Beautiful Ruins
finding happiness atop the sad music of humanity
When you’ve spent a few years inside the news cycle — when you’re an active figure in some place like Washington or LA or New York City — it’s easy to get caught in the delusion that the world outside your own social-power structure is, well, nonexistent. It’s easy to believe that the ladder-to-be-climbed is indestructible. Some people call this ideology the Bubble or the Hive and some of them spend their entire lives inside of it. They might move from Washington to New York or from New York to LA, but their attitude toward the world remains unchanged.
Now, I’m not going to spill any ink bashing the bubble because A.) that’s a cliched piece of writing and B.) it’s impossible to write that piece without sounding sour — I’ll only say that I lived on the periphery of the Washington bubble for a few years and I had a wonderful time of it. Finally, some time around early 2018, I read a book called The Boys on the Bus1 and that broke a lot of things for me. And then I read another book called The Decline of the West2 and that shattered everything that was left.
Those books popped the bubble for me and I grew apathetic about the whole thing. It was still fun, I still had a hell of a lot of fun in Washington, but I understood that even apparent constants like the American political system are constructs that will eventually evaporate. America, as great as it is, will eventually fade off just like the Roman and Mayan empires did before it. And when you live in Washington and you begin thinking like that, eventually, you also begin to think something like this city will make beautiful ruins.
Yes, ruins — I’m a little bit obsessed with ruins. I’ve written before about my obsession with lost works, but I think my obsession with ruins is a bit different. Because I don’t remember how my lost works obsession came into being but my obsession with ruins began with a painting. And I remember the exact painting. I was taking a class on romanticism in college and the professor showed us a 1787 painting called The Old Temple by a Frenchman named Hubert Robert. I stared at it for hours, I couldn’t look away. Here it is:
Hubert Robert painted a lot of these. Apparently he was obsessed with ruins too. He did the same thing I started doing after the bubble was popped — he looked at the beautiful places and saw them as ruins. In 1796, he painted the Grand Galerie of the Louvre as a ruin.
Here on the left is the Grand Galerie of the Louvre as it looks today. On the right is the Grand Galerie as a ruin — as Robert imagined it the 18th century.3
Hubert Robert wasn’t the only painter who did ruins. The Romantics were all a bit taken with the theme. There’s also Turner’s painting of Tinturn Abbey — and that stunning Tinturn Abbey-themed Wordworth poem about the “still sad music of humanity.”
More than anything else, these paintings are underlined with a stillness that can get a bit addictive if you bring it outside the paintings. You can lose your mind a bit on the ladder of Washington and for me, the one thing that always worked was to remember that all we were really doing was cavorting atop the soon-to-be ruins.4 Sure, the Supreme Court building might stand for five-hundred more years — but what are five-hundred-years on our planet; a blue-and-green ball that’s about 4.5 billion-years-old.
At some point, the Supreme Court building will decay. The West Facade will crumble until all that remains are the columns and the steps. The same thing will happen to the Capitol dome — it will cave in from the center. And the Washington Monument will eventually topple over until it’s only a stump surrounded by swampy greenery and cherry blossom trees. Those ruins are always there as you walk through the capital. They are always there, just beneath all the awfully important things happening in the city.
There is a concept in architecture known as ruin value. It’s the idea that you should design your buildings with the foreknowledge that they will eventually decay — that you should design beautiful buildings that will make beautiful ruins. The Nazis claimed they invented the concept, but of course they didn’t actually invent it. In the 19th century, when the British architect John Soane presented his plan for the Bank of England, he included a sketch of what the bank would look like as a ruin.
The Nazis claimed they invented the idea of ruin value because they idealized Greek and Roman culture and believed they were the descendants of those civilizations; but that’s only another example of the Nazis being blinded by their own racism. Yes, ruins are generally a Eurocentric fascination but what could be more stunning than the ruins of Yax Mital — the a Mayan city buried in the middle of the lush Guatemalan rainforest. Or Teotihuacan in the dusty center of Mexico? Tens of thousands of now-forgotten people lived in each of those cities and some of them were awfully important.
What I’m saying is that ruins say something about what we’ve been but they also say something about where we’re going. And when you bear both those things in mind, when you keep them somewhere in the back of your mind, it’s a bit easier to live here in the post-Trump wasteland of America. So what, you might say — so what that the country is going to shit? At least it will make a beautiful ruin.
The Boys on the Bus is about the political reporters covering the 1972 presidential election and when you read it, you’re particularly struck by a man named Raymond Apple, who worked for The New York Times. Apple spent his career at the top of the Washington ladder, he was the Times’ lead man in the capital for decades. But, of course, nobody remembers him now. So, when you read that as a young reporter staring ambitiously up the ladder, you get a little jaded. You begin to think things like well, this whole thing is all just transient bullshit, so why am I taking it so seriously?
The Decline of the West is one of those super dense books that you can read in about a hundred different ways. I’m not sure if I even understood it correctly. I stumbled across it because I was reading Scott Fitzgerald’s journals and he wrote about it a lot. But the book also influenced a lot of fascists, so you’ve got to be careful with it. Basically, it’s about this theory of history that says societies grow and collapse along cycles. This happened with the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians and now — if you believe this idea — it’s happening with western society.
The thing I love about Hubert Robert’s pieces is the idea that you can get entirely lost in them. In 2016, when his paintings were on display at the National Gallery, the Washington Post’s art critic mused that “one might gaze at the happy painted figures moving among those magnificent ruins and imagine oneself not just a viewer, but also a participant in the spectacle.”
What I’m saying is that it feels awfully important to be awfully important in Washington until you step outside of it and consider the Roman ruins. The Pantheon and the Roman Senate and Roman temples and the obvious fact that there were hundreds of thousands of people in Ancient Rome who thought they were awfully important but now they’re all forgotten. All that remains are the ruins.
Beautiful piece.
Terrific post.