Ruined
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
I first became aware of the power of that one word ruin when reading the poetry of Gerald Stern. It seems the very opposite of beauty, and yet how close the two words are often found on a page—how near and next of kin are beauty and ruin. Yesterday, reading Colum McCann on the train, there was that word again, often. When Michael Ondaatje speaks the word it is all shush and reverence.
"When we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future," Christopher Woodward wrote in In Ruins.
Is that how it is for you, or is it just this thing that happens to the incurably love-riddled melancholy?
