| | I'm joining the Chunkster Reading Challenge for 2010. The goal is to read three books of 450 or more pages. The first book is a Barnes & Noble reprinting of 1996, for 466 pages (ISBN-10 is 0760702489).
English writer Rose Macauley (1881 - 1958) was a critic, biographer, travel writer, and novelist. Pleasure of Ruins (1953) is a comprehensive survey of ruins. As travel writing it presents interestesting descriptions of ancient places, even though seasoned traveller Macauley totally effaces herself from these descriptions. For example:
If ever a dead city held romance it is Petra. . . . Hewn out of ruddy rock in the midst of a mountain wilderness, sumptuous in ornament and savage in environs, poised in wildness like a great carved opal glowing in a desert, this lost caravan city staggers the most experienced traveler.
Having read hundreds of volumes of travel writing from antiquity to the 19th century, as a literary critic, she analyzes how writers have reacted to "the pleasure of ruins." For instance: "Competition for the inspiration of literary works has always been keen among Roman ruins."
For readers interested in archeology and history, we learn that one of the great benefits of ruin hopping is to learn that, architecturally speaking, there's more than one way to do a monument. My only gripe is that she gives only short shrift to Central and South America, echoing Smuael Johnson "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." Yeah, who whould have thought Indians had Teotihuacán or Palenque or Tulum or Tikal or Altun Ha in them?
For those romantics who are less into the science and history, we can also cultivate a a melancholy pessimistic sense of time's inevitable passing and an oddly comic exuberant sense that we are still alive and kicking.
This is a long book and her quiet civilized tone may not be for everybody, but I enjoyed this book.
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