Reading John Ruskin

Reading John Ruskin is like sitting in a living room with that good old grandmother of yours who lived through the Great Depression and World War II and everything after. Not the annoying one who talks about being part of "the Greatest Generation" (though that seems to be more of an anxiety-born boomer label for them). I'm talking about the one known for her patience, thoughtfulness, inner strength and forgiveness. Perhaps she's named Mildred or Barbara and she's tougher than you and twice as kind. Reading John Ruskin's thoughts on art reminded me of her.

"Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life," says John Ruskin, in his long essay "The Nature of Gothic," originally published in 1853. He continues:

It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom, --a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom, -- is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.

Here you have a man explicitly tying the arts of humanity to nature's creations. He's realizing that our lot isn't so separate from trees and flowers and challenges artists, sculptors and architects -- and all human beings, for that matter -- not to challenge the laws of nature but to harness them and work with the flow of life and death.

What seems quaint about Ruskin is the way he creates rules and laws for things like "human life" and "human judgment." I imagine the key phrase is "divinely appointed." Who now advocates for something within human beings that's connected to the infinite?

He was writing in the 19th Century, before Hitler and Stalin and the various tyrannies and wars that proved just how cheap life could be. We are so tied now to individual fates and specific judgments. We are confronted with landfills of evidence of how difficult it is to control human desires, what our lives are filled with and what we leave behind. For Ruskin to argue for craftsmanship and the ability for all workers to exercise creativity and connect our daily lives with nature sounds downright out of touch.

If the pleasure or change be too often repeated, it ceases to be delightful, for then change itself becomes monotonous, and we are driven to seek delight in extreme and fantastic degrees of it. This is the diseased love of change of which we have spoken.

This might be my favorite paragraph from the "Gothic" essay. Although he was fighting it, I can't believe Ruskin could foresee the scale to which our culture would embrace "the diseased love of change." I don't think it's just novelty that would make Ruskin wince -- it's the ways in which we've dehumanized our culture in order to create and consume an ever-changing series of new delights.

What's interesting to me is the friction between individuals and collective experience. Change itself has become monotonous from the outside -- just think of how your best-traveled friend's stories can become so boring -- but living in constant change feels exciting and fresh. This is a big topic. Let's return to Ruskin:

Again: the talent of the composer is not in the monotony, but in the changes: he may show feeling and taste by his use of monotony in certain places or degrees; that is to say, by his various employment of it; but it is always in the new arrangement or invention that his intellect is shown, and not in the monotony which relieves it.

So it comes back to the individual's talent for balancing invention and monotony. I take this to mean there is no guidebook -- just individuals making their way, who can reflect and criticize and scheme and praise together. There are no real rules, or no specific rules. It's a constant navigation back and forth. We aren't nature, we are a part of it.

In true mystical fashion, Ruskin sets forth a distant light, tells stories of its brilliance, and tells us to go to it.

It's worth noting that unlike our quiet dignified elders in the living room, Ruskin wrote volumes and volumes and said quite a bit. Despite feeling so passionately about Gothic styles, he was disappointed in even his own architectural constructions. The physical reality of making a building wasn't commensurate with his vision.

It's a beautiful dream, and we can see things leaving tracks to and from his ideas like deer crossing a stream in the snow, but where that river stops and starts we can't hardly say.