The pleasure of ruins captures the imagination because our most monumental efforts to make things that stand still for ever are seen to result ultimately in flow; because nature’s vitality triumphs over the schemes of mankind; because the vestigial and dilapidated give rise to imaginative sublimity, as a mountain partially lost in mist seems more awe-inspiring than one in plain sight. All of which return us from the world of the left hemisphere to that of the right.
