Other texts form MP 1 and 2


This first chapter of MP II is all about contemplation in Platonic sense


MP 2 in this age when destroy so much energies of Nation ...





MP II, p. 31 

 Art, properly so called, is no recreation; it cannot be learned at spare moments, nor pursued when we have nothing better to do. It is no handiwork for drawing-room tables, no relief of the ennui of boudoirs; it must be understood and undertaken seriously, or not at all.* (4.26) 

 .... the object I propose to myself is of no partial nor accidental importance.⁴ It is not now to distinguish between disputed degrees of ability in individuals, or agreeableness in canvases; it is not now to expose the ignorance or defend the principles of party or person; it is to summon the moral energies of the nation to a forgotten duty, to display the use, force, and function of a great body of neglected sympathies and desires, and to elevate to its healthy and beneficial operation that art which, being altogether addressed to them, rises or falls with their variableness of vigour, now leading them with Tyrtæan fire, now singing them to sleep with baby murmurings.(4.27-28)

 And at this time, when the iron roads are tearing up the surface of Europe, as grapeshot do the sea; when their great net² is drawing and twitching the ancient frame and strength ^{(of England)} together, contracting all its various life, its rocky arms and rural heart, into a narrow, finite, calculating metropolis of manufactures; (4.31) 

Continue faculty of contemplation (theoria) is highest 








Add text here  about Gothic Grotesque from SV III

Letter 5, from Fors, may 71,  

THE WHITE-THORN BLOSSOM²

“For lo, the winter is past,

The rain is over and gone,

The flowers appear on the earth,

The time of the singing of birds is come,

Arise, O my fair one, my dove,

And come.”³

Denmark Hill,

1st May, 1871.

1. My Friends,—It has been asked of me, very justly, why I have hitherto written to you of things you were little likely to care for, in words which it was difficult for you to understand.⁴

I have no fear but that you will one day understand all my poor words,—the saddest of them, perhaps, too well. But I have great fear that you may never come to understand these written above, which are part of a king’s love-song, in one sweet May, of many long since gone. (La lune de Jancovici? ) 

14. There are three Material things, not only useful, but essential to Life. No one “knows how to live”³ till he has got them.

These are, Pure Air, Water, and Earth.

15. The first three, I said, are Pure Air, Water, and Earth.

Heaven gives you the main elements of these. You can destroy them at your pleasure, or increase, almost without limit, the available quantities of them.

You can vitiate the air by your manner of life, and of death, to any extent. You might easily vitiate it so as to bring such a pestilence on the globe as would end all of you. You, or your fellows, German and French, are at present busy in vitiating it to the best of your power in every direction; chiefly at this moment with corpses, and animal and vegetable ruin in war: changing men, horses, and garden-stuff into noxious gas. But everywhere, and all day long, you are vitiating it with foul chemical exhalations; and the horrible nests, which you call towns, are little more than laboratories for the distillation into heaven of venomous smokes and smells, mixed with effluvia from decaying animal matter, and infectious miasmata from purulent disease.

29.91  On the other hand, your power of purifying the air, by dealing properly and swiftly with all substances in corruption; by absolutely forbidding noxious manufactures; and by planting in all soils the trees which cleanse and invigorate earth and atmosphere,—is literally infinite. You might make every breath of air you draw, food.

16. Secondly, your power over the rain and river-waters of the earth is infinite. You can bring rain where you will,¹ by planting wisely and tending carefully;—drought where you will, by ravage of woods and neglect of the soil. You might have the rivers of England as pure as the crystal of the rock; beautiful in falls, in lakes, in living pools; so full of fish that you might take them out with your hands instead of nets. Or you may do always as you have done now, turn every river of England into a common sewer, so that you cannot so much as baptize an English baby but with filth, unless you hold its face out in the rain; and even that falls dirty.

17. Then for the third, Earth,—meant to be nourishing for you, and blossoming. You have learned, about it, that there is no such thing as a flower;² and as far as your scientific hands and scientific brains, inventive of explosive and deathful, instead of blossoming and life-giving, Dust, can contrive, you have turned the Mother-Earth, Demeter,*into the Avenger-Earth, Tisiphone¹—with the voice of your brother’s blood crying out of it,² in one wild harmony round all its murderous sphere.

This is what you have done for the three Material Useful Things.

Texts from Stormcloud lectures :
as Rosenberg ? :
Lecture 1 : §1-4,
§29 etc....

RUSKIN'S TWO WARMING TEXTS

                                                 In 1869, this is what Ruskin wrote in his preface to the Queen of the Air :

This first day of May, 1869, I am writing where my work was begun thirty-five years ago, within sight of the snows of the higher Alps.2 In that half of the permitted life of man, I have seen strange evil brought upon every scene that I best loved, or tried to make beloved by others.3 The light which once flushed those pale summits with its rose at dawn, and purple at sunset, is now umbered and faint; the air which once inlaid the clefts of all their golden crags with azure is now defiled with languid coils of smoke, belched from worse than volcanic fires; their very glacier waves are ebbing, and their snows fading,4 as if Hell had breathed on them; the waters that once sank at their feet into crystalline rest are now dimmed and foul, from deep to deep, and shore to shore. These are no careless words—they are accurately—horribly—true. I know what the Swiss lakes were; no pool of Alpine fountain at its source was clearer. This morning, on the Lake of Geneva, at half a mile from the beach, I could scarcely see my oar-blade a fathom deep.

lThe light, the air, the waters, all defiled! How of the earth itself?

MtBlanc.jpg
Vue of Mont Blanc form the Col de la Faucille

Praeterita, I, ch.9, § 194, "The Col de Faucille on that day of 1835, opened to me in distinct  vision the Holy Land of my future work and true home in this world". 

He pursued this theme in 1873 in Fors 34

La Douce Dame, of oct 1873, §11, (LE27.635)                                               

More than the life of Switzerland,—its very snows,—eternal, as one foolishly called them,—are passing away,2 as if in omen of evil. One-third, at least, in the depth of all the ice of the Alps has been lost in the last twenty years; and the change of climate thus indicated is without any parallel in authentic history. In its bearings on the water supply and atmospheric conditions of central Europe, it is the most important phenomenon, by far, of all that offer themselves to the study of living men of science: yet in Professor Tyndall’s recent work on the glaciers,* though he notices the change as one which, “if continued, will reduce the Swiss glaciers to the mere spectres of their former selves,” he offers no evidence, nor even suggestion, as to the causes of the change itself.’

The first of these texts dates from 1871.

In july of that year , Ruskin wrote in Fors 8, § 1, (27.134),

“…It is the first of July, and I sit down to write by the dismallest light that ever yet I wrote by; namely, the light of this midsummer morning, in mid-England (Matlock, Derbyshire), in the year 1871.

For the sky is covered with grey cloud;—not rain-cloud, but a dry black veil, which no ray of sunshine can jpierce; partly diffused in must, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible, yet without any substance, or wreathing, or colour of its own.2 And everywhere the leaves of the trees are shaking fitfully, as they do before a thunderstorm; only not violently, but enough to show the passing to and fro of a strange, bitter, blighting wind. Dismal enough, had it been the first morning of its kind that summer had sent. But during all this spring, in London, and at Oxford, through meagre March, through changelessly

sullen April, through despondent May, and darkened June, morning after morning has come grey-shrouded thus.

And it is a new thing to me, and a very dreadful one. I am fifty years old, and more; and since I was five, have gleaned the best hours of my life in the sun of spring and summer mornings; and I never saw such as these, till now.

And the scientific men are busy as ants, examining the sun, and the moon, and the seven stars, and can tell me all about them, I believe, by this time; and how they move, and what they are made of.

And I do not care, for my part, two copper spangles how they move, nor what they are made of. I can’t move them any other way than they go, nor make them of anything else, better than they are made. But I would care much and give much, if I could be told where this bitter wind comes from, and what it is made of.

For, perhaps, with forethought, and fine laboratory science, one might make it of something else.’ ”


Stormcloud texts
Use Rosenberg's choice

Lecture 1
§1-4
then §29-36, 38-39

§ 85. The Antipodes 

THE STORM-CLOUD OF THE  NINETEENTH CENTURY

LECTURE I

(Delivered on February, 4, 1884)

1. Let me first assure my audience that I have no arrière pensée in the title chosen for this lecture. I might, indeed, have meant, and it would have been only too like me to mean, any number of things by such a title;—but, to-night, I mean simply what I have said, and propose to bring to your notice¹ a series of cloud phenomena, which, so far as I can weigh existing evidence, are peculiar to our own times; yet which have not hitherto received any special notice or description from meteorologists.