A view of the Charles River and skies at sundown looking west towards Boston University Bridge. I am the digital Turner: who will be my Ruskin? Did I not, after all, expend as much effort photoshopping pixels as Turner did grinding pigment and squinting?
“It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of all creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more, for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her. There are not many of her other works in which some more material or essential purpose than the mere pleasing of man is not answered by every part of their organization; but every essential purpose of the sky might, as far as we know, be answered, if once in three days, or thereabouts, a great, ugly black rain cloud were brought up over the blue, and everything well watered, and so all left blue again till next time, with perhaps a film of morning and evening mist for dew. And instead of this, there is not a moment of any day of our lives, when nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly… the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is not “too bright, nor good, for human nature’s daily food,” it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for the soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, it is surely meant for the chief teacher of what is immortal in us, as it is the chief minister of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal. And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a subject of thought…”
John Ruskin Modern Painters 1
You must at least have a Boswell. Every literary fellow has a Boswell. If you'd get after him to stop making merrie with the local lasses (with an "l," please note), perhaps he'd have a bit more time for a bit of Ruskining.
Posted by: Bleak Mouse | October 28, 2005 at 14:41
Aw. I feel special.
Posted by: Quicquid | October 28, 2005 at 19:16
And I don't mean special as in "short bus."
Posted by: Quicquid | October 28, 2005 at 19:17
Nothing can be beautiful which is not true. And so this coxscomb, who adulterates and besmirches honest images with manufactured manipulation, deserves not even twenty guineas' worth of my aesthetic consideration. Adieu.
Posted by: Anna | October 28, 2005 at 22:20
Anne, how very true that is! But beauty and truth together is too much Keats for me.
Posted by: stephenesque | October 30, 2005 at 13:45