BuckyE wrote:
And there's the rub. There's no such thing as permanence and yearning for it just leads to unhappiness. And to people believing they can do damaging things without there being bad consequences. We need to foster, however it could be done, the realization the monuments have endured *in spite* of the ineluctable forces tearing them down: that they are fragile remainders of a once much more complete whole.
Nigel represents a long tradition BuckyE, that is perhaps emphasised by the following article;=
http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1877/spabman.htm
William Morris was a socialist and craftsman who believed passionately in the preservation of creative hand work, he founded the anti-restoration society, which argued against the victorians need to "restore" churches, so that when you look up at a church embellished and pinnacled to within an inch of its life, you will know that Morris failed to save it!
He also argued against capitalism as the ruling force of an economy because it ultimately destroyed anything of beauty - and here I note, that selling paintings for millions of pounds is not a particurlarly good way to go about it..
The problem comes in a small country like Britain with so much history to save and so many people needing to live cheek by jowl with all these monuments how much are we going to realistically save.. Stukeley in the 18th c was bemoaning the fact that such a lot was going under the plough, and you have only to look at the plates (Littlestone gives the link) to see how many more barrows there were around Stonehenge.. in the end it is always a battle, who wins is in the lap of the gods.
