The Pleasure of Ruins

In “Among the Dorians,” one of the essays collected in Barbarian in the Garden, Zbigniew Herbert describes a visit to Paestum, founded by Greek colonists in Italy in the seventh century BCE. Temperamentally, Herbert was an odd species of antiquarian. For him, the past was never past. It remained present and he possessed the rare gift of dwelling there while rooted in the now. Even his briefest poems coexist effortlessly in three or four levels of time – say, the present, World War II, his pre-war youth in Lvov and the seventh century BCE. Herbert starts his essay like this: “I tried to convince Naples of the artistic merits of silence. In vain. Some aesthetics are based on noise.”

Herbert preaches the aesthetic virtues of silence to the most voluble of people. At the same time, he gives us an off-the-cuff distillation of his own poetic practice. Herbert’s poems read like hard-won affronts to silence, surrounded by it but strong and resilient. In a poem, “Mr. Cogito and Pop,” his eponymous stand-in meditates on “the aesthetics of noise.” At Paestum, the ruins of three Doric temples, dedicated to Hera, Apollo and Athena, remain standing. In the ancient stones Herbert sees another reflection of his own artistic method:

“The first impression borders on disappointment: the Greek temples are smaller, lower than I expected. They stand on a flat plain under an immense sky, pressed to the ground, an exceptional situation since the majority of sacred buildings were erected on hills and absorbed the lines of the mountain landscape which gave them a certain airiness.

“In Paestum, where nature refused to assist, one may study the Dorians in a cool dispassionate manner. It is the proper approach for the most masculine architectural style, whose austerity summarizes the history of its northern creators. Thickset, solid and athletic as befits an heroic age. The lines of the columns display a clear muscular power. The broad capitals strain under the architraves’ weight.”

If you expect poems to be flamboyantly eloquent, to make “noise”, Herbert’s might at first disappoint you. Like the temple ruins, his poems are most often small, masculine, austere, solid and muscular. More parallels:

“The temple’s mass is compact, yet lighter than in archaic structures. Its proportions are perfectly balanced; the separate elements are a clear, logical whole. The Dorian artist worked in both stone and empty spaces between the columns, shaping air and light in an Orphic text.”

For contrast, consider Goethe’s reaction to his first view of Paestum in 1787, almost two centuries before Herbert’s, as reported in Rose Macaulay’s The Pleasure of Ruins:

“The first sight excited nothing but astonishment. I found myself in a perfectly strange world; for, as centuries pass from the severe to the pleasing, they form man’s taste at the same time…. Our eyes, and through them our whole being, have been used to and decidedly prepossessed in favour of a lighter style of architecture; so that these crowded masses of stumpy conical pillars appear heavy, not to say frightful. But I soon recollected myself…and in less than an hour found myself reconciled to it – nay, I went so far as to thank my genius for permitting me to see with my own eyes such well-preserved remains….”

Herbert, in Paestum, with its mingling of mutability and permanence, feels at home:

“One must spend at least a whole day in the ruins to understand the life of stones in the sun. They change with the time of day and year. In the morning the Paestum limestone is grey, at noon – honey, with the sunset – scarlet. I touch it and feel the warmth of human flesh. Green lizards run across like shivers.”

It makes sense that a man who wrote a poem about a pebble, calling it “a perfect creature,” could feel the human warmth in an ancient stone.