Welcome back, and thanks for reading. After two quite long articles on the decline and fall of both America’s WASP aristocracy and the British landed elite, I wanted to send out a shorter one as something of a break from that long, dense content. So, here is a shorter one on something I find interesting. I hope you enjoy it.
It is impossible to escape a feeling of decay when going about public life in any Western nation. Where once there were clean parks, beautiful stone buildings, and healthy-looking people who put in effort to look refined and dignified, now we’re surrounded by monstrosities, slovenliness, and intentional ugliness. This is why pictures and videos from the past are so immensely radicalizing, as I have written about before.
Even when building beautifully is attempted now, something generally seems off. The spirit that led to the creation of beautiful things once—a pulsing surge of civilizational confidence and vitality—isn’t there now, and so new attempts at beautiful buildings or the like generally seem wrong. They’re too gaudy, for one. Further, all the little things that used to go into such structures—molding, portraiture, furniture, and so on—isn’t what it used to be. Either it’s stuck in a past environment that no longer exists—Chippendale furniture, for example—or it is modern and so looks inappropriate and ridiculous when contrasted with the generally Palladian or Neo-Classical structure it has been put. The National Trust trying to make the Ickworth House library more “accessible” by replacing the old furniture with beanbag chairs is one of the more entertaining examples.1