Wise words from John Ruskin, in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 4 November 1860:
When I begin to think at all I get into states of disgust and fury at the way the mob is going on (meaning by mob, chiefly Dukes, crown princes, and such like persons) that I choke ; and have to go to the British Museum and look at Penguins till I get cool. I find Penguins at present the only comfort in life. One feels everything in the world so sympathetically ridiculous; one can’t be angry when one looks at a Penguin.
i wonder how he and Herzog would get along...
ReplyDeleteAlso, do we think 'and look at Penguins till I get cool' is a little bit of wordplay? i reckon Ruskin is well into that shit. At some point someone at college was doing a research project on Ruskin i think as the library had about a hundred books by him from the reserve collection out on a shelf in the special reading area. Either that or the librarians were really really bored or else really really interested in nineteenth-century art and reading about how great Turner and others were.