The dark side

The Baths of Caracalla, Rome









Rose Macaulay, in her magnificent book, "The Pleasure of Ruins", describes the satisfaction of ruins and the catastrophic element they symbolise:

"The literature of all ages has found beauty in the dark and violent forces, physical and spiritual, of which ruin is one symbol. The symbols change; the need does not. Oedipus, Clytemnestra, Atreus, Medea .. all the atrocious horrors of Greek drama, of Seneca, of Dante's Hell, of Tasso, of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans - these have a profoundly ruinous and welcome gloom" (p. 20)

Of course, humanity has not changed, we only have to watch the tv news or go to a multiplex movie to understand that. But difficult to accept that such a need exists, probably in all of us.