Timeless Beauty - In the Arts and Everyday Life

This is a vital book for the renewal of Western civilisation, with its legacy and acceptance of so much ugliness in modern forms. The foreword was written by the late Kathleen Raine in June last year, so this must have been nearly the last thing she wrote, lamenting the triumph of functionalism over true art and the corresponding absence of beauty. Lane does not mince his words, reminding us that while our civilisation is materialistic, the realm of beauty belongs to the soul - beauty is the nourishment of the soul. This means that we have marginalised imagination, intuition and beauty, and have correspondingly brutalised the world and made ourselves psychically sick in the process. Lane reminds us that crimes of violence in the UK rose from 6,000 in 1950 to 243,000 in 1997. He also reports that as many as 330 million people worldwide suffer from depression. His book is a passionate plea for the restoration of beauty and ranges widely through the arts and architecture, with a wonderful selection of inspiring quotations. I was glad to see Sorokin's distinction between ideational and sensate cultures incorporated but it was a pity that more of the works to which he refers were not illustrated. One could imagine another more sumptuous edition of this book that would make its message even more powerful. It was also surprising that there was no mention of the Prince of Wales, whose support of Temenos and indeed the Platonic view of beauty has been so strong. If you are concerned with the contribution beauty can make to the restoration of spiritual and aesthetic values, then I urge you to read this book.