21 April, 2015

R is for Ruin

The greatest puzzle ever: putting the Parthenon back together.
I love ruins.  My favourite place in all the world is atop the Acropolis in Athens, which can be swarming with tourists at the height of summer, yet still somehow allows one to feel a quietude, peacefulness and connection to the planet, like nowhere else – not that I've ever experienced, anyway.

Selfie taken on the Acropolis in Athens in 2005
(before the advent of "selfies").

The late, and wonderful Christopher Hitchens wrote of the place, in 2009

But did you know, for example, that the Parthenon forms, if viewed from the sky, a perfect equilateral triangle with the Temple of Aphaea, on the island of Aegina, and the Temple of Poseidon, at Cape Sounion? Did you appreciate that each column of the Parthenon makes a very slight inward incline, so that if projected upward into space they would eventually steeple themselves together at a symmetrical point in the empyrean? The “rightness” is located somewhere between the beauty of science and the science of beauty.
Hitchens espouses the "rightness" of the Parthenon – how it is (or was) “the one building in the world which may be assessed as absolutely right.” and now, in its state of ruin it is no less perfect.  It is.

 
My appreciation of decay extends beyond ancient buildings, to other things as well:  furniture, books, ephemera...  I don't necessarily need to know the story of something, but am warmed just knowing it has lived.  Well, perhaps not lived, but that it has existed in time, experienced the vibrations of the lives around it.  And possibly even absorbed the spirits...

Nothing is more perfect, more comforting and more interesting and engaging, than something less than perfect. 

Perhaps people are the best example.

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