Kindred Spirits Guardini and Ruskin
I am reminded of how like things are brought together in the mind, and how, while separated by years and miles, these can share so close an affinity that one could think they originated in the same creative impulse and in the same creator. This fills us with hope (at least I am so filled), that there are threads in time that to the discerning will not be lost, and that right has a kind of invulnerability and immortality that will not permit its thought to be extinguished, no matter the efforts of systematizers and humanitarian busibodies of whatever stripe. By way of example, I have been thinking of the unanimity of spirit found in the painting by Ruskin titled “Lake, Land and Cloud (Near Como)” and the letters exchanged between Guardini and Louis Dupre during Guardini’s stay there at the lake. Could there be any closer commerce between two minds separated by the accidents of birth? In the shadows and dark outlines of poplar trees, in the weightless hulks of clouds, I am taken back to Guardini’s gentle humanity, his utter, unpretentious simplicity (for there can be much pretention in the manque of primitivism), and the difficulty of accepting life, absent the tendency to treat the moment, this moment, as somehow cumulative and directional. I am reminded here of the notion of “spiritual race” and how this certainly has meaning as an epiphenomenon of which the modern mind is almost completely ignorant. A critic of Guardini’s has written that he falsifies the “individuality” available to the modern man as a result of the new techniques of production. But I think that the critic misunderstands individuality, introducing confusion between mere multiplicity of choice and individuality of person. If individuality can be reduced to the process of selection among an array of products, then the term has lost all meaning, to my mind. What of the play of individuality of production, of being, rather than consumption. In this area, the modern man is utterly the poorer for his advancement. This view of man as consumer is an execrable bit of reductionism, reducing men to instrumentalities of economy. I can see this piece of reasoning all the hallmarks of that “libertarian” economism in which all things are “products,” and subject to the abstraction of price. This is the very monstrosity of “technique” against which Guardini inveighs, and I am convinced that the “libertarian” has no effective reply.
