In Love with Ruins
St. Dunstan-in-the-East, an English parish church between the Tower of London and London Bridge, barely survived the Great Fire of 1666. It did not survive what is sometimes called the Second Great Fire: the 60-day German bombing campaign of London, commonly called The Blitz. For mysterious reasons, rather than demolish what remained of St. Dunstan-in-the-East, the council chose in 1971 to transform it into a public garden. Consequently, you can now find, east of Monument station, not far from the Billingsgate Roman House & Baths, the very beautiful ruins of a 900-year-old church, draped in English ivy and lightly dusted with moss.
Ruins like those of St. Dunstan-in-the-East bewitch us, and they bewitch us because they are visible signs of the passage of time and the power of nature. They are like the faces of old men, marked by the deep wrinkles and scars acquired in the course of a life lived well. Only in the case of the remains of buildings, and particularly beautiful buildings, they also call our attention to the efforts of our forebears to make and to build, to leave some mark of their culture on the face of this world, and though the products of their strivings were always doomed to decay or disintegrate or be destroyed, and so to be returned to the earth from which they came, they nonetheless cast a bright and dazzling light on our nature as dreamers and designers of worlds. In his sermon, ‘Learning in War-Time’, C.S. Lewis put our complex, paradoxical character like this:
‘Men propound mathematical theorems in besieged cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on the scaffold, discuss a new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.’
There is an immense beauty in the process of decay, which we commonly connect to rotting food or disintegrating bodies. Certainly we may perceive it as a loss; it is the natural response to seeing the things we love fade away. ‘Not Verweile doch, du bist so schon,’ writes Michael Oakeshott, quoting Goethe’s Faust, ‘but Stay with me because I am attached to you.’ We can, however, see what we call decay not as loss, but as the unfolding of the world, an illustration of the unceasing flow of things: as something in time that puts us in mind of the timeless. Blake connected the decay of material things with the eternal, the spiritual, the unchanging: of the binding of ‘today’ to ‘always’. In his Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he writes: ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’
Ruins are thus symbols – symbols of the glories of our collective past and of the fleeting nature of all things; of our place, as human beings standing in the current of time, allowing the water to flow about our ankles; of, at once, our ultimate inferiority to nature and our identity as part of it, which ennobles us anew. It is fitting that our perception of time stretching out through the centuries excites such profound sensations of wonder and astonishment, since these, as the psychologist Phillippa Lally tells us, also alters how we perceive and understand what we call ‘time’:
‘Experiencing awe can expand our perception of time, endowing us with a sense of the eternal. This makes moments feel fuller and the world vaster.’
We experience feelings like these when we come upon scenes so perceptually vast that they seem to rise over and above our frames of reference. They are moments of transcendence; and in these moments, we are humbled, and so feel deeply at peace with the world and our place in it. Our sense of proportion, so often lacking as we hurry about our lives, suffering unnecessarily, causing suffering to others, martyring ourselves over trivialities, is restored. When we stand before the crumbled walls of St. Dunstan-in-the-East or what remains of the Acropolis in Athens, or a broken statue, or faded headstone, or the stone shell of the Coliseum in Rome, we are not just passersby, let alone tourists: we are witnesses to the passage of the ages, to time itself made material. This is what the romantic painter Thomas Cole, who like few others renewed the artistic tradition of Europe by imbuing it with an American sensibility, perceived so clearly and why he made ruins the subject of so much of his work.
Ruins are the shadows cast by our history upon our present: reminders of the unceasing cycles of rise and fall that characterise human life and human designs, and of the simple truth that the only thing that ever stays the same is that everything changes. Panta rhei, wrote Heraclitus: ‘Everything flows.’ In the form of crumbling walls and toppled columns and empty window-frames and roofs reduced to rubble, we encounter the timeless in time, eternity in a moment, the still point of the turning world.
Harry Readhead is a novelist, essayist, poet and critic. His work has appeared in the Times, the Guardian, the Spectator, the New Statesman, the Independent, the Times Literary Supplement, the Tablet, America, the Diagram, the Cardiff Review, Asymptote Journal, and others. He is Creative Director at Sonder, a communications agency.