in writing and illustration
intended for several other fields. By uncovering works here, and drawing upon
works there, we can piece together a field of texts and images to serve the aes-
thetics of mins. In this essay, organized under nineteen cross-referenced head-
ings, I discuss fundamental works for construction of that field, along with
some items not easily accessible that may stimulate reflection on special topics.
Authors often combine different kinds of writing touching on ruin. Thus,
archaeological discovery and description at times goes hand-in-glove with trav-
el literature. Guidebooks and historical monographs devoted to celebrated mins
may be lavishly illustrated with works of visual art and documented with liter-
ary excerpts. Photography finds its way into every kind of book on ruins. Ruin-
writing and min-imagery invite cross-genre exploration.
For an alphabetical list of authors, editors, and titles, see the Index, below.
1. Aesthetic Theory
Most works of aesthetics are theories of art. A few theories of ruin are now
available, including contributions of considerable value or much promise.
The most important contribution to the aesthetics of mins is Rose Macau-
ley's monumental Pleasure of Ruins (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984
[facsimile of the orig. ed. of 1953]). The locus of Macauley's aesthetics is the
audience, for this is a study of the kinds of pleasure that mins produce in visi-
tors. People have (better, had) a passion for mins, which may take many forms,
but which springs from our human condition, for we mortals are drawn to con-
templation of loss and destruction: "ruin is part of the general Weltschmerz,
Sehnsucht, malaise, nostalgia, Angst, frustration, sickness, passion of the hu-
man soul; it is the etemal symbol" (p. 23).
Among the forms of pleasurable activity that people took in ruins are
moralizing upon ruin (p. 43), reading classical literature or the Bible at the sites
mentioned (pp. 44, 88-89), treasure-seeking (p. 61), dining by moonlight (pp.
79-80), partying and camping (p. 81), experiencing the ecstasy of discovery (p.
118), cutting names on stones (p. 161), spotting the ancient fragments incorpo-
rated into local dwellings (p. 163), identifying buildings with the aid of a guide-
book (p. 298), and adapting ruins to modem usage (pp. 339-340).
. Macauley makes the most of accounts of experiencers of min. She treats
us to entertaining passages drawn from travelers' writings, to which she adds

her own moving descriptions of encountering ruins around the world. Since the
narrative accounts are typically linked to the approach to the ruin, Macauley is
at her best in the analysis of ruin-in-site. Her chapters, outfitted with the history
of previous visitors, are veritable guides to ruins by categories, including palac-
es, castles, ghost towns, and.churches. Brilliant amalgam of travel book and lit-
erary compilation, ornamented by 75 black-and-white illustrations.
By hyphenation, Macauley creates a ruin-vocabulary to express the pas-
sionate attachment we may have for ruin:
ruin-pleasure, pp. xiii, 42,43, etc. ruin-commonplaces, p. 74

ruin-questing, p. xiv ruin-viewers, p. 74
ruin-picture, p. 2 Ruinelust, p. 76
ruin-triumph, p. 3 ruin-lovers, p. 99
ruin-excitement, p. 3 ruin-builder, p. 100
ruin-poetry, p. 5 ruin-drama, p. 100
ruin-elegizer, p. 5 ruin-fancier, pp. 102, 347
ruin-sentiment, p. 6 ruin-loving dreams, p. 151
ruin-haunted, pp. 9, 189 ruin-meditations, p. 163
ruin-minded, p. 9 ruin-petting, p. 166
ruin-sensibility, p. 9 ruin-enthusiast, p. 170
ruin-gazing, ruin-gazers, pp. 14, 181 ruin-preservers, p. 177
ruin-worship, pp. 14, 40, 177 ruin-destroyers, p. 177
ruin-knowledge, p. 14 ruin-hunter, p. 184
ruin-tending, pp. 14-15 ruin-scene, p. 185
ruin-discourse, p. 15 Ruinenstimmung, p. 191
ruin-feeling, pp. 8, 180 ruin-field, p. 203
ruins-fans, p. 25 Trümmerfeld, pp. 203, 401
ruin-mania, p. 32 ruin-snobs, p. 210
ruin-painter, pp. 34, 183 ruin-wilderness, p. 213
ruin-building, p. 36 ruin-strewn bay, p. 220
ruin-craving, p. 39 ruin excitement, p. 222
ruin-grounded, p. 39 phil-ruin tourists, p. 228
ruin-tipplers, p. 41 ruin-travellers, p. 231
ruin-tasters, pp. 42, 80 ruin-appeal, p. 242
ruin-seers, ruin-seeing, pp. 43, 106, 356 ruin-sprouting hills, p. 245
Ruinenempfindsamkeit, p. 48 ruinologers, p. 249
Ruinensehnsucht, p. 53 Ruinenempfindung, p. 300
ruinrseeker, p. 54 ruin-littered, p. 324
ruin-seeking traveler, p. 54 ruin-joys, p. 351
ruin-makers, p. 57 bomb-ruin, p. 366
ruin-explorer, p. 59 Ruinenschmerz, p. 376
Bibliographical Essay on the Literature and Imagery of Ruin 463
ruin-pleasurists, p. 378 ruin-touched, p. 437

ruin-faking, p. 384 ruinhungrige Phantasie, p. 444
ruin-maze, p. 403 ruin-visitors, p. 451
ruin-clearers, p. 404 ruin-poets, p. 454.
ruin-finds, p. 420
The ruin-Lady, Dame Macauley, combines evocative literary skills with

cosmopolitan experience and wide reading in this preeminent masterpiece of
ruin-writing. Dwelling on ruins, her writing makes us dwell in ruins.
Yet the success of the large volume (480 pp.) may intimidate. The aes-
thetic response to ruin gets lost in the psychology, history, and biography of
this viewer-oriented approach. We need to do more with the aesthetic theory of
ruin as distinct from description of the fascination of viewers for ruins.
Abundant quotation of sources, but no bibliography. The pictures give an
excellent impression of how our predecessors saw the ruins, though the graphic
works are not analyzed as aesthetic contributions. The images do not show the
ruins the way a visitor now sees them. This shortcoming is remedied by the col-
or and black-and-white work of RoloffBeny Interprets in Photographs: Pleas-
ure of Ruins by Rose Macauley, text ed. Constance Babington Smith (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, rev. ed. 1977 [orig. pub. 1964]).
A wealth of images, quotations, and sources is available in the exhibition
catalogue and research guide by Michael S. Roth, with Claire Lyons and
Charles Merewether, Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed (Los Angeles: Getty
Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, "Bibliographies &
Dossiers," 1997). The collaborators offer imaginative and original responses to
ruin in the arts and culture. Good use of the notion of the framing of the ruin as
an act by the subject within a cultural context. Excellent bibliography.
Christopher Woodward gives a loving account of ruin-experience in a
well-researched and well-written history of ruin-treatments in literature, art,
and taste. In Ruins (London: Chatto & Windus, 2001). Woodward's intention is
"to show what a source of inspiration ruins must have been in earlier cultures"
(p. 251). "When we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future" (p. 2).
Excellent chapter on the diversity of experiences in the Colosseum, "Who
Killed Daisy Miller?"
For an astute analysis of the several modes taken by the aesthetics of ruins
in the history of Western consciousness, see Hartmut Böhme, "Die Ästhetik der
Ruinen," in Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf, eds.. Der Schein des Schö-
nen (Göttingen: Steidl, 1989), pp. 287-304. (From German): "The history of
the ruinless eternal Rome is the history of the ruining of others—other cities,
other peoples" (p. 290). Petrarch began the fashion of ruin-poetry, "at first,
Rome-poetry" (p. 292). The eighteenth century brought recognition of ruin's
beauty. In our times, ruins "are ubiquitous, and we live in tbe midst of them.
Our ruins are no longer indicators of the past but testimonies (Signaturen) of
the present" (p. 300). Good treatment of Sigmund Freud's vision of ruin.
Refreshing studies resulting from a recent conference have been edited by
Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reijen, Ruinen des Denkens, Denken in Ruinen
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996). In his Introduction, "Die Moderne als
Ruine," Bolz argues that ruin is a special Gestalt of "creative destructivity" (pp.
8-9). Michael Rutschky, "Panzerhaut der DDR: Die Ruinierung der Beriiner
Mauer," writes on the destruction of the Berlin Wall with fascinating photos of
the process. Gérard Raulet, "Die Ruinen im ästhetischen Diskurs der Mod-
erne," reviews varieties of the aesthetics of ruins. Jochen Hörisch, "Der Ruin/
Die Ruine": the ruin (mase, no plural) of something is abstract and distinct
from a ruin or ruins (fem., with plural), which are the concrete remains of a
building or other entity.
A full-scale reflection on decay is Midas Dekkers, The Way of All Flesh:
The Romance of Ruins, trans, from Dutch by Sherry Marx-Macdonald (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000 [orig. pub. 1997]). The London edition,
published by The Harville Press, 2000, is subtitled A Celebration of Decay. Not
a pleasant book. "Ruins are time on hold" (p. 32). On sand castles, see pp.
35-36. Valuable insight about ruins as ecosystems (p. 40). On the odor of ruins,
see pp. A5ff. Dekkers proposes "a Ruins List of new buildings earmarked for
ruin" (p. 57).
A classic contribution is Denis Diderot in his "Salons," in Œuvres esthé-
tiques, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, "Classiques Gamier,"
1959), section on Hubert Robert. In the Salon de 1767, pp. 637-649, while os-
tensibly describing and judging the ruin-paintings of Robert, Diderot offers
"the poetics of mins" that underlies our experience as viewers of ruin-art, and
possibly as visitors to ruins, and which should instruct the artists of this genre.
The "gentle melancholy" of ruin-enjoyment turns us back on ourselves (p.
641). (From French): "Everything becomes annihilated, everything perishes,
everything passes away" (p. 644). Ruins instruct us to resign ourselves to the
same fate, by offering "a deserted, solitary, and vast asylum." Diderot is drawn
to enter the paintings to savor the reflective solitude. Robert, however, usually
ruins the solitude for him with too many human figures.
With exuberant imagination, Florence M. Hetzler, "the Ruins Lady," did
much to stimulate interest in ruins among professional aestheticians. Her study,
"Causality: Ruin Time and Ruins," Leonardo, 21:1 (1988), pp. 51-55, insists
on nature working over time as the maker of the special work of art which is
the ruin. Ruin-time engenders ruin-beauty. See also Hetzler, "The Aesthetics of
Ruins: A New Category of Being," Journal of Aesthetic Education, 16:2
(Summer 1982), pp. 105-108.
Three bright contributions by aestheticians are: (1) Donald Crawford,
"Nature and Art: Some Dialectical Relationships," Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism, 42:1 (Fall 1983), pp. 49-58, sect. 2 on ruins, pp. 52-55. Ruin as
"aesthetically unintended" (p. 52). The ruin "hangs suspended, in a state of be-
coming . . . , in transition between the artifactual and the natural" (p. 53). Ruin
as dialectical product, looking backward to what was, yet present and headed
for decay. (2) Christopher Perricone, "Ruins and the Sublime," Diálogos, 50
(1987), pp. 39-47. The ruin is sublime due to its formlessness. (3) Guy Sircello,
"Beauty in Shards and Fragments," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
48:1 (Winter 1990), pp. 21-35. The first few pages are a promising critique of
the holistic theories of beauty that have been traditional in Western aesthetics.
Sircello calls for "an archaeological model of beauty" as a Great Dig.
A technical application of Husserlian phenomenology to the pleasure we
take in ruined activities is available in Linda E. Patrik, "The Aesthetic Experi-
ence of Ruins," Husserl Studies, 3 (1986), pp. 31-55.
Autobibliograpby. My previous studies include: (1) "Tbe Aesthetics of
Ruins," Bucknell Review, 18:3 (Winter 1970), pp. 89-102, with pen-and-ink
drawings of Scottish ruins. An outline for the theory developed by this book.
(For application of that outline to literary study, see Paul Witherington, "News
and Ideas," College English, 33:2 [November 1971], pp. 255-256.) (2)
"Experiencing Aesthetically, Aesthetic Experience, and Experience in Aesthet-
ics," in Possibility of the Aesthetic Experience, ed. Michael H. Mitias
(Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), pp. 61-68. Case studies of decay and ruin
in Philadelphia and Yosemite National Park, USA. (3) "Aesthetic Qualities in
the Experience of the Ruin," in Aesthetic Quality and Aesthetic Experience, ed.
Mitias (Amsterdam: Rodopi and Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,
"Elementa Series," 1988), pp. 165-176. A summary of the moments in experi-
encing ruin (developed in Chapter Seven, above). (4) "Aesthetics in Hiroshima:
The Architecture of Remembrance," in Philosophy and Architecture, ed. Mitias
(Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, "Value Inquiry Book Series," 1994), pp.
221-234, with pen-and ink drawings.
See also works by Paul Zucker, in Section 2, "Art History," below, and
the special issue of Rivista di estética, in Section 18, "Philosophy," below.
2. Art History
Writings in the history of art on ruins have been so extensive, well-researched,

and attractively illustrated that often "the aesthetics of ruins" has meant the
scholarly treatment of ruins within the visual arts. That treatment is usually
guided by an historical method that aspires to science. Though art history does
not take the ruin per se as center of study, it contributes to the aesthetics of ru-
ins by documenting the variety of taste for ruins, articulating the insights of vis-
ual artists into ruins, and whetting our appetite for direct experience of ruins.
The field offers helpful surveys of national traditions, comparative studies of
of artists, thematic exhibition catalogues, and monographs on ruin-artists (see

Section 3, below).
For an excellent introduction to historical world-views underlying the ap-
proach to mins by painters, see Hans Vogel, Die Ruine in der Darstellung der
abendländischen Kunst (Kassel: Karl Winter Verlag, 1948). Though Europe is
in the ruins of World War II, we may live with the beauty of ruins, not just
despite them (p. 3). Ruins now have existential meaning for Europeans as sym-
bol of our threatened humanity (pp. 3, 10). Literary texts accompany the illus-
trations. Vogel mentions Biblical mins: the fall of Babylon, Sodom, Jericho,
Temple of Jemsalem, and the Philistines' Temple in Gaza. Classical mins are
the fall of Troy and Carthage. To these lists, we may add the biggest Biblical
ruination, the Deluge, and the biggest classical mystery, the loss of Atlantis.
The objective of Paul Zucker's thoughtful Fascination of Decay: Ruins;
Relic-Symbol-Ornament (Ridgewood N.J.: The Gregg Press, 1968) is "to ana-
lyze the aesthetics of ruins and to discover the reason for their fascination" (p.
2). Illustrations with commentary. But Zucker's challenging introduction, enti-
tled, "Why Ruins?", does not answer its question. Zucker's lively history of art
analyzes artistic treatments of ruins that make them tragic, fearsome, macabre,
emotive, spectacular, sinister, natural, poetic, charming, allegorical, moral, dec-
orative, dramatic, festive, terrifying, symbolic, amusing, picturesque, fantastic,
ambiguous, bewitching, or chaotic.
Zucker cautions: "in our haste to destroy and rebuild we have lost the
awareness of the patient, deliberate, and often beautiful wearing away of stone
by time—tbe fascination of decay" (p. 249). Nature may use "elements of ar-
chitecture as objects" (p. 5). Ruined architecture may become abstract sculp-
ture, enjoyable for itself without reference to any imagined original (p. 7).
Good study of ruins in stage design (pp. 102-115). Zucker quotes an unidenti-
fied commentator: "Artificial ruins must be seen to be disbelieved" (p. 162).
See also Zucker, "Ruins: An Aesthetic Hybrid," Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 20:2 (Winter 1961), pp. 119-130.
A useful and charming book on graphic art in Europe is Jeannot Simmen,
Ruinen-Faszination in der Graphik vom 16. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart
(Dortmund: Harenberg, "Die bibliophilen Taschenbücher," 1980). The 116 il-
lustrations are accompanied by commentaries that analyze features in the work
or place the artists art-historically. Revealing use of thematic groupings, such
as the Colosseum, the Tower of Babel, war-torn Berlin, and garden mins. Ver-
gänglichkeitspathos (p. 14).
A masterpiece of historical scholarship that painstakingly traces the his-
tory of the ruin as it functions in garden art, landscape painting, and architec-
ture, moving back and forth between these three fields, is Günter Hartmann,
Die Ruine im Landschaftsgarten: Ihre Bedeutung für den frühen Historismus
und die Landschaftsmalerie der Romantik (Worms, Germany: Werner'sehe
Verlagsgesellschaft, "Grüne Reihe, Quellen und Forschungen zur Garten-

kunst," 1981). Extraordinarily rich investigation of detail in painting, building
practice, and garden theory and design. With 148 illustrations. Extensive bibli-
ography. A beautifully produced book.
Useful exhibition catalogue: Brigitte Buberl, Roma Antica: Römische Ru-
inen in der italienischen Kunst des 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hirmer Verlag,
1994). A massive book on portrayal of the city of Rome, beautifully illustrated,
extensive commentaries on catalogue entries, and scholarly chapters on ruins
and survival, memory, the picturesque, the sublime, and religion.
Exhibition catalogue: Zwischen Phantasie und Wirklichkeit: Römische
Ruinen in Zeichnungen des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts aus Beständen der Stiftung
Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabem, 1988).
Historical introduction by Dirk Syndram to the artistic "Magic of Ruins." The
commentary, chiefly by Syndram, on the 109 illustrations, is extensive.
An older study of ruin-painting still with merit and with notable black-
and-white illustrations is Leandro Ozzola, "Le Rovine romane nella pittura del
xvii e xviii secólo," L'Arte, 16:1 (1913), pp. 1-17; 16:2 (1913), pp. 112-130.
A monumental study of the forging of a cultural patrimony in Italy that
leads to the Renaissance is Lucilla De Lachanal, Spolia: Uso e reimpiego
dell'antico dal III al XIV secólo (Milan: Langanesi & C , "Biblioteca di arche-
ologia," 1995).
A grand presentation of the pedagogical exercises of French art students
sent to Rome and Athens is the exhibition catalogue, Paris-Rome-Athènes: Le
Voyage en Grèce des architectes français aux xix^ et xc« siècles (Paris: École
nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 3rd ed., 1986 [orig. pub. 1982]). Graphie
representation of great ruins and of their imagined reconstruction. A similar ex-
hibition catalogue is Roma Antiqua: Envois des architectes français (1788-
1924): Forum, Colisée, Palatin (no city: Académie de France à Rome, École
française de Rome, & École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1985).
For a superb scholarly study of the stages applied to sculpture-ruins as
adaptation, collectionism, and museumification, see Salvatore Settis, "Des ru-
ines au musée: La Destinée de la sculpture classique," Annales Économies, So-
ciétés, Civilisations, 48:6 (November-December 1993), pp. 1347-1380.
A forceful account of the regrettable destruction and ruination of works of
art is Robert Adams, The Lost Museum: Glimpses of Vanished Originals (New
York: The Viking Press, "A Studio Book," 1980). With 215 illustrations. While
Adams does not make a case for appreciation of ruined visual works, he re-
counts how ruination gives us distorted views of art history.
A descriptive work, with historical background, offering a good account
of development of taste for ruins in England, is Michael Felmingham and Rig-
by Graham, Ruins: A Personal Anthology (London: Country Life, 1972). Prince
Pückler-Muskau, of a visit to Kenilworth Park, England, 1826: "The fancy de-
lights in guessing the past of what remains;..." (p. 28). Good chapter on Goth-
ic ruin: "A rebirth and revival of the old ruins." Good chapter on twentieth-
century English war-artists, such as Graham Sutherland. Good work on mun-
dane ruins of canals, rail yards, factories, and mines, provoking the reader to
fresh experience of the world. Good book!
For an entertaining and enlightening study of the conceptual, visual, and
linguistic relationships that were made between ruins and runes, especially in
Britain, see Barbara Maria Stafford, "'Illiterate Monuments': The Ruin as Dia-
lect or Broken Classic," the inaugural essay in The Age of Johnson, 1 (1987),
pp. 1-34. Stafford has a gift for linking art history, cultural history, and intel-
lectual history, and a flair for finding extraordinary illustrations.
A sobering book for the consideration of aesthetics is Hitler's State Archi-
tecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity by Alex Scobie (University Park,
Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, "College Art Association Mono-
graphs on the Fine Arts," 1990). Chapter 4, "Albert Speer's Theory of Ruin
Value": to build great works of durable construction that future generations
would admire as the Third Reich's monuments, even when becoming ruins (pp.
93-96). On the classical itinerary of Adolf Hitler's state visit to Rome in 1938,
see pp. 23-26.
On Hitler and Speer, see also the following two works. (1) Johanne La-
moureux, "La Théorie des mines d'Albert Speer ou l'architecture 'futuriste' se-
lon Hitler," RACAR: Revue d'Art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review, 18:1-2
(1991), pp. 57-63. Summary in English. Hitler and Speer thought of monumen-
tal ruins, not of the ordinary ruins they would cause throughout Europe. Their
grandiose theory is driven by "un véritable impératif ruiniste" (p. 63). (2) An-
gela Schönberger, "Die Staatsbauten des Tausendjährigen Reiches als vorpro-
grammierte Ruinen? Zu Albert Speers Ruinenwerttheorie," Idea: Jahrbuch der
Hamburger Kunsthalle, 6 (1987), pp. 97-107. The irony of history is that the
supposed epoch-lasting structures would so soon be reduced to indistinguish-
able rubble (p. 106).
A key work in terms of the Ruining Eye is Kenneth Clark, 100 Details
from Pictures in the National Gallery (London: The National Gallery, 1990
[orig. pub. 1938]). Clark chooses the details to assist our appreciation of the
originals. Tantalizingly brief yet trenchant comments on style and art history.
The illustrations are paired, not with their originals, but with details from other
paintings with similar content. Whereas tbe original edition relied on black-
and-white photography, this handsome second edition uses color for the details
and black-and-white for miniaturized originals banished to the index. The read-
er might thereby experience more aesthetic appreciation of the details as works
of art than of the originals.
See also works by Margaret M. McGowan, and Francis Haskell and
Nicholas Penny, in Section 5, "History of Culture," below.
3. Individual Artists
Visual artists have celebrated ruins, sometimes in the spirit of archaeological

description, often in terms of imaginative freedom. The veduta was a view of
the ruin in a landscape. The capriccio was a gathering together of dispersed ru-
ins within one frame. Whatever their genre, such visual works may be enjoyed
for their own merits. They also may also direct our vision in valuable ways to
ruins themselves. Insights for the aesthetics of ruins and enjoyment of artistic
representation of ruins are available in many picture books and scholarly mono-
graphs on the ruin-artists, including Antonio Canaletto (1697-1768), Frederick
Catherwood (1799-1854), Thomas Cole (1801-1848), Caspar David Friedrich
(1774-1840), Francesco Guardi (1712-1793), Claude Lorraine (1600-1682),
AUessandro Magnasco (1667-1749), Monsü Desiderio (pseudonym of Didier
Barra, ca. 1590-ca. 1652), Giovanni (Gian) Paolo Panini (Pannini) (ca. 1692-
1765), Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), Hubert Robert (1733-1808),
David Roberts (1796-1864), Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), and J. M. W. Turner
(1775-1851). A handful of recommended titles follows.
On Canaletto: William L. Barcham, The Imaginary View Scenes of Anto-
nio Canaletto (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., "Outstanding Dissertations
in the Fine Arts," 1977). A highly readable study of Canaletto's art in the con-
text of ruin-painting in Italy, with perceptive references to the many illustra-
tions. Barcham identifies features of the "ruin tradition" in art: loneliness, loss,
wonder, romance, visual reconstruction. "For the first time, ruin painting fell
into the hands of a first-rate painter. It was no longer an interesting but minor
genre. With Canaletto, it became a major landscape statement" (p. 116).
On Monsù Desiderio: Michel Onfray, Métaphysique des ruines: La Pein-
ture de Monsù Desiderio (Bordeaux: Mollat, 1995). A rare philosophie exami-
nation of a ruin-painter.
On Piranesi: Bruno Reudenbach, G. B. Piranesi: Architektur als Bild: Der
Wandel in der Architekturauffassung des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Munich:
Prestel-Veriag, 1979). Excellent illustrations, excellent bibliography. Also see
the thorough book by Norbert Miller, Archdologie des Traums: Versuch über
Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1978).
On Robert: Hubert Burda, Die Ruine in den Bildern Hubert Roberts
(Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1967). A comprehensive scholarly work. An-
dré Corboz, Peinture militante et architecture révolutionnaire: A propos du
thème du tunnel chez Hubert Robert (Basel: Birkhäuser Vedag, "Schriftenreihe
des Instituts für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur an der Eidegenöss-
ischen Technischen Hochschule Zürich," 1978). Especially good on Robert's
ruin-painting as insisting upon the power of destruction ("la destruction
positive") and as taking part in the revolutionary vision of future ruins (pp.
44-53). On Robert, see also Diderot in Section 1, "Aesthetic Theory," above.
4. Literary History
Ruin has been studied by scholars as a central theme in Italian, French, English,
and German literature. At times, a rage for ruin permeated literary taste. That
taste had general cultural and even political implications.
A sensitive study of Italian poetry, well-written and carefully developed,
is Renzo Negri, Gusto e poesia delle rovine in Italia fra il Sette e I'Ottocento
(Milan: Casa Editrice Ceschina, 1965). (From Italian): "Ruins are always ready
as material for poetry. . . . A perennial category of the spirit. . . . as symbol of
the irremediable precariousness of every human achievement" (p. 5). European
culture has a "misteriosa affinità" for creative life-forces, but when modem in-
dustrial ruins lose their "funzionalità," they alienate us (p. 8). Painting, gardens,
and theatrical settings are dimensions of the passion for ruins (p. 43). Negri
shows how Italian thought and sensibility welcomed the aesthetics of the sub-
lime found in ruins (pp. 55-75). In Italian poetry, "landscape interiorizes itself
(p. 81). On Lisbon Earthquake, pp. 87-98. On destruction of Jerusalem, pp.
98-100. Notable quotations (from Italian) by: (1) E. Silva, late 1700s, "Nature
always reclaims with a species of triumph the possession of the site which ar-
chitecture had stolen from her" (pp. 4 7 ^ 8 ) . (2) V. Gioberti, "ruins are like the
fossils of nations and of extinct civilizations" (p. 73). The history culminates in
Giacomo Leopardi, a poet of ruins, who brings the themes and attitudes to ma-
turity (pp. 211-236). Excellent bibliographical essay, pp. 239-246.
A well-developed study of political and social attitudes in Italy toward
ruin is Carolyn Springer, The Marble Wilderness: Ruins and Representation in
Italian Romanticism, 1775-1850 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press, 1987). "It is my contention that religious and political pressures specific
to Italy between 1775 and 1850 generated a distinctly political iconography of
ruins in Italian literature" (p. 2). Springer explores archaeology as metaphor.
Lord Byron's Rome is for private poetic reverie, while for the Italians, the clas-
sical landscapes publicly "serve alternately as signs of the restored power of the
papacy and of the emerging force of nationalist movement" (p. 6). The volume
contains an abundance of Italian poetry and graphic art. Useful chronology.
The title is drawn from Byron.
Fine studies have been edited by Vincenzo De Caprio as Poesia e poética
delle rovine di Roma: Momenti e problemi (Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Studi
Romani, "Quaderni di Studi Romani," 1987). Armando Guisci's eloquent
chapter, "Roma come sistema delle rovine," pp. 11-19, contends that (from
Italian): "Rome is a living system of ruins" (p. 12). De Caprio's chapter, "'Sub
tanta diruta mole': II Fascino delle rovine di Roma nel quattro e Cinquecento,"
pp. 23-52, is a good study of the Renaissance spirit, expressed in poetry, in re-
sponse to the grandeur of Roman ruins. See also Liana Cellerino, '"Or tutto
intorno involve': Rovina e sublime morale nel settecento," pp. 97-111.
An outstanding study of the wealth of French literary efforts devoted to

min is Ingrid G. Daemmrich, "The Ruins Motif as Artistic Device in French
Literature," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 30:4 (Summer 1972), pp.
449-457; 31:1 (Fall 1972), pp. 31-41. Successive movements take mins as (1)
metaphor for the human condition, (2) aesthetic pleasure of the picturesque,
and (3) stmctural device in literary creation.
A magisterial effort of scholarship, and a treasury of French (and Latin)
source material, is Roland Mortier, La Poétique des ruines en France: Ses
origines, ses variations, de la Renaissance à Victor Hugo (Geneva: Librairie
Droz, "Histoire des Idées et Critique Littéraire," 1974). The ruin-texts Mortier
studies testify to "la transformation de la sensibilité française" over the centu-
ries (p. 12). The literature expresses cultural values. Major treatments of
Joachim Du Bellay, Diderot, Constantin-François Volney, François-René de
Chateaubriand, and Victor Hugo. With 32 illustrations. No bibliography.
A "rhetoric of ruin" contributed to "creation of British nationalism" ar-
gues Anne Janowitz, England's Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Land-
scape (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 3. Janowitz studies "the
convergence of nationalism and the ruin motif in an ideological light (pp.
11-12). She differentiates min traditions of topographical poetry, antiquarian-
ism, and incompletion (pp. 17-18). Excellent studies of William Wordsworth
and William Blake.
A work that drew blood is Reinhard Haferkorn, Gotik und Ruine in der
englischen Dichtung des Achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Verlag von Bern-
hard Tauchnitz, "Leipziger Beiträge zur englischen Philologie," 1924). Organ-
ized by English poets. Good selection of passages to discuss. Excellent chapter
of summary of the eighteenth-century movement (pp. 187-201). This book
crumbled into pieces in my hands, as I was reading its browned pages in the Li-
brary of Congress. Turning to dust, the words of Haferkorn made me sneeze so
violently that my nose started to bleed. I had to go home to recover.
For a thoughtful, complex, yet fragmentary work on min. Romanticism,
poetry, and poetics, see Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of
Ruin: Wordworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981). Loaded with quotations. See my review in
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 40:2 (Winter 1981), pp. 219-220.
An excellent study, noteworthy for humane grasp of its themes, is Laur-
ence Goldstein, Ruins and Empire: The Evolution of a Theme in Augustan and
Romantic Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977). Gold-
stein highlights "ruinological texts," "min sentiment," "ruin-drama" (pp. 4, 8).
Interesting studies in culture, comparative literature, and biography have
been edited by Annabel Patterson as Roman Images: Selected Papers from the
English Institute, 1982 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
Highlights: Margaret W. Ferguson, "'The Afflatus of Ruin': Meditations on
Rome by Du Bellay, Spenser, and Stevens," pp. 23-50. The title is drawn from
Wallace Stevens. Patricia B. Craddock, "Edward Gibbon and the 'Ruins of the
Capitol,'" pp. 63-82. William L. Vance, "The Colosseum: American Uses of
an Imperial Image," pp. 105-140. Elizabeth Block, "The Rome of Henry
James," pp. 141-162.
Several forms of poetic fragments are distinguished by Marjorie Levin-
son, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill, N.C.:
The University of North Carolina Press, 1986).
For admirable thoroughness, subtle interpretations, and fresh conclusions
in the vast field of German literature, see Hermann Bühlbäcker, Konstruktive
Zerstörungen: Ruinendarstellungen in der Literatur zwischen 1774 und 1832
(Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 1999). On Ruinenmotiv and Ruinenmetaphorik; on
humanity, world, nation, and history as ruins; and then on Ruinendarstellungen
in the literary masters. Extensive bibliography.
A welcome survey of the literature and the field of Romantic ruin is Gra-
zyna Krolikiewicz, Terytorium Ruin: Ruina Jako Obraz i Temat Romantyczny
(Krakow: Universitas, "Seria Select," 1993). In Polish.
See also McGowan in Section 5, "History of Culture," below.
5. History of Culture
Ruins have been studied as touchstones of cultural history. How they are inter-
preted at one time or another reveals a people's deeply shared values. A nation-
al identity may be built upon ruins, such that a politics of ruins accompanies an
aesthetics of ruins. As symbols, ruins may shape a culture, and be shaped by it.
An enjoyable combination of history, culture, and the art history of
"Graecomania" is Fani-Mada Tsigakou, The Rediscovery of Greece: Travellers
and Painters of the Romantic Era (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Caratzas Brothers,
Publishers, 1981). Tsigakou's theme is that the rediscovery of the remains of
ancient Greece contributed to awakening modem Greece: from ruin to recov-
ery. With 173 annotated illustrations. A wealth of passages cited. Section on
accounts of the regions of Greece. "[I]t was generally thought that the visitor's
physical presence at an actual site would stimulate almost miraculously a re-
vival of its ancient ethos. The concept of the 'spirit of place' . . ." (p. 27). "The
contrast between Greek and Turk was seen equally as the struggle between
Christianity and the Infidel, between Civilization and Barbarism, between Lib-
erty and Oppression" (p. 55).
A similar volume on Egypt is Peter A. Clayton, The Rediscovery of Anci-
ent Egypt: Artists and Travellers in the 19th Century (New York: Thames and
Hudson, 1982).
For a history of the emergence of a classical consciousness, see Roberto
Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Basil Black-
well, 2nd ed., 1988 [orig. pub. 1969]), especially chapter 5, "The Ruins of
Rome and the Humanists."
An excellent contribution to the history of taste, with scholarship that is a
delight to read, is Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique:
The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2nd [corrected] printing, 1982). The book "is concerned with the
creation, the diffusion and the eventual dissolution of a 'canon' of universally
admired antique statues" (p. 67). Many of the statues were broken. The histori-
cal text is complemented by 95 illustrated case studies.
A magnificent history of French culture as successive destructions of cul-
tural treasures, including churches, castles, statues, and palaces, is Louis Réau,
Les Monuments détruits de l'art français: Histoire du vandalisme (no city: Li-
brairie Hachette, "Bibliothèque des Guides Bleus," 1959), 2 vols. Useful intro-
duction on the psychology of vandalism. Section on Bastille, vol. 1, pp.
209-214. In vol. 2, a chapter on "Le Vandalisme restaurateur," caused by the
architects for the service of historical monuments (from French), "who rebuilt
in their own fashion buildings placed under their care" (p. 105). Another chapt-
er on "Le Vandalisme administratif." Appendix contains a useful directory that
chronicles destroyed or mutilated works, a topographical directory, a directory
of categories of destruction, and a blacklist of vandals, which includes Baron
Haussmann and Eugène VioUet-le-Duc.
For the French connection to Rome, see Margaret M. McGowan, The
Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance Erance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univers-
ity Press, 2000). Valuable comprehensive study of the development of the vis-
ual and literary traditions. On "the Creative Power of Ruins," see chapter 5.
Outstanding treatments of Du Bellay and Julius Caesar. Well-illustrated. Exten-
sive bibliography. Includes 72 pp. of discussion notes.
A handy illustrated volume on the changing attitudes toward the ancient
city of Rome, with a valuable section of documentary sources, is Claude Moat-
ti, À la recherche de la Rome antique (no city: Découvertes Gallimard,
"Archéologie," 1989). Other volumes in this admirable series include Azedine
Beschaouch, La Légende de Carthage (1993); Jean Vercoutter, À la recherche
de l'Egypte oubliée (1989); and Alexandre Farnoux, Cnossos: L'Archéologie
d'un rêve (1993).
6. Archaeology
Archaeological literature bas grown up about ruins. As a branch of writing, it

initially aimed at involving the general reader in the adventure of discovery and
then in the revivification by imagination of a lost world. The discovery, excava-
tion, and interpretation of ruins often enters the pages of archaeology with a
feeling for the aesthetic. Nowadays, archaeology prides itself on being a sei-
ence, and its literature, aimed at specialists, is usually technical. But even ques-
tions about the technical treatment, say, of stabilizing or restoring walls, are
shot through with value considerations. Caution: in their efforts at recovery of
cultures of the past, archaeologists exercise later cultural preconceptions.
A great book, in format and content, that displays the glory of discovery is
Edward Bacon, ed.. The Great Archaeologists (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1976): "The modem world's discovery of ancient civilisations as originally re-
ported in the pages of The Illustrated London News from 1842 to the present
day." This exceedingly rich volume shows what was going on in archaeology at
any one time. Text and illustration gave popular access to the thrills of archaeo-
logical discovery, of which Howard Carter's opening of Tutankhamun's tomb
in 1922 is the acme.
A similar treasure book is Brian M. Fagan, ed.. Eyewitness to Discovery:
First-Person Accounts of More than Fifty of the World's Greatest Archaeologi-
cal Discoveries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). The excitement of
eureka-experience.
In an elegant essay, a contribution to the "rationale of mins," Ruins: Their
Preservation and Display (London: British Museum Publications Limited, "A
Colonnade Book," 1981), M. W. Thompson argues for preservation and display
in the interest of making the ruin intelligible to the visitor. He speaks of "a
body of specialists in ruins" (p. 9), and he cautions, "So long as there are stone
buildings there will be ruins,..." (p. 13).
An excellent guidebook to scientific and scholarly procedures is Philip
Barker, Techniques of Archaeological Excavation (New York: Universe Books,
2nd ed., 1983). See especially "The Life History of a Post-Hole," pp. 87-91.
Computer reconstructions count as "virtual archaeology," according to
Maurizio Forte and Alberto Siliotti, eds.. Virtual Archaeology: Re-Creating An-
cient Worlds (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1997), trans, from
Italian by Judith Toms and Robin Skeates. With 660 illustrations in color. Out-
standing for envisioning, interpreting, and projecting the three-dimensional
wholeness of sites now in ruins.
An exercise in imagination by outfitting celebrated mins with overlay ver-
sions of their original glory is exemplified by Stefania and Dominic Perring,
Then & Now (Edison, N.J.: Chartwell Books, "A Quarto Book," 1999 [orig.
pub. 1991]). In most cases, the photographs of the mins are much more impres-
sive than the imagined originals. The colored features presumed for the origi-
nals appear incongruous to the monotone ruins. In my copy of the book, the
original streets of Pompeii overlay the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, England.
An admirable treatment of the wealth of ruins in The Netherlands is M. J.
Kuipers-Verbuijs, et al, Ruines in Nederland, ed. A. G. Schulte (Zwolle:
Waanders Uitgevers, "Rijksdienst voor de Monumentenzorg," 1997). Chapters
on ruins in art, literature, gardening, reconstmction, restoration, and preserva-
tion. Detailed directory of sites. Photographs of ruins, illustrations of artworks,

plans, and maps. Every country in Europe should follow this model!
For a comprehensive treatment of considerations related to ruins, see Rog-
er Summers, Ancient Ruins and Vanished Civilisations of Southern Africa
(Cape Town: T. V. Bulpin, 1971). Ruin is "something built by human hands
which has been so utterly destroyed that it can never again be restored to its
original function" (p. xiii). Excellent documented description of the ruins is fol-
lowed by assessment of travelers' tales, discussion of building types, dating, or-
igin and original use, and work to be done in the future. Summers has a good
sense for the cultural and social context of ruins. "One of the major fascinations
of ruins is that they encourage the asking of questions" (p. 43). Valuable range
of old photographs and recent color studies.
On the controversy concerning the Great Zimbabwe, see J. Theodore
Bent, The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries
Press, "The Black Heritage Library Collection," 1971, facsimile of London ed.
of 1892). "As a feature in the country they [the Great Zimbabwe ruins] are
most remarkable—ancient, massive, mysterious, standing out in startling con-
trast to the primitive huts of the barbarians who dwell around them and the wil-
derness of nature" (p. 87). Bent believes that the Phoenicians built the ancient
structures. R. Gayre of Gayre, The Origin of the Zimbabwean Civilisation
(Salisbury, Rhodesia: Galaxie Press, 1972), asserts, "the evidence for the Bantu
as the architects and builders of the Zimbabwean complex is non-existent" (p.
45). Gayre's huge scholarly work gives the credit for the Zimbabwean ruins
and civilization to "Judaized Arabs" from Saba, Arabia (p. 134). In the book's
photographs of ruins where people are on the site, they usually appear of Cau-
casian, white, European, Anglo, Colonial origin.
On the other side of the Great Zimbabwe controversy, see G(ertrude) Ca-
ton Thompson, The Zimbabwe Culture: Ruins and Reactions (London: Frank
Cass & Co., Ltd., "Cass Library of African Studies: African Prehistory," 2nd
ed., 1971 [orig. pub. 1931]), a highly technical archaeological study. "I am as
cofident [sic] as ever that the great buildings as well as the less ones, are Afri-
can in conception and execution, .. ." (p. 31). P. S. Garlake, The Ruins of Zim-
babwe (Lusaka, Zambia: Neczam, "Haz Pamphlets," 1974), pp. 3 9 ^ 1 , reviews
the racist attitudes that the ruins could not have originated indigenously. Gar-
lake argues for African credit: "the Ruins can be seen clearly as a proud and in-
tegral part of the Shona past." The pamphlet is a synopsis of Garlake, Great
Zimbabwe (no city: Thames and Hudson, "New Aspects of Antiquity," 1973).
A monumental early work that combines features that were to become de-
veloped as separate genres is David Le Roy, Les Ruines des plus beaux monu-
ments de la Grèce, considérées du côté de l'histoire et du côté de l'architecture
(Paris: Louis-François Delatour, 2nd ed., 1770 [orig. pub. 1758]), 2 vols. Mag-
nificent folio, mixing personal narration, adventures of travel, archaeology, cit-
ation of historical sources, illustrations of ruins and their imagined reconstmc-

tion, essays on technical questions, on the history of styles, and on the views of
the mins. Le Roy distinguishes his work from James Stuart, the English author
(1762), because Le Roy's illustrations show the grandeur and picturesqueness
of the ruins and the activity of local people (vol. 1, p. vi).
A fine book on ruins in South America is C. J. McNaspy, S.J., Lost Cities
of Paraguay: Art and Architecture of the Jesuit Reductions, 1607-1767
(Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1982). The text is illustrated with a good
eye to art history. The black-and-white photos of ruins by J. M. Blanch, S.J.,
are works of beauty.
Comprehensive archaeological survey of Amerindian ruins, beautifully il-
lustrated: William M. Ferguson and Arthur H. Rohn, Anasazi Ruins of the
Southwest in Color (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1987).
For a patient and genial exploration of theories accounting for many mys-
terious structures in Britain, including Stonehenge, see Richard Muir, Riddles
in the British Landscape (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981). The overall im-
pression of Muir's well-illustrated work is that Britain is a land of remains.
See also the works by Moatti, Beschaouch, Vercoutter, and Farnoux in
Section 5, "History of Culture," above.
7. Individual Ruins
Every celebrated ruin is the subject of specialized studies, guidebooks, picture

books, and poetry or fiction. In such works, we may find the history of aesthet-
ic response to the ruin, which is instructive in suggesting ways we might ex-
perience the ruin. The illustrations may give pleasure and instmction. The indi-
vidual min may serve as imaginative center for cultural identity. Listed by ruin
as identified by book title.
Stonehenge Complete by Christopher Chippindale (Ithaca, N.Y.: Comell
University Press, 1983). "Everything important, interesting or odd that has been
written or painted, discovered or imagined, about the most extraordinary anci-
ent building in the world." History of Stonehenge as puzzle. Rich in illustra-
tions: artistic, photographic, and scientific. Excellent assessment of the astro-
nomical claims for Stonehenge (ch. 14). Chippindale's wry conclusion: "The
overwhelming impression I have of the builders of Stonehenge is their sheer
perverseness" (p. 273).
Valley of the Golden Mummies by Zahi Hawass (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2000). Beautifully illustrated volume presented as
first-person narrative of archaeological discovery and activity at Bahariya Oasis
and its region by the leading light of Egyptian Archaeology. Hawass recounts
harrowing tale of being pursued by the phantoms of mummies (pp. 95-97). The
book contains many photographs of its author, who has become a celebrity.
The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? (London: Verso,

2nd ed., 1997 [orig. pub. 1987]) is answered in the affirmative by Christopher
Hitchens, as "the opportunity to perform a noble and beautiful act" (p. ix).
Hitchens is sensitive to the symbolic, moral, and aesthetic questions at stake.
Pertinent poetry and Parliamentary debates are reproduced, and persuasive es-
says are contributed to this short book by Robert Browning and Graham Binns.
For dramatization of the controversial subject of "Elginism," see the video.
Lord Elgin and Some Stones of No Value (London: Channel Four TV, 1985),
with Hugh Grant and Melina Mercouri. The deprecating words in the title are
those of Lord Elgin.
Paestum: Past & Present by Emanuele Greco (Rome: Vision S.r.l., 1999),
trans, from Italian by A. Potter. Overlays.
Pompeii, AD 79: The Treasure of Rediscovery by Richard Brilliant (New
York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. Publishers, "An Official Publication of The
American Museum of Natural History," 1979). This brilliant book is a magnifi-
cent bimillenary volume, splendidly illustrated (244 pictures). Cultural history
of changing taste, archaeological practice, and social attitude toward ruins. The
great stages in dealing with Pompeii are: Disaster, Discovery, Exploitation,
Classification, Rediscovery. In the overlay series, Pompeii: Monuments Past
and Present by A. De Franciscis, revised by I. Bragantini (Rome: Vision S.r.l.,
1995). Excellent guided description of the original works. On Pompeii, see
also, below, works by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Claude Aziza, under Section
9, "Imaginative Literature," and by Wilhelmina F. Jashemski, under Section 14,
"History of Gardens."
// Colosseo: Funzione simbólica, storica, urbana by Michela Di Maceo
(Rome: Bulzoni Editore, "Biblioteca di storia dell'arte," 1971). Perceptive ac-
count of the successive interpretations and uses of the Colosseum. Abundant
documentation and illustration.
Masada: Herod's Fortress and the Zealots' Last Stand by Yigael Yadin,
trans, from Hebrew by Moshe Pearlmen (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1966). The archaeologists found remains of the defenders, and the excavations
support the account of Josephus. The report on the excavation, by Yadin, a
leading Israeli archaeologist and former Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli
Defence Forces and Deputy Prime Minister, is complemented by material on
visitors to Masada. But Shaye J. D. Cohen, "Masada: Literary Tradition, Ar-
chaeological Remains, and the Credibility of Josephus," Journal of Jewish
Studies, 33:1-2 (Spring-Autumn, 1982), pp. 385^05, makes a persuasive case
that the archaeological evidence does not support Josephus. Instead, argues Co-
hen, Josephus invented the Masada myth. Prominent Israelis, including Yigael
Yadin, invented the myth, according to Nachman Ben-Yehuda, in Sacrificing
Truth: Archaeology and the Myth of Masada (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity
Books, 2002). In his devastating critique of the mythmaking of nationalistic
archaeology, Ben-Yehuda makes detailed use of the transcripts of the daily dis-
cussion sessions at the site that were recorded by Yadin.
Machu Picchu (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, "A Bulfinch Book,''
2001). Photographs by Barry Brukoff. Poetry ("Alturas de Macchu Picchu") by
Pablo Neruda. Prologue by Isabel Allende. Texts in Spanish and English trans,
by Stephen Kessler. This wonderful harmony of the arts of poetry, translation,
and photography proves that books may lead the soul to ecstasy.
The Eortifications of Cartagena de Indias: Strategy and History (Bogotá:
El Áncora Editores, 3rd ed., 1998), by Rodolfo Segovia, trans, from Spanish by
Segovia and Haroldo Calvo Stevenson, with lovely photographs by Oscar Mon-
salve. A sensitive and informed text on the monumental Colonial city in Co-
lombia that teeters on the edge of ruin. Segovia's Epilogue, "The Absent," is a
troubling account of the demolition of features of "a Wall City unparalleled in
the Americas" (p. 167).
Le Désert de Retz: A Late Eighteenth-Century Erench Eolly Garden, the
Artful Landscape of Monsieur de Monville by Diana Ketcham (Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press, rev. ed., 1994 [orig. pub. 1990]). The most celebrated
construction of a ruin, built in the eighteenth century as an inhabitable ruined
column. It subsequently fell into ruin, only to be recently restored as ruin.
See also works on the Great Zimbabwe by Bent, Gayre of Gayre, Caton
Thompson, and Garlake, in Section 6, "Archaeology," above.
8. Travel Literature
The literature devoted to travel is a well-practiced genre that for a few centuries
was the primary means of getting the experience of ruins to those seated in
armchairs. We may still read some of these books for enjoyment as high adven-
tures in exotic lands. They were often accompanied by splendid graphic works
that shaped an aesthetic attitude toward ruins. Here are my favorite examples.
John L(loyd) Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas,
and Yucatan (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1969 [orig. pub. 1841]), 2
vols. Fully illustrated by Frederick Catherwood. Gripping adventures, in mala-
rial jungles, of the explorer of forty-four cities, often unnamed, moonlit, and
mysterious. A good eye for picturesque beauty of nature, ruins, and women,
with somber reflections on the loss of the ruins to nature and neglect. Stephens
had purchased the ruins of Copan in Honduras for US $50. The sequel: Incid-
ents of Travel in Yucatan (also Dover, no date [orig. pub. 1843]), 2 vols. Of the
ruins: "It has been the fortune of the author to step between them and the entire
destruction to which they are destined; . . ." (vol. 1, preface, p. v). Both works
were best-sellers, often translated. Stephens and Catherwood have been called
"two immortals in the history of Maya studies" (Ian Graham).
Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (London: Century,
1989 [orig. pub. 1877]). Exciting adventure of the fearless traveler to the mins
along the Nile. Always drawn to the picturesque, Edwards paints the pictur-
esque in her words. " . . . I could have breakfasted, dined, supped on Temples.
My appetite for them was insatiable; and grew with what it fed upon" (p.;354).
9. Imaginative Literature
Poetry and fiction have been crucial to development of a taste for ruins. The
poet as a ruin, or among mins, is the pose of an awful lot of poetry, and a lot of
awful poetry, some of which you have had to read from my pen. While the pop-
ular literary genre dedicated to ruins is filled with cheap escapism, pretentious
sentimentality, and wild fantasizing, it has produced some fine works. Great
Western poets from the Renaissance onward, including Petrarch, Jacopo Sanna-
zaro. Du Bellay, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron, Leopardi, Wordsworth, Hugo,
Nemda, and Derek Walcott have authored ruin poems. The World Anthology of
Ruin Poetry (WARP) has yet to appear. Ruin fiction inclines toward archaeo-
logical adventures or else the futurism of science fiction. Listed here are a few
items worth special attention.
A standard textbook in French letters is Leçons françaises de littérature et
de morale, ou recueil, en prose et en vers, des plus beaux morceaux de notre
langue dans la littérature des deux derniers siècles, avec des préceptes de
genre et des modèles d'exercice (Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette et Cie., 29th.
ed., 1862 [orig. pub. 1804]), 2 vols., ed. by (F.-J.-M.) Noël and (F.-M.-J.) De la
Place. Vol. 1, p. xi (from French): "'Tis a kind of French Museum or Elysium,
where our best orators, historians, philosophers, and poets seem to recite them-
selves among themselves, . . ." Lots of citations of ruins! In vol. 1, texts
gathered under headings: 1. Narrations, 2. Tableaux, 3. Descriptions, 4. Defini-
tions, 5. Fables and Allegories, 6. Religious Ethics or Practical Philosophy, 7.
Letters, 8. Speeches and Oratorical Pieces, 9. Exodes, 10. Perorations, II. Phil-
osophic or Literary Dialogues, 12. Characters or Portraits, and Comparisons
and Parallels. Similar headings used in vol. 2 for poetry.
Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt (1812), The Com-
plete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1980), no. 174. Ecstatic verse in form of a voyage to Rome. The book-length
poem that set the Romantic taste for min. Chock-full of memorable exclama-
tions (from Canto 4): "Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!" (st. 78, p. 150).
"A ruin—yet what min!" (of the Colosseum, st. 143, p. 172). "A ruin amidst
ruins" (st. 25, p. 32). "Chaos of ruins!" st. 80, p. 151). And, redoing a proverb,
"While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand;

When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall;
And when Rome falls—the World" . .. (st. 145, p. 173).
Joachim Du Bellay, Antiquitez de Rome (orig. pub. 1558), trans, from

French by Edmund Spenser, as Ruines of Rome (1591), ed. Malcolm C. Smith
(Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, "Pegasus Paper-
books," 1994). A good edition for comparative study. Du Bellay takes us
through ruined Rome to lament its past. To the visitor who fails to find "Rome
in Rome" (no. 3), Du Bellay counsels (from French): "of Rome, Rome alone is
the monument" (no. 27).- Spencer, in his turn, must make bis way through Du
Bellay's poetry, not through Rome.
The most popular work in the ruin genre of literature is Edward Bulwer-
Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. Pub-
lishers, no date [orig. pub. 1834]). The point of view of the historical novel is
the present-day when Pompeii is in ruins. The narrator, writing a "history," thus
puts life into the ruins by directly addressing the nineteenth-century reader, re-
peatedly calling attention to the present as distant from the events portrayed. He
offers a tour of celebrated features in their ruined state and in their imaginary
reconstruction. He has reanimated the skeletons as characters in the story (p.
422). This edition offers photos of the ruins mentioned. Melodramatic storytell-
ing of love, hate, revenge, intrigue, sacrifice. Brooding over the whole imagi-
nary world is the catastrophe that we know will overwhelm. "The Plot
Thickens": bk. 3, ch. II. Characters represent lost Greece, lost Egypt, and nas-
cent Christianity, while Pompeii serves as microcosm of all Rome. A teaser to
the imagination of the visitor: "You may tread now on the same place; but the
garden is no more, the columns are shattered, the fountain has ceased to play.
Let the traveller search amongst the ruins of Pompeii for the house of lone [a
character]. Its remains are yet visible; but I will not betray them to the gaze of
commonplace tourists" (p. 243).
An omnibus collection of literary works responding to or recreating Pom-
peii has been edited by Claude Aziza in over 1,000 pp., as Pompéi: Le Rêve
sous les ruines (no city: Presses de la Cité, "Collection Omnibus," 1992). In-
cludes Bulwer-Lytton, Alexandre Dumas, Gustave Flaubert, and (Freud's fa-
vorite) Wilhelm Jensen. Madame de Staël, Corinne, ou l'Italie (1807) at Pom-
peii (from French): "Most of these houses which were buried with fresh lava
were built with pieces of petrified lava. Thus, ruins upon ruins, and tombs upon
tombs" (p. 35). Lively commentary by Aziza. Many useful study features.
A charming Italian work is Alessandro Verri, Le Notti romane, in a fine
critical edition by Renzo Negri (Bari: Guis. Laterza & Figli, "Scrittori d'ltalia,"
1967). Part 2 (orig. pub. 1804) is Sulle ruine delta magnificenza antica. Cicero
serves as Cicerone in nocturnal rambles about ancient Rome with the shades of
noble Romans.
An unusual gem of mocking reflection upon archaeology and French cul-
ture is Alfred Franklin's anonymous. Les Ruines de Paris en 4875 (Paris: Li-
brairie de l'Écho de la Sorbonne, 2nd ed., 1875). A cataclysm has destroyed the
old world, and the ruins of Paris are excavated by an expedition from Caledo-
nia. Fake references are used. The battles inscribed on the Arch of Triumph are
mistaken for the generals' names (pp. 46^7), a copy of the Laokoön for a fu-
nerary monument (pp. 59-60), and the Louvre for a nécropole. Humorous re-
port of academic proceedings about statue of Joan of Arc (pp. 67-72). The Ve-
nus de Milo is admired, but her lost arms are sought in vain (pp. 81-83). A later
edition, appearing in 1908, futurizes the title to Paris "en 4908."
For studies that identify and discuss other works of ruin-literature, see
Section 4 on "Literary History," above.
10. Guidebooks and Souvenir Books
Guidebooks, meant to assist the visitor to a min by providing information, oc-

casionally recognize aesthetic qualities. Their accompanying illustrations may
display more of that recognition than the didactic text. But guidebooks, by
shaping a visit, may also ruin the aesthetic experience of ruins. While guide-
books are designed as tools for field use, a parallel genre has developed as at-
tractively illustrated volumes meant to reside at home on the coffee table. They
are anticipation books or souvenir volumes. Here are a few general works that
prove useful in planning a trip to mins.
A model achievement is Brian Bailey, Great Romantic Ruins of England
and Wales, with photographs by Rita Bailey (New York: Crown Publishers,
Inc., 1984). The work was also published in London under the title The Nation-
al [UK] Trust Book of Ruins (George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., 1984). The
Baileys choose 100 ruins to illustrate and discuss, organized as ancient, eccle-
siastical, military, and domestic. The wonderful photographs celebrate the aes-
thetic features of the ruins. The author coins the word "olethrophile" (Gr.) for
connoisseur of mins (p. 10). A case of a ruin within a min: Knowlton Church, a
mined Christian work, stands in a circle of prehistoric earthwork.
Another fine book on Britain is Frederick Ross, The Ruined Abbeys of
Britain (London: William Mackenzie, no date [ca. 1882]). History of each site
and account of its present state of ruin. Good selection of poetic and other testi-
mony. Illustrations by A. F. Lydon are beautiful treatments of the ruins in their
settings, with effects of clouds or moonlight, and attention to vegetation. Lydon
has a good eye for emergent form. Line of Destmction, and Framing Device.
A handy visitor's guide to 101 Sri Lankan sites is Somapala Jayawardha-
na. Ruins of Sri Lanka (Boralesgamuva, Sri Lanka: Cultural Publications Co.,
Ltd., 1987).
In the genre of guides to ghost towns, George Farwell, Ghost Towns of
Australia (Adelaide: Rigby, rev. ed. 1976 [orig. pub. 1965]), is distinguished by
its narrative of visits.
The Western states of the United States are the subject of guides to ghost
towns, often published by the presses of state universities in recognition of their

regional heritage. On California and Nevada: Thomas Moore, Ghost Towns and
Shadow Towns: A Photographic Quest (South Brunswick, N.J.: A. S. Barnes
and Company, 1970). Good documentary photographs. Ralph Looney, Haunted
Highways: The Ghost Towns of New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1968). John W. Morris, Ghost Towns of Oklahoma (Norman,
Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977). Well-illustrated, alphabetical re-
search guide to some 130 locations, contrasting old photographs with views of
present sites. The University of Oklahoma Press has published similar books
covering New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Texas.
11. Art of Photography
Photographers have exercised their fine art on the subjects of decay, destruc-
tion, and ruin. They teach viewers how we might look at these subjects and at
photographs. Ruin photography is a well-developed genre calling for wider rec-
ognition by aestheticians and general public. We need a volume or two on the
World of Ruin Photography (WORP). Photography has become indispensable
to guidebooks, souvenir volumes, and archaeological works intended for gener-
al readership. For a century, most travelers to ruins have probably taken photo-
graphs as part of their visit. I list fifteen books in this gallery by photographer.
Anna-Maryke, Fragment: Icons from Antiquity (Neutral Bay and Mullum-
bimby, Australia: Chapter & Verse, 2000). Ruins in Iran, Turkey, and Egypt
are the subject of beautiful black-and-white prints with intense darkness and
mysterious shadows, yet fine-grained detail.
William Craft Brumfield, Lost Russia: Photographing the Ruins of Rus-
sian Architecture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). " . . . I have at-
tempted to capture in photography the nobility and pathos of these lost monu-
ments, which embody the purity of form and the patterns of ornament that so
distinguish Russian architecture" (p. viii). Under Communism, Russia "became
a vast network of ruins that symbolized the state's power against and indif-
ference to any culture other than its own" (p. 10). Interesting personal narrative
of approaching the sites. Though Brumfield's aim is documentary, his black-
and-white photographs are artistically moving. Many of the works portrayed
are not ruins; they are just neglected, damaged, or forgotten. The Imperial Es-
tate at Tsaritsyno, which contained artificial ruins, became a ruin (p. 73).
Luis Castañeda, Mayab: Donde la piedra se hizo poesía; Where Poetry Is
Written in Stone (no city: Gobierno del Estado de Yucatán, "Cultur Servicios,"
1991). Monochromatic prints of Yucatecan ruins with fine-grained details sus-
pended in magical light.
Désiré Charnay, photographs. Désiré Charnay: Expeditionary Photogra-
pher, text by Keith F. Davis (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico
Press, 1981). The ruins photographed in Mexico in the nineteenth century by

the French photographer are somber, unattractive, earthbound,... mysterious.
Jean-Claude Gautrand, Forteresses du dérisoire (Paris: Les Presses de la
Connaissance, 1977). Toward an archaeology of the German coastal-bunkers in
France, as "mégalithes modernes." Haunting studies in black and white of ab-
stract forms framed by sand, sea, and sky. The work concludes with charming
adaptive uses, including seaside cottages. Introduction by Jean-Pierre Raynaud
on how the bluntly utilitarian object becomes a work of art.
Peter Goin, Nuclear Landscapes (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univers-
ity Press, "Creating the North American Landscape," 1991). Black-and-white
pictures of remains at the Pacific Atolls of Bikini and Enewetak. A "Doom
Town" was constructed by the Americans for nuclear destruction (pp. 48-49).
Ruins of a modern amphitheater intended "as part of the entertainment facilities
for test site personnel" (pp. 138-139). Some remains suggest Mayan jungle ru-
ins. Recognition of "an unnatural beauty" (pp. 144-145). Goin shows the ruins
without people, because the sites are radioactive. A chilling book.
Manfred Hamm, photographs. Dead Tech: A Guide to the Archaeology of
Tomorrow, text by Rolf Steinberg, trans, from German by Michael Stone (San
Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982 [orig. pub. 1981]). Hamm's black-and-
white and color photographs are powerful images of abandoned factories,
bunkers, piers, trains, automobiles, planes, ships, space-launchers, and nuclear-
power plants. In the hard-hitting introductory essay, "The Ruins Complex," Ro-
bert Jungk asserts, "Ruins from the p a s t . . . are almost always the dead bodies
of past atrocities" (p. 7). Contemporary breakdowns of the wonders of civiliza-
tion and the threat of nuclear catastrophe lead people to the neurotic "ruins
complex" of belief in inevitable destruction (p. 10). A chapter is entitled "Rust
in Peace." A frightening book.
Mimmo Jodice, photographs, Mediterranean, texts by George Hersey
("Mimmo Jodice and the Anatomies of Ruin") and Predrag Matvejevic (New
York: Aperture, 1995). Jodice's black-and-white photographs are haunting, po-
etic, off-focus encounters of ruin that often make the viewer off-balance.
Walter Kaufmann, Time Is an Artist: Photographs and Text (New York:
Reader's Digest Press, 1978). The rare instance of a philosopher-photographer.
Reflections on decay, aging, ruin, and restoration.
Clarence John Laughlin, photographs. Haunter of Ruins: The Photogra-
phy of Clarence John Laughlin, ed. John H. Lawrence and Patricia Brady
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997). Laughlin works, in black and
white, on ruins of the South in the United States, often posing a ghostly figure
on the site, as if the ruin could not speak for itself. Thus, he is a haunter, not a
hunter, of ruins. Andrei Codrescu's chapter, "Poems of the Interior World:
Clarence Laughlin; The Fullness of Absence," pp. 13-18, makes a good case
for the poetic paradox of ruin in Laughlin's photography: "His ruins are pos-
sessed of a complex and mysterious life. His living figures, on the other hand,
are melodramatically attempting to achieve the complexity of mins" (p. 13).
Cynthia MacAdams, photographs, Mayan Vision Quest: Mystical Initia-
tion in Mesoamerica, text by Hunbatz Men and Charles Bensinger (New York
HarperCollins Publishers, 1991). MacAdams seeks "to capture the mystical
forces in the pyramids and temples." The black-and-white prints of the struc-
tures embedded in the earth, with no human beings present, produce the uneasy
feeling that they are invested with spirits.
Simon Marsden, photographs. In Ruins: The Once Great Houses of Ire-
land, text by Duncan McLaren (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980). Unpagi-
nated. Marsden's photographs are beautiful, eerie arrangements of light and
dark. Often, a ghostly light appears in a window. Each ruin is strongly sited.
The angle of view is upward. Soft-focus, dramatic, haunted, overgrown, lonely.
McLaren is interested in the story hidden behind every ruin: "Ireland's often
tragic and troubled history together with deep religious and mythological be-
liefs have combined to produce an atmosphere of remoteness and unreality
amongst its people and their environment. This fatalistic emotion is somehow
enhanced by the many decaying mins that permeate the countryside."
Chuck Place, photographs. Ancient Walls: Indian Ruins of the Southwest,
text by Susan Lamb (Golden, Colo.: Fulcmm Publishing, 1992). The color pho-
tographs of dazzling beauty in magic light make the viewer fall in love with m-
ins, thanks to this well-placed artistry.
Camilo José Vergara, American Ruins (New York: The Monacelli Press,
1999). The decay of inner-city America in superb color photography. "In con-
trast to those who see these ruins as failures and eyesores that are best forgot-
ten, I record urban decay with a combined sense of respect, loss, and admira-
tion for its peculiar beauty" (p. 11). Vergara's unusual work on American cul-
ture is a "Smithsonian [Museum] of Decline" (pp. 14—15). He envisions "an ur-
ban mins park, an American Acropolis" (p. 15). He discusses the "cult of mins"
(p. 24). Many of the photographs are of abandonment awaiting ruin. The theme
is regret at loss. In the cases of some buildings, Vergara shows us the progres-
sive mination over time. His provocative photographs make more of a case for
salvaging and restoring than for appreciating the beauty of what is mined.
Paul Virilio, Bunker archéologie (Paris: Les Éditions du Demi-Cercle,
"Morceaux choisis," 1991 [orig. pub. 1975]). The sharpness of Virilio's black-
and-white photographs of German coastal defenses in France contrasts with the
neglect of the stmctures depicted. Abstract forms abound.
We can always count on photography for new developments. See below,
on photography's contribution to Disaster Books, Section 15, and to works on
War Ruins, Section 16. See also, above, Beny under Macauley in Section 1,
"Aesthetic Theory"; Brukoff under Machu Picchu in Section 7, "Individual
Ruins"; and Bailey in Section 10, "Guidebooks and Souvenir Books."
12. Architecture
An architectural genre that promises to have a great future is the incorporation

of ruins in monuments and modem buildings. Another architectural specialty is
the transformation of old buildings into different kinds of stmctures, though ar-
chitects regard this practice as saving, not ruining, works.
Brief summary of Worid War II ruins preserved as memorials: Eugeniusz
Gasiorowski, "Die Ruine als Gedenkstätte und Mahnmal," Osterreichische
Zeitschrift für Kunst und Denkmalpflege, 3 3 : 3 ^ (1979), pp. 81-90. Includes
Coventry Cathedral; St Alban's Church, Cologne; Hiroshima; Kaiser Wilhelm
Memorial Church, Berlin.
A beautiful book that presents success stories of the conversion of build-
ings is Sherban Cantacuzino, Re/Architecture: Old Buildings/New Uses (New
York: Abbeville Press, Publishers, 1989). Includes a warehouse turned into cul-
tural center, a school into housing for the elderly, the Theosophical Temple in
Amsterdam into a public library, and a menagerie in Horton, England, into a
private residence. The originals are not considered mins. With 306 illustrations.
A similar volume is Barbaralee Diamonstein, Remaking America: New
Uses, Old Places (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1986). Adaptive use in
the United States as a form of preservation. Examples: warehouse, factory,
synagogue, and high school to apartments; rail station to library; tobacco ware-
house to offices and shops; movie theater to bookstore; and a remarkable Denv-
er structure "FROM Women's college; hotel, gambling hall, and brothel; res-
taurant; private club; jazz club TO Museum of Westem Art" (p. 174).
An unusual exhibition catalogue: Kongreßhalle Berlin: Realistische
Phantasien und Realität (Beriin: Aedes, Galerie für Architektur und Raum,
Beriin Museum, 1987 [orig. pub. 1980]). The Congress Hall, built in 1957, col-
lapsed in 1980. Artists respond to the challenge of what to do with the ruin:
leave it as min, simplify it, build over it, integrate it into grander structure.
An imaginative exploration of functionless buildings, including mins, as
limit forms for architectural meaning: Robert Harbison, The Built, the Unbuilt,
and the Unbuildable: In Pursuit of Architectural Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 1991). Oddly written and organized. Provocative photographs.
13. Preservation
Much writing has been devoted to saving buildings from ruin—and some to
saving ruins. The preservation movement appeals to moral sentiment and cul-
tural values. It argues against aesthetic loss. It activates political will and beats
the dmm for funding. Preservation is also a branch of practice in architecture.
An excellent source for activities and case studies is Preservation, the
magazine of the National (USA) Tmst for Historic Preservation.
A comprehensive handbook written for the engineer to stabilize and re-

constmct buildings of value that have fallen into min is Gabriel López-Collado,
Las ruinas en construcciones antiquas: Causas, consolidaciones y traslados
(Madrid: Ministerio de Obras Publicas y Urbanismo, 3rd ed., 1985 [orig. pub.
1976]). Many of the photographs in Lopez-Collado's book are of interest from
the aesthetic point of view, showing, for example, the beauty of cracks (pl.
91 A) and the Line of Destruction (pl. 103A). Useful glossary.
A book fascinating for its explanation of how professional workers save
ruins is Roland Von S. Richert and R. Gordon Vivian, compilers. Ruins Stabili-
zation in the Southwestern United States (Washington: National Parks Service,
U.S. Department of the Interior, "Publications in Archeology," 1974). A "guide
to the methods, materials and techniques employed in the stabilization and
maintenance of prehistoric and historic structures in a minous condition" (p. 1).
"[I]n this volume we are dealing with structures or, more usually, with mere
remnants of structures in various stages of deterioration" (p. 4). Noteworthy
philosophy of human intervention in the stabilization of mins. "In professional
circles, the words preservation, restoration, reconstruction and stabilization
frequently stir up a war of semantics" (p. 4). Preservation saves the structure as
it is found. Restoration authentically recovers what has been lost or concealed.
Reconstruction is re-creation. Stabilization arrests further deterioration. But it
also allows putting fallen pieces back together for the sake of appearance (p. 5).
For a powerful expression of moral outrage against letting French church-
es fall into min, see Michel de Saint Pierre, Églises en ruine; Église en péril
(no city: Pion, 1973). Poignant photographs of ecclesiastical buildings turned
into a garage, market, jail, and sheepfold. Saint Pierre lists other transforma-
tions as grange, private dwellings, cattle stall, cinema, gymnasium, distillery,
city hall, bank, stable, farm, inn, museum, party room, dispensary, lecture hall,
workshop, amusement center, coal depot, boat storage, tobacco shed, silo, wine
cellar, furniture factory, theater, disinfection service, fire station, chicken coop,
library, offices, school, homeless refuge, judicial center, clubhouse, store,
bakery, hangar, and marl pit. Extensive census of ruined works.
Thorough histories of masterpieces of French architecture as they were
destroyed are offered by M. Claude de Móntelos, La Mémoire des ruines: An-
thologie des monuments disparus en France (Paris: Mengès, 1992). (From
French): "A min has an almost limitless life, while a monument has a restricted
life" (p. 53). Case of a failed demolition, "le ruineur ruiné" (pp. 116-117). Tell-
ing quotations (from French) by: (1) Viollet-le-Duc, "We've got just too many
ruins in our country . . . " (p. 51). (2) Pierre Pu vis de Chavannes: "Something
more beautiful than a masterpiece is its ruin" (p. 8). (3) Georges Clemenceau,
visiting New Delhi in 1929: "What beautiful ruins this will make!" (p. 24).
Móntelos's most moving chapter is on les Halles of Paris, torn down in 1971,
despite the vigorous campaign to preserve them.
14. History of Gardens
While much has been written about the vogue of artificial ruins in gardens (see
Hartmann in Section 2, "Art History," above), gardens as subject to ruin have
only recently been developed as field for scholarship. The study of ancient ex-
cavations of gardens deserves its own name, such as Archaeoparadeisology. A
neglected field that cries out for cultivation is the landscaping and gardening
conducted among well-established ruins. Call it Ruinhorticulture.
The pioneering work in garden archaeology is Wilhelmina F. Jashemski,
The Gardens of Pompeii, Herculaneum,-and the Villas Destroyed by Vesuvius
(New Rochelle, N.Y.: Caratzas Brothers, Publishers, 1979), illustrated by Stan-
ley A. Jashemski. A lovingly executed recovery of the cultural values of gar-
dens as detected by remains, which in some cases were then restored. Ruins of
trees often mean no more than casts made from the cavities left by their roots.
An effective ai'gument for turning archaeological thinking to the remains
of gardens is Christopher Taylor, The Archaeology of Gardens (Aylesbury,
England: Shire Archaeology, 1983). Contains interesting aerial photography.
15. Disaster Books
Popular illustrated books on the destruction caused by natural and human

disasters—fires, floods, earthquakes, avalanches, volcanic eruptions, crashes,
explosions, collapses, sinkings—may have surprising aesthetic appeal, espe-
cially when much time has elapsed since the terrible events. Here are two unu-
sual items.
The Photographs of James Wallace Black: Views of the Ruins of the
Great Fire in Boston, November, 1872 (Williamstown, Mass.: Williams Col-
lege Museum of Art, 1977), exhibition catalogue by Stephen Robert Edidin.
Henry Ward Beecher, Sermon, 10 November 1872: "Things that seemed as
though they would stand as long as the pyramids, are, to-night, in ruins" (p. 1).
Edidin has an excellent grasp of how aesthetic considerations shaped Black's
documentation of the disaster. "In a period in which the establishment of pho-
tography as a legitimate art form was very much an ongoing concern, the ruins
offered New England photographers almost classic examples of picturesque
subject matter that were simply not available in the United States except as a
result of this sort of contemporary disaster" (pp. 1-2).
Leukoma ton Ereipion tes Chiou: Synepeia ton Seismon tes 22/3 Apriliou
1881, photographs by Adelphon Kastania, published in 1881 as "Album des ru-
ines de Chio à la suite des tremblements de terre du 22/3 avril 1881," reprinted
in 1983 by the Gennadeion Library of Athens. These heartbreaking images of
the Greek .earthquake, on second view, more than a century later, have strong
formal qualities.
16. War Ruins
Illustrated pamphlets and books of the destructions of war are often meant to
ignite indignation. In other instances, such works have the mission of cold doc-
umentation, recording destruction's reality. Sometimes, aesthetic qualities ap-
pear. Pictures can switch back and forth from outrage to factuality to beauty,
while we view them. C'est la guerre! Listed by war.
From the American Civil War: George N. Barnard, Photographic Views
of Sherman's Campaign (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1977). A reprint
in reduced size of the original, published in 1866. The views of the ruins do not
include people. The shots are not frightening or remorseful, but formal and
classical, sometimes reminiscent of Roman ruins.
From the Paris Commune of 1871: Alfred d'Aunay (pseudonym of Alfred
Descudier?), Les Ruines de Paris et de ses environs, 1870-1871, with 100 pho-
tographs by A(lphonse) Liébert (Paris: A. Liébert, 1871), 2 vols. Pages of text
are unnumbered: "notre triste promenade à travers les ruines de la ville" [1, p.
8]. The text emphasizes the regrettable damage. The photographs, in contrast,
are peaceful. Their static quality is due to lengthy exposure time, which fore-
closes movement. Carefully chosen perspectives with formal interests and stud-
ies in light. The author describes the action of flames and falling of stones, but
the photographer shows the tranquility of stone still standing or piled up. His
pictures suggest no danger. They are contemplative. Liébert does well with
framing and patterning of elements. The occasional human figure appears as a
phantom, because of movement blurred by the exposure. D'Aunay is aware of
the contrast between ruin and image, as he mentions (from French): "Nothing is
as beautiful, nothing as grandiose as the ruins of the Ministry of Finance . . . in
photography" (the telling ellipsis is in the original [1, p. 3]). The ruined histori-
cal features of tbe Hôtel-de-Ville are described, but "The City Hall will again
rise superb, just as we had seen it, just as its ruins show it to us. It has been
burned and devastated, but it is still standing" [1, pp. 1-2]. This ruin is illustrat-
ed first, as if the biggest affront to Paris.
From World War I, France: In the format of a souvenir photographic
booklet, Reims en Ruines (Rheims: E. Dumont, Éditeur, 3rd series, no date). No
text. Captions in French and English. Starts with the ruins of the churches in
such a way as to stimulate anger.
From World War II, Germany: Hermann Claasen, Nie Wieder Krieg!
Bilder aus dem zerstörten Köln, eds. Klaus Honnef and Walter Müller (Col-
ogne: Wienand Verlag, 1994 [orig. photographed 1945]). The pictures are quite
sad, yet after this passage of decades, the formal qualities and the incongruities
are aesthetically accessible. Accompanied by contemporary texts. Most of the
images do not contain people. When people are present, their contribution is
formal, not emotive. For a different version of similar materials, see the exhibi-
tion catalogue, Claasen, Das Ende: Kriegszerstörungen in Rheinland (Cologne:

Rheinland-Veriag GmbH, "Kunst und Altertum am Rhein," 1983). These pho-
tographs have people in them. As human-interest documents, the images
emphasize the suffering of the people, not the properties of the ruins.
From World War II, again Germany: Richard Bauer, Ruinen-Jahre: Bild-
er aus dem zerstörten München, 1945-1949 (no city: Hugendubel, 1983).
While the more than 150 photographs are offered for their documentary value,
some have a classic stillness of composition in which mins are purified (pp. 66,
67, 84). People going about their day's business at the edge of the ruins make
the setting strangely theatrical like an alienated world (p. 89). The mins of the
National Theater in Munich echo the Baths of Caracalla at Rome (pp.
124-125). The pictures do not play on moral outrage or horror of destruction.
Decades after the destmction, they are curiosities. These mins are not smoking;
they pose no danger. The bodies have been removed. Yet, cumulatively, the ru-
ins carry a heavy message. Destruction touched everything: church, post office,
homes, shops, museums. Many touching incongruities add to the alienation,
such as an architect's name-plate stuck to a wall shom of substance (p. 134), a
no-parking sign hanging above a street jampacked with ruins (p. 136), and a
group of women washing amid débris (p. 168).
From World War II, Greece: A pamphlet with cover title. Ruins of Mod-
ern Greece, 1941-1944, and title page. Cities and Villages of Greece Destroyed
by Germans, Italians, and Bulgars, 1941-1944 (no city: Greek Government
Office of Information, no date). Reports of destruction, a fold-out map, exten-
sive chart of destroyed localities, a few photographs before and after destruc-
tion. Meant to disgust the reader.
From World War II, Poland: An art portfolio, A(ntoni) Suchanka, Ruiny
Starej Warszawy (1945), 12 lithographs. (In English): "I painted the mins of
Warsaw not from any consideration of duty as a chronicler; I was captivated by
the tragic beauty of her destruction." Suchanka has a fine sense of the unity pf
the mins in a detail and a strong grasp of structure revealed by destruction.
To be continued.
17. Ruin-Art Creations
Recently, visual artists have seized upon the themes of ruin, fragmentation, de-
cay, and destruction to create new works of art that in turn seize upon the view-
er's imagination. The ruin may become a central inspiration to artists in the
twenty-first century.
An astonishing work of "archaeology-fiction" is presented by Anne and
Patrick Poirier, Domus Aurea: Fascination des ruines (Paris: Les Presses de la
Connaissance, 1977). This exploration of an imagined min, including account
of the burning of an imaginary city, contains standard components of archaeo-
logical study: photographs, plans, inscriptions, models. The Poiriers successful-

ly construct ruins. See also exhibition catalogue with the same title ([Paris]:
Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Musée national d'art
moderne, 1978). Texts by several hands. Pontus Hulten (from French): "Ruins
are no longer the symbol or what remains of a lost civilization, but the mirage
of collective memory facing a future still without roots" (p. 3). Günther Mat-
ken, "Les Ruines anticipées," pp. 19-24, delicately analyzes the modemity of
min in which we see future min as likely and even desirable. The title, "Domus
Aurea" ("House of Gold"), is taken from Nero's palace, a min in Rome.
The catalogue. Fragments Against Ruin: A Journey through Modern Art
(London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1981), text by Julian Spalding, records
a fragmentary exhibition of works often fragmentary in image, reflecting on hu-
manity's newly recognized existence as fragment of the whole. The title is
drawn from T. S. Eliot. Another suggestive exhibition catalogue is Mary Gad-
die, ed.. Lost and Found: An Archaeological Composition (Salt Lake City: Salt
Lake Art Center, 1987). Katherine M. Nelson, "Archaeological Sight," ex-
plains, "Within the physical and philosophical parameters of the project,
'archaeological site' must be interpreted as 'archaeological sight'—a way of
experiencing cultural remains as a metaphor, not artifact" (p. 8).
18. Philosophy
In travel narrative and reflective poetry, in the garden folly or on the Grand
Tour, mins were once the site and stimulus to meditation on the solemn sub-
jects of mortality, time's passage, and the overthrow of empire. Ruins have a
future as metaphor for the human condition. Here are a few key works.
The most influential philosophizing upon ruin is C(onstantin)-F(rançois
de) Volney, Des ruines [Les Ruines: Méditations sur les révolutions des em-
pires], ed. Jean Tulard (Paris: Slatkine, 1979 [orig. pub. 1791]). This classic in
the genre of meditations on the passing of empires and the transitoriness of the
world is a mixture of regret, nostalgia, sadness, and sobriety. Volney assumes a
poetic pose, an invented character as author, such that we are to admire the re-
finement of his sentiments. His precious book is sited in his soul, not in the
world. Volney makes ruin central as metaphor, nay more, conceit, though he
has precious little to say of specific mins. His excess of sentiment strikes me, to
use a Yiddish technical term, as schmalzidike.
Volney's Invocation (from French): "I salute you, solitary ruins, sacred
tombs, silent walls! 'Tis you that I invoke; to you I address my prayer" (p. 49).
Ruins teach us about equality and liberty. "Oh mins! I will turn back to you to
learn your lessons!" (p. 51). Irresistible image of the min-meditator: "I sit down
on the base of a column, and there, elbow bent upon my knee, head supported
by my hand, tuming my regard sometimes on the desert, fixing it at other times
on the mins, I abandon myself to a profound reverie" (p. 56). For Volney, revo-
lution means the turning of great cities and empires into min (p. 59). Ruins of
the past lead us to think of our civilization as future mins (pp. 61-62).
• The "Genius of Ruins and Tombs" appears as a phantom to instruct Vol-
ney on humanity's rise from the state of nature, by the social contract, to socie-
ty driven by self-love (l'amour de soi) (pp. 88-89). If laws are bad, societies
fall into min (p. 92). Volney gives a long account of the decline of peoples due
to unrestrained self-indulgence and violation of natural law. A new century is
bui-sting forth, signaled by the French Revolution (ch. 15). Chapter 17 defends
liberty and equality as foundations of social order. Volney imagines a "General
Assembly" of Peoples (ch. 19). Chapters 20-21 are a marvelous survey of the
absurdities of religious beliefs throughout the worid. Catholicism is founded
"siir la mine de toutes les passions" (p. 191). Chapter 22 offers a naturalistic ac-
count of religion's origin. This is a history of epochs of human organization
and worid-views. Then evolution of distinct religions from common core. Vol-
ney ends with a call for recognition of the human community (p. 293).
For a trenchant philosophic discussion of Volney's notions of history,
freedom, and natural law, see Günther Mensching's essay, "Zur Dialektik des
Kosmopolitismus in Volneys 'Ruinen'," in his edition of the German transla-
tion of Volney, Die Ruinen (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, "Bibliothek der eu-
ropäischen Auficlämng," 1977), pp. 331-360.
Georg Simmel offers suggestive reflections on the metaphysics of ruin,
"Die Ruine," Philosophische Kultur: Gesammelte Essais (Potsdam: Gustav
Kiepenheuer Veriag, 1923 [orig pub. 1911]), pp. 135-143. In the upsurge of
nature and the downfall of human-made structure, the ruin presents the meta-
physical and aesthetic attraction of profound peace. Often reprinted.
Rivista di estética, 21:8 (1981) is a special issue, in Italian and French, on
ruins, in wide-ranging cultural and intellectual senses, including cinema, litera-
ture, gardening, and philosophy. Philippe Minguet, "II Gusto delle rovine," pp.
3-7, (from Italian): "In the dialectics between the myth of eternity and the reali-
ty of submission to the workings of time, the ruined work attests to the resist-
ance, more or less partial, of the human" (p. 5). Maurizio Ferraris, "Viollet-le-
Duc o Piranesi: Postmodernita e tarda-modernità," pp. 21-35, offers a meta-
physical discussion of completeness, restoration, nihilism, and present-day sen-
sibility. Philippe Dubois, "Figures de ruine: Notes pour une esthétique de
l'index," pp. 8-19, explores interesting ideas about (1) ruin as a theoretical
form in the sense of Charies Sanders Peirce's "index," the contiguity of sign
and its referent; (2) Freud and the paradox of the psychologically intact ruin;
and (3) photography as ruin of the real. Other scholariy journals should publish
special issues on ruins!
See also, above, works by Onfray (on Monsù Desiderio) in Section 3,
"Individual Artists," and Kaufmann in Section 11, "Art of Photography."
19. Miscellaneous
My favorite category in any scholarly field. The odds and ends that invite us to
explore loose ends and find insights against the odds. We may seek the subject
of ruins in many areas, from the iconography of tombstones to the history of
program-music. Here is an assortment of works in the fields of reference,
church history, humor, nautical archaeology, and engineering.
Encyclopedia article: "Rovina/restauro" by Carlo Carena, Enciclopedia,
12 (Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1981), pp. 270-294, followed by 32 illustra-
tions. The scope of Carena's treatment in this outstanding reference article is
indicative of the enormous presence of ruins in Italy, its art and literature, and
European culture generally. Beautifully illustrated.
Another encyclopedia article: "Ruines (Esthétique)" by Mario Praz, Ency-
clopaedia universalis, 20 (Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis, 1996), pp.
345-348. An historical sketch of ruin taste in Western literature and art. Praz
makes original twists, insisting on insights from Eastern aesthetics, including
the pre-Islamic Arab poet of ruin, Adi Ibn Zaid, and the twentieth-century Ja-
panese novelist, Junichiro Tanizaki. Before the West discovered the ruin, the
Chinese and Japanese cultivated a taste for the wear imparted to things.
Church history: Oleh Wolodymyr Iwanusiw, Church in Ruins: The De-
mise of Ukrainian Churches in the Eparchy ofPeremyse (St. Catharines, Ont.:
St. Sophia, Religious Association of Ukrainian Catholics in Canada,
"Schevchenko Scientific Society Ukrainian Studies," 1987). Illustrated cata-
logue in Ukrainian and English of Ukrainian churches in Poland and the Soviet
Union that were seized by the Communist state and converted to other uses.
The charming buildings in the color photographs do not fuel the moral outrage
intended. Only a few are in ruin, for example, p. 186. But in some cases, the
only remains of the church are its cross (cf. pp. 136-137).
Good humor: David Macauley, drawings and text. Motel of the Mysteries
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979). Masterpiece of mordant mockery
of archaeology and American culture in the form of excavation of a motel. Toi-
let paper is mistaken by amateur archaeologist "Howard Carson" as "Sacred
Parchment, pieces of which were periodically placed in the urn during the cere-
mony" (pp. 32-33).
Underseas sights: James P. Delgado, Lost Warships: An Archaeological
Tour of War at Sea (New York: Checkmark Books, 2001). Extensive coverage
throughout history. Knowledgeable text. Saddening pictures. This book gives
the reader a sinking feeling.
Speculative engineering report: James R. Chiles, "Engineers Versus the
Eons, or How Long Will Our Monuments Last?", Smithsonian, 14:12 (March
1984), pp. 56-67. How modern American monuments, including the World
Trade Center in New York, would collapse in ruin if abandoned.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
He carries ruins to ruins.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” The Essays, ed. Alfred R.
Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1987 [orig. pub. 1841]), First Series, p. 46.
Robert Ginsberg was bom in Brooklyn, New York in 1937.

From 1952 to 1960, he studied at the University of Chicago, chiefly in
aesthetics (B.A., M.A.). Assisted by Fulbright grants, he lived in Paris from
1960 to 1963, continuing his explorations in aesthetics at the Sorbonne. He did
additional studies in Sweden, the Netherlands Institute for Art History in The
Hague, and the University of Vienna. He returned to America to complete a
Ph.D. in philosophy in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania (1966).
Ginsberg has engaged in study missions to Italy (classics), Israel (peace
studies), and China (Confucianism). In the United States, he pursued post-
Pl. 94. Robert Ginsberg, Lavabo, Mellifont Abbey, Ireland, 1999

(Photo by Ellen S. Ginsberg)
doctoral studies at The Johns Hopkins University (film), University of Califor

nia at Irvine (political philosophy), Brandeis University (classics), the Folger
Institute in Washington (history of philosophy), and Georgetown University

(classics). Research grants have taken him to Norway, the United Kingdom,
Spain, Greece, Hungary, and Germany.
Ginsberg taught in France and Turkey in the 1960s. In the United States,
he served as adjunct professor at Drexel University, Philadelphia, and Temple
University, Harrisburg. Appointed as the first faculty member at The Pennsyl
vania State University’s Delaware County Campus in 1967, when it opened its
doors in the Philadelphia suburbs, he taught for Penn State for thirty-five years.
He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Comparative Literature.
During a motor tour of Scotland in 1967, Ginsberg first discovered the
beauties of ruins. Subsequently, he has traveled extensively to study and photo
graph ruins and lecture on them (PI. 94). To gain experience in the field, he par
ticipated in archaeological study tours in Egypt, Tunisia, Italy, Yugoslavia,
Mexico, and Guatemala. In developing a career as photographer-philosopher,
he has exhibited his visual works in Paris, Hong Kong, Montreal, Philadelphia,
and Washington.
Among Ginsberg’s publications are a handbook for students, Welcome to
Philosophy! (1977), and a monograph on sculpture, Gustav Vigeland: A Case
Study in Art and Culture (1984). He edited Criticism and Theory in the Arts
(1963), A Casebook on the Declaration of Independence (1967), The Critique
o f War: Contemporary Philosophical Explorations (1969), and The Philoso
pher as Writer: The Eighteenth Century (1987).
Ginsberg edits the book series, New Studies in Aesthetics. Previously, he
served as editor of the Social Philosophy Research Institute Book Series
(SPRIBS), the Jones and Bartlett Philosophy Series, The Journal of Value In
quiry', and the Value Inquiry Book Series (VIBS). As an editor, he has super
vised the publication of two hundred volumes.
In 1962, Robert Ginsberg and Ellen Sutor wed in Paris. Since 1972, the
Ginsbergs have made their home in Takoma Park, Maryland, an historic suburb
of Washington, where they direct the International Center for the Arts, Human
ities, and Value Inquiry.

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THE AESTH ETICS OF R U IN S

illustrated by the author

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004

Cover Image: Robert Ginsberg

Foreword by Claire Richter Sherman XV

ONE The Ruin as Matter 1

TWO The Ruin as Form 15

THREE The Ruin as Function 33

FOUR The Ruin as Incongruity 51

FIVE The Ruin as Site 11

SIX The Ruin as Symbol 102

SEVEN The Ruin as Aesthetic Experience 155

EIGHT Visit to a Ruin: St. Andrews 173

NINF. Building with Ruin 135

TEN Nature as Ruin 201

ELEVEN Sculpture and Other Visual Arts as Ruin 221

TWELVE Cinema and Television as Ruin 232

THIRTEEN Literature as Ruin 253

FOURTEEN Philosophy as Ruin 251

FIFTEEN The Terminology of Ruin 285

Theories of Ruin 115

The Ruining Eye—and Other Senses 335

Fragments of a Chapter on Ruin 355

NINFTFFN Meditations on Humanity, Self, and the

Works Cited 449

Chronology of Ruin 453

Appendix Bibliographical Essay on the Literature and

About the Author 493

1. Ellen S. Ginsberg and Robert Ginsberg, Altar, Sparta, Greece, 1985 vi

35. St. Peter's Church, Louvain, Belgium, 1971 112

77. Roman Amphitheater, Nîmes, France, 1961 365

1. Bécan, Mexico, 2003 xviii

Robert Ginsberg, in The Aesthetics of Ruins, provides entirely fresh perspec-

Claire Richter Sherman

This book is a comprehensive study of the aesthetic experience of ruins.

Fig. 1. Bécan, Mexico, 2003

In this book, I illustrate ruins in forty countries hy more than a hundred of my

I thank the following publishers: (1 )»BuCkneir Uniyersity.Press:for;use:of;matev

THE RUIN AS MATTER

lenced by violence, disarmed by destruction, powerless to press forward to

is the dictionary of matter’s meaning, theater for unique experience, laboratory

PL 2. Roman Brickwork, Pompeii, Italy, 1961

randomness in which we stand, cause and consequence, witness and collabora­

THE RUIN AS FORM

PI. 4. Window, Dryburgh Abbey, Scotland, UK, 1967

it perfectly from many points, just as we do in visiting gardens, cityscapes, and

connectedness of shape and substance. You cannot represent its unity in a

. . . even above the brim. (“Birches,” Frost, 1979, p. 122)

PL 5. Fallen Pillars, Delos, Greece, 1974

PI. 7. Coastal Fortress, Croatia, 1986

The wall of Renaissance windows that survives Heidelberg Castle, Ger­

F ig. 2. A rb r o a th A b b e y , S c o tla n d , U K , 1967

ciation, must be ranked alongside of world-class achievements of architecture

THE RUIN AS FUNCTION

We have shifted from observing the exterior of structural regularity to

It attracts independent attention, thanks to its newness. We grow fond of what

We may experience this pleasantness of one function seen against another

PI. IO. Shipwreck, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, USA, 1969

PI. 11. The House of Columns, Chichen-Itza, Mexico, 2003

PI. 12. The (ivmnasium, Pompeii, Italy, 1961

is that they come to a point. We have wandered into a large-scale fortuitous

PI. 13. Stairs, Roman Odeon, Gortvn, Crete, Greece, 1974

A boy’s will is the wind’s will,

randomness in which we stand, cause and consequence, witness and collabora

The wall of Renaissance windows that survives Heidelberg Castle, Ger

Lantern of the North.” Their neighboring cemeteries, however, remain con

reflection, is caught up in a swirl of activity. The ruin stirs Dee-lightful reflec

brought steps in the twentieth century to incorporate lands with Greek

Innovation is crucial in ordinary ruins, if we experience them aesthetical

The distribution of pillars, intact or broken, is of geometrical interest, and of in