The answer was, of course, Ruskin himself, who liked to boast, in another analogy between the function of art and that of eating and drinking, that he bottled skies as carefully as his sherry-importing father did sherries. Here are two diary entries for sky-bottling days in London in the autumn of 1857:
1 November: A vermilion morning, all waves of soft scarlet, sharp at the edge, and gradated to purple. Grey scud moving slowly beneath it from the south-west, heaps of grey cumuli—between the scud and cirrus—at horizon. It issued in an exquisite day. … All purple and blue in distance, and misty sunshine near on the trees, and green fields. … Note the exquisite effect of the golden leaves scattered on the blue sky, and the horse-chestnut, thin and small, dark against them in stars.
3 November: Dawn purple, flushed, delicate. Bank of grey cloud, heavy at six. Then the lighted purple cloud showing through it, open sky of dull yellow above—all grey, and darker scud going across it obliquely, from the south-west—moving fast, yet never stirring from its place, at last melting away. It expands into a sky of brassy flaked light on grey—passes away into grey morning.
8.
The effectiveness of Ruskin's word-painting derived from his method of not only describing what places looked like (‘the grass was green, the earth was grey-brown') but also analysing their effect on us in psychological language (‘the grass seemed expansive, the earth timid'). He recognised that many places strike us as beautiful not on the basis of aesthetic criteria—because the colours match or symmetry and proportion are present—but on the basis of psychological criteria, inasmuch as they embody a value or mood of importance to us.
One morning in London, he watched some cumulus clouds from his window. A factual description might have noted that they formed a wall, almost completely white, with a few indentations that allowed some sun through. But Ruskin approached his subject more psychologically: ‘The true cumulus, the most majestic of clouds… is for the most part windless; the movements of its masses being solemn, continuous, inexplicable, a steady advance or retiring, as if they were animatedly an inner will, or compelled by an unseen power' (emphasis added).
In the Alps, he described pine trees and rocks in similarly psychological terms: ‘I can never stay long without awe under an Alpine cliff, looking up to its pines, as they stand on the inaccessible juts and perilous ledges of an enormous wall, in quiet multitudes, each like the shadow of the one beside it—upright, fixed, not knowing each other. You cannot reach them, cannot cry to them;—those trees never heardhnman voice; they are far above all sound but of the winds. No foot ever stirred fallen leaf of theirs. All comfortless they stand, yet with such iron will that the rock itself looks bent and shattered beside them—fragile, weak, inconsistent, compared to their dark energy of delicate life and monotony of enchanted pride. ‘ [Emphasis added]
Clouds, engraving byj. C. Armytage after a drawing byj. M. W Turner, from John Ru skin's Modern Painters, Vol. y, 1860
Through such psychological descriptions, we seem to come closer to answering the question of why a place has stirred us. We come closer to the Ruskinian goal of consciously understanding what we have loved.
9.
It would scarcely have been possible to guess that the man parked at the kerb opposite a row of large office blocks was doing some word-painting. The only hint was a notepad pressed against the wheel, on which he occasionally scribbled something between long periods of staring.
It was eleven-thirty at night, and I had been driving around the docks for several hours, stopping for coffee at London City Airport (where I had longingly watched the last flight, a Crossair Avrò RJ85, take to the skies, bound for Zurich—or for Baudelaire's ‘anywhere! anywhere!'). On my way home, I came upon the giant illuminated towers of the West India Dock. The offices seemed to have no connection with the surrounding landscape of modest and weakly lit houses; they would have been more at home, I thought, on the banks of the Hudson or to one side of the space shuttle at Cape Canaveral. Steam was rising from the top of two adjacent towers, and the whole area had been painted with an even, sparse coating of fog. The lights were still on in most floors, and even from a distance, one could see computer terminals, meeting rooms, potted plants and flipcharts inside.
It was a beautiful scene, and along with the impression of beauty came the desire to possess its source—a desire that, to follow Ruskin, only art could properly satisfy.
I began word-painting. Descriptive passages came most readily: the offices were tall; the top of one tower was like a pyramid; it had ruby-red lights on its side; the sky was not black but an orangey-yellow But because such a factual description seemed of little help to me in pinning down why I found the scene so impressive, I attempted to analyse its beauty in more psychological terms. The power of the scene appeared to be located in the effect of the night and of the fog on the towers. Night drew attention to facets of the offices that were submerged in the day. Lit by the sun, the offices could seem normal, repelling questions as effectively as their windows repelled glances. But night upset this claim to normality, it allowed one to see inside and wonder at how strange, frightening and admirable they were. The offices embodied order and cooperation among thousands, and at the same time regimentation and tedium. A bureaucratic vision of seriousness was undermined, or at least questioned, by the night. One wondered in the darkness what the flipcharts and office terminals were for: not that they were redundant, just that they might be stranger and more dubitable than daylight had allowed us to think.
At the same time, fog ushered in nostalgia. Foggy nights may, like certain smells, carry us back to other times we experienced them. I thought of nights at university, walking home along illuminated playing fields, and of the differences between my life then and my life now, which led to a bittersweet sadness about the difficulties that had beset me then and the precious things that had since been lost to me.
There were bits of paper all over the car now. The standard of the word-painting was not far above that of my childlike drawing of an oak tree in the Langdale Valley. But quality was not the point. I had at least attempted to follow one strand of what Ruskin judged to be the twin purposes of art: to make sense of pain and to fathom the sources of beauty.
And, as he had pointed out when presented with a series of misshapen drawings that a group of his pupils had produced on their travels through the English countryside: ‘I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw'
RETURN
IX
On Habit
1.
I returned to London from Barbados to find that the city had stubbornly refused to change. I had seen azure skies and giant sea anemones, I had slept in a raffia bungalow and eaten a kingfish, I had swum beside baby turtles and read in the shade of coconut trees. But my hometown was unimpressed. It was still raining. The park was still a pond; the skies were still funereal. When we are in a good mood and it is sunny we may be tempted to impute a connection between what happens inside and outside of us, but the appearance of London on my return was a reminder of the indifference of the world to any of the events unfolding in the lives of its inhabitants. I felt despair at being home. I felt there could be few worse places on Earth than the one I had been fated to spend my existence in.