John Ruskin: A Mind As Bright as Fireflies | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

John Ruskin: The Most Remarkable Englishman of All Time:
A Mind as Bright and Eccentric as Fireflies!

I spent a happy couple of hours in the Ashmolean’s exhibtion of the Pre-Raphaelites in Italy http://wanderingbetweentwoworlds.blogspot.com/2010/11/pre-raphaelites-in-italy-ashmolean.html and realized again what a seminal and remarkable figure John Ruskin was in the history of England, the history of art, the history of economics, the history of literature, and any number of disciplines.

Ruskin, an only child of doting parents, inherited money. Not a major fortune–his father was a wine-dealer–but enough so that he could afford to buy art (an absolute necessity and addiction for him) and beautiful objects, books, furniture, fossils, marble, houses such as Brantwood–and never need to work.

But work, he did. With furious passion! The Complete Works of Ruskin stretches to 38 volumes–books on flowers and rocks and Florence; on economics and Venice and Amiens, on art and architecture and painting. He knew everything, was interested in everything. He was a man of passion, who lived intensely with intense pleasure. His autobiography, Praeterita, written behind the back of his controlling young cousin and caretaker, who opposed his writing, is a treasure–for what it reveals of Ruskin’s life, mind and thinking, his tumultous life–ten lives in one!!–and Victorian thought.

Though in his last years, he fell into the power of foolish people, Joan and Arthur Severn, who took over his house and abused him while ostensibly caring for him, let us not mourn overmuch, for his intense power of intellectual enjoyment added much joy to his life.

Let me close as Ruskin closes his autobiography, written with a herculean effort even as his last and final breakdown closed in on him, written in despair, summoning up his last efforts of concentration,
“Fonte Branda I last saw with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked together that evening in the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the thunderous clouds still lighted from the west, and the openly golden sky calm behind the Gate of Siena’s heart, with its still golden words, ‘Cor magis tibi Sena pandit,’ and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.”

And how Ruskin’s writing still shines, mixed with fireflies and lightning, and more intense than the stars!

See also http://theoxfordchristian.blogspot.com/2011/02/quest-for-joy-3-fireflies.html