When we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future. To statesmen, ruins predict the fall of Empires and to philosophers the futility of mortal man’s aspirations. To a poet, the decay of a monument represents the dissolution of the individual ego in the flow of Time; to a painter or architect, the fragments of a stupendous antiquity call into question the purpose of their art. Why struggle with a brush or chisel to create the beauty of wholeness when far greater works have been destroyed by Time?
- Christophet Woodward, In Ruins, Vintage 2002.
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