During the ensuing days I contemplated in and near the Colosseum and the Forums for hours. As if caught up in a different dimension or transported to an alien sphere, I admired the beautifully carved capitals and the graceful lines of the columns. I felt that I became familiar with every stone and each crumbled pillar. I thought of nothing in particular; just to be in the presence of something grand that I scarcely could grasp and to admire the ruinated buildings for their own sake seemed to suffice: to attempt to recreate the ancient circumstance seemed almost a sacrilege. No academics should disturb the ardent admiration.
Since then I have contemplated ruins in many parts of the world with the same fascination and strange pleasure, engulfed in that vacuum that hovers over the ruinous sites as if to protect them from the savages of time, only to prove valid what Thomas Whately wrote in 1770: "A monument of antiquity is never seen with indifference."
And indeed, since down the ages men have been fascinated and preoccupied by ruins. They have meditated before them, rhapsodized of them and mourned pleasurably over their very ruination. What is this pleasure, and what makes up its many strands? How much of the pleasure is for appreciation for what the ruins were in their prime, and how much is pure admiration for what the ruins are now—l'art pour l'art, beauty for beauty's sake? How much of it is morbid pleasure in decay and destruction, or egotistic satisfaction in being alive and whole, or the pleasure of melancholy of simply trying to grasp the tides of time? Who walked here before? What human qualities did they possess? What did they feel? How did they die? Were they afraid to die? What legacies did they think they left behind? Did we find those legacies, or are we asserting our own wishes and emotions into the pages of history? Is this the pleasure of contemplation?
The ghosts of Nineveh and Babylon—those mighty cities that thought that there was "none beside me," buried under the immensities of the desert sand and time itself—have haunted man with their fearful destinies. Dressed in their Assyrian grandeur with their winged man-headed bulls guarding majestic gates, these cities are not part of our heritage. Their ruins speak of an alien culture with alien tongues: Sennacherib and Sargon, Nebuchadnezzar and his court are as strange as the winged bulls themselves. A little more than mounds, Ninevah and Babylon offer a purely imaginative pleasure, if somewhat intellectual. Petra, Pergamum or Persepolis can be enjoyed by anyone with eyes that see, but Ninevah evokes the contemplation expressed by the Biblical prophet Zephaniah, who, like all prophets, rejoiced over the ruin and destruction of great cities, confident that they had richly deserved that which befell them. Prophets have been the most single-minded of ruin-lovers, having no use for cities until they fell, and then rejoicing over their desolation in exultant, almost revengeful reverie:
“And he will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy Assyria, and will make Nineveh a desolation, and dry like a wilderness. . . . the cormorant and the bittern shall lodge in upper lintels of it; their voice shall sing in the windows; the desolation shall be in the thresholds. . . . This is the rejoicing city that dwelt carelessly, that said in her heart, I am, and there is none beside me: how is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in! every one that passeth by her shall hiss and wag his hand."
Zephaniah might not have approved the excavation which have brought the wicked places to the attention of modern generations who neither hiss nor wag their hands, but carefully remove the graven images, idols and decorations, and mindfully seize them in places of honor in museums for the admiration of the world . . .
To most of us, to speak of a ruin is to speak of a castle, for as if by common consent, a castle ought to be ruined. The old castles of Spain, Italy, Germany and the British Isles are more intriguing than Windsor or the chateaux of the Loire. And a little ruin is best: you don't want so much destruction as to totally spoil the form. Enough detail and definition must remain as to allow us to contemplate and stir us to high moral reflections: we feel retribution on the wickedness and pride that appeared natural to those who inhabited castles, and realize that the mighty power of the aloof genteel could not withstand the revengeful jealousies of the common folk. Yet, there hides in man an unexplainable need to build castles and palatial residencies, which others, in anger and fear, raze until the world is like a fantasy of tumbling towers: everywhere chateaux disparus, verfallene Schlosser, casteli rovinati, castles in ruin . . .
An ardent ruin admirer wrote: "I explored the castle from end to end, with immense satisfaction to the eternal child that lives in all of us and takes more delight in the dungeons and embattlements of a [castle] than in any other relic of antiquity." Henry James recalled his childhood contemplations near a ruined castle, and spoke of a "sensation of dropping back personally into the past . . . while I lay on the grass beside the well in the little sunny court of [a] small castle, and lazily appreciated the still definite details of medieval life."
Indeed, imagining oneself a part of the setting, being portrayed against a ruinous background or leaving one's signature carved in the important setting (as all good tourists have done in all ages) is a part of the pleasure of ruins—the pleasure of self-extension. Composing poetry, prose or music, or transposing the pleasure onto canvas, are manifestations of this Ruinenlust. For who, having seen the ruinous structures in Rembrandt, or having heard Debussy's Sunken Cathedral, has not been inspired and transported?
There are two less spontaneous pleasures of ruin contemplation: archeology and antiquarianism, which have brought to light more ruins than can be enumerated. With the greater knowledge comes the critique—a sure demise of pure pleasure. Furthermore, academic study necessarily imposes the ills of modern technology on the pleasurable ruins. Complains Robert Byron about the excavations at Persepolis:
“In the old days, you rode up the steps on to the platform. You made a camp there, while the columns and winged beasts kept their solitude beneath the stars, and not a sound or a movement disturbed the moonlit plain. You thought of Darius and Alexander. You were alone with the ancient world. You saw Asia as the Greeks saw it, and you felt their magic breath stretching out towards China itself. . . . Today you step out of a motor, while a couple of lorries thunder by in a cloud of dust. You find the approaches guarded by walls. You enter by leave of a porter, and are greeted on reaching the platform by a light railway, a neo-German hostel, and a code of academic malice compiled from Chicago. These useful additions clarify the intelligence. You may persuade yourself, in spite of them, into a mood of [contemplation]. But the mood they invite is that of a critic at an exhibition. That is the penalty of greater knowledge.”
And indeed, now that we can identify things, now that many sites have been explored and labeled, some of the romance and pleasure is inevitably lost. Now the contemplation is combined with intellectualism as we read the posted explanations. This is the familiar tragedy of archeology: the sacrifice of beauty to knowledge. "The ghosts of the lost splendour are better than anything dug from the earth," is an apt realization and defense for the flights of fancy—combined with a healthy portion of ignorance—when confronted by unexplained ancient wonders hewn in stone.
In the early 1700's the whim of fashion transported the active and outdoor British from their contemplation of ruins in pictures and literature to their gardens and parks. Payne Knight rhapsodized:
“Bless'd too is he who, midst his tufted trees,
Some ruin'd castle's lofty towers sees,
Imbosom'd high upon the mountain's brow,
Or nodding o'er the stream that glides below.”
As objects of landscape—picturesque and exciting in themselves and artistic in their relationship to the design as a whole—ruined temples, Gothic castles, abbeys and Chinese pagodas sprang up in every fashionable gentleman's grounds in Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. A fine example of ruin making by destruction—not by anger or fear, but in aesthetic enthusiasm—was reputedly achieved by an English nobleman, who, in search for a more spacious home abandoned his ancient fortified manor house by the tower surviving a 14th-century castle by a lilied mote, and had a splendid new house quarried out of the hillside high above the castle. But, in order to have a "fashionable" ruin visible from his windows, he had the old house partially ruined and carefully reduced to a jagged profile. Scarcely qualifying as a ruin, it still makes an exquisite picture.
The inexhaustible wealth of ruins dotting the world feeds man's melancholic pleasure in the past. The courtly life, the banquets, the music, the dancing, the exquisite mosaics, the gracefully arched windows, the statues, the gates and the walls give us pleasure in contemplating the fallen pride, the wealth and bon vivant. Now we see shattered walls, broken columns, trees thrusting through crumbling floors, and the elegant living trampled to dust. All this makes for that melancholic delight we seek so eagerly and treasure gratefully in our brief passage through time. "There's a fascination frantic in a ruin that's romantic," goes a familiar jingle and truthfully describes this strange pleasure of ruins.
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Photo left: The medieval castillo at Manzanares el Real, Province of Madrid, Spain |
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This page was created on February 25, 1998
Most recent revision: March 2, 2007