The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [62]
3 November: Dawn purple, flushed, delicate. Bank of grey cloud, heavy at six. Then the lighted purple cloud showing through it, open sky of dull yellow above—all grey, and darker scud going across it obliquely, from the south-west—moving fast, yet never stirring from its place, at last melting away. It expands into a sky of brassy flaked light on grey—passes away into grey morning.
8.
The effectiveness of Ruskin's word-painting derived from his method of not only describing what places looked like (‘the grass was green, the earth was grey-brown') but also analysing their effect on us in psychological language (‘the grass seemed expansive, the earth timid'). He recognised that many places strike us as beautiful not on the basis of aesthetic criteria—because the colours match or symmetry and proportion are present—but on the basis of psychological criteria, inasmuch as they embody a value or mood of importance to us.
One morning in London, he watched some cumulus clouds from his window. A factual description might have noted that they formed a wall, almost completely white, with a few indentations that allowed some sun through. But Ruskin approached his subject more psychologically: ‘The true cumulus, the most majestic of clouds… is for the most part windless; the movements of its masses being solemn, continuous, inexplicable, a steady advance or retiring, as if they were animatedly an inner will, or compelled by an unseen power' (emphasis added).
In the Alps, he described pine trees and rocks in similarly psychological terms: ‘I can never stay long without awe under an Alpine cliff, looking up to its pines, as they stand on the inaccessible juts and perilous ledges of an enormous wall, in quiet multitudes, each like the shadow of the one beside it—upright, fixed, not knowing each other. You cannot reach them, cannot cry to them;—those trees never heardhnman voice; they are far above all sound but of the winds. No foot ever stirred fallen leaf of theirs. All comfortless they stand, yet with such iron will that the rock itself looks bent and shattered beside them—fragile, weak, inconsistent, compared to their dark energy of delicate life and monotony of enchanted pride. ‘ [Emphasis added]
Clouds, engraving byj. C. Armytage after a drawing byj. M. W Turner, from John Ru skin's Modern Painters, Vol. y, 1860
Through such psychological descriptions, we seem to come closer to answering the question of why a place has stirred us. We come closer to the Ruskinian goal of consciously understanding what we have loved.
9.
It would scarcely have been possible to guess that the man parked at the kerb opposite a row of large office blocks was doing some word-painting. The only hint was a notepad pressed against the wheel, on which he occasionally scribbled something between long periods of staring.
It was eleven-thirty at night, and I had been driving around the docks for several hours, stopping for coffee at London City Airport (where I had longingly watched the last flight, a Crossair Avrò RJ85, take to the skies, bound for Zurich—or for Baudelaire's ‘anywhere! anywhere!'). On my way home, I came upon the giant illuminated towers of the West India Dock. The offices seemed to have no connection with the surrounding landscape of modest and weakly lit houses; they would have been more at home, I thought, on the banks of the Hudson or to one side of the space shuttle at Cape Canaveral. Steam was rising from the top of two adjacent towers, and the whole area had been painted with an even, sparse coating of fog. The lights were still on in most floors, and even from