dream house

Given there is so much disorder, chaos in the world, why should we add to it?

Anyone who has visited the South Bank, lived on a council estate, or seen the university of Essex will immediately understand just how soul destroying and ugly modern architecture is. One can only imagine Eastern Europe to be any worse. Underlying both, of course, is Bentham's utilitarianism/communism. The irony being that what is seen in purely utilitarian terms ends up as useless (and at a much quicker rate).

"Ruin porn".

An interesting term, suggesting a kind gaze, full of of lust for disasters, signs of disintegration, abandonment (is this so very different from the Romantic age's love of ruins?). Perhaps. There, 'brokenness' suggested wholeness, the idea that something was lost: we live in a broken world but to appreciate absence we must have a prior notion of 'presence'. Or it suggested the continual survival, even in the barest outline, of something once loved and valued. But now all we have to go by are fragments. We live in a fragmentary world and that's all there is, all there ever was. God and the cosmos are not even in the equation. If-and it's a big 'if- anything is of value it is because I say it is so. There is no discovery or finding, only a making. There is no 'world' so to speak, only 'I'. The world is lyingly added.

Why does beauty matter?

You've thought about this a lot recently especially since you live now without much music or art and see fewer and fewer beautiful women (the women are either "aunties" or silly young girls). The city of gardens with its leafy suburbs is now a city of crass commercialism: glaring and tacky billboards, awful cheap imitations of Dubai-style building, and the insulated bubble-like shopping malls that are a feature of just about every city nowadays.

Music: dissonance.

At a store you heard some rap music being played and it was the most awful rubbish one could imagine. You wonder if anyone could even understand what was being played: "I'll take two women and fuck you ho" sort of thing. Charming!

To even mention the word taste today is to open oneself to the charge of elitism and snobbery (whereas, of course, you are arguing for just the opposite!). Khair...Here's some Scruton: Roger