Today is the birthday of the great Victorian critic John Ruskin (born 1819). The last time I marked his birth was way back in 2009, when this blog was in its swaddling clothes. I wrote then about the Ruskinian notion of 'illth', the opposite of wealth, creative not of well-being but of ill-being. I was writing when the world was suffering from the prodigious illth-creation of the bankers – this was the time of the 'credit crunch'/ financial crisis (which the bankers of course came through unscathed and unreformed). Today, with the world increasingly controlled by an amoral transnational kleptocracy, and The Machine rolling ever onward in its dehumanising work, illth is everywhere. Ruskin would be appalled, but not, I think, surprised: when a society is without a sacred dimension, a sense of the past and a strong attachment to place and community/nation, this is what happens. A good thing he's not alive to see it – I think even he might be lost for words.
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- Nige
- Nige, who, like Mr Kenneth Horne, prefers to remain anonymous, was also a founder blogger of The Dabbler and a co-blogger on the Bryan Appleyard Thought Experiments blog. He is the sole blogger on this one, and his principal aim is to share various of life's pleasures. These tend to relate to books, art, poems, butterflies, birds, churches, music, walking, weather, drink, etc, with occasional references to the passing scene. His book, The Mother of Beauty: On the Golden Age of English Church Monuments, and Other Matters of Life and Death, is available on Amazon or direct from the author.
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