The Pleasure of Ruins

"Yes, this is a wonderful book – a real tome. I think it’s out of print now, but I bought a second hand copy very cheap via Abe Books. Rose Macaulay was a prolific writer who wrote more than twenty novels in the twentieth century. Macaulay was fascinated by ruins and themes of civilisational collapse; I really like her novel My World My Wilderness , which is partially set in post-war London, where a fearless teenage girl called Barbary runs wild through the shell craters and the bombed-out remains of churches, all of which are garlanded with wildflowers and weeds: “greenery that grew high and rank, running over the ruins as the jungle runs over Mayan temples, hiding them from prying eyes…” It’s very atmospheric. But I’ve chosen The Pleasure of Ruins , a nonfiction book, because it’s an impressive work of scholarship: a cultural history of ruins that examines how these places repulse and attract in equal measure, and in that sense haunt our collective imagination. She’s very good on the origins of sham ruins. She quotes Thomas Whateley, the 18th-century English politician and author of Observations on Modern Gardening : In wild and romantic scenes may be introduced a ruined stone bridge, or which some arches may be still standing… a picturesque object…the care taken to keep it still open, tho’ the original building is decayed… give it an imposing air of reality I think that’s so interesting – artifice creating a sense of reality. I think the emotional and spiritual significance of the symbol of the ruin, or the abandoned building more generally, is such that it throws our present worries and cares into sharp relief. It says: one day this too will be dust. Of course, she writes about real places too, ancient cities: Petra and Persepolis, Nineveh and Babylon. Places that prove to us the truth of that sentiment. The collapse of civilisations, ruined temples to ruined gods. She touches on modern ruins too, saying they have yet to acquire the “weathered patina” of age, and have not yet put on their ivy, but Very soon trees will be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them. Very soon the ruin will be enjungled, engulfed, and the appropriate creatures will revel… I love that – the redemption of the ruin through natural forces. It is reborn as a living landscape. In the end, though, she says that ruins are best experienced as a fantasy, that in real life – as she experienced in London during the war – the picturesque destruction is too tinged with sadness and fear to be desirable. The idea of ruination, of abandonment and decay, is bigger and more meaningful than it is in reality."