After the fall
Ruins have plenty to teach us about beauty and decay
How to explain our taste for ruins? Are we attracted to their echoes of transience and decay, and perhaps of our own mortality? Or are we moved by traces of a past that has not quite disappeared — messages from an era otherwise inaccessible?
“We are so often drawn to the sight of what is broken, damaged and decayed,” Susan Stewart notes in her admirably researched and beautifully produced volume, The Ruins Lesson. Ruins excite our imagination with the lesson that our greatest structures will one day return to the ground, while reminding us that in their fallen states these sites are endowed with beauty, even redemption.
Stewart, a distinguished poet, a former Macarthur fellow and a Princeton professor of the humanities, charts the West’s fascination with decayed remains, from Egyptian relics to contemporary monuments of destruction and trauma. The Ruins Lesson is a sweeping cultural history that draws in Renaissance humanism, 18th-century changes in representing the past and the romantic reconfiguration of memory. In the 20th century, culture came to be seen as a ruin, a troubled witness to human violence. We are struck less by nature’s sublime powers than by our capacity for ruination.
The sentimental attachment to the ruin, the contemplative gaze that finds signs of renewal in mossy growth on broken stones, has been deconstructed. In our age of climate crisis, we might ask: When humans cause mass extinction, what does it mean to find beauty in decay?
The Ruins Lesson is in many respects a scholarly tome, with hundreds of footnotes and an extensive bibliography. But Stewart writes with poetic grace and a non-specialist’s appreciation of printmaking, painting, literature and architecture. Readers outside the academy will find much to value in this lovely book. It takes no scholarly preparation to appreciate the ways in which culture-makers grappled with the lessons of decay even as they strove to create works of lasting value. The book is copiously illustrated, and the colour prints powerfully illuminate the detailed descriptions of prints and paintings.
As part of the opening of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1997, I co-curated Irresistible Decay, an exhibition on ruins and their representations. It seemed worthwhile to recall the veneration of decay as we welcomed visitors to the beautiful new cultural centre in the hills of Southern California.
A museum can be like a monument, which Stewart reminds us “can be a temporary means of teaching the living about the past.” She goes on to conclude, though, that “it is only in the continual transmission of our values, in the life of thought, language and critical reconsideration, that we can find any permanence.”