Anglo Irish Docklands Headquarters - charcoal notebook-sketch by Ronan McDonnell
In Ireland where we once had crumbling buildings exhibiting our departed poverty we now have bigger crumbling buildings displaying our lost wealth.
According to the philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. That means most, if not all of us.
Consider the current global economic decline. It comes after a period of high stability and growth of wealth. Not too dissimilar to the United States at the end of its first period of relative stability. The lawless days of the wild west were ending when railroads joined the two sides of the expansive country linking far-flung farms, mines and other sources of wealth. Fortunes were there for the taking. The massive earnings of the industrialists, bankers and trail-blazing venture capitalists resulted in edifices of blatantly over-indulgent excess.
Years later Joan Didion would describe these buildings and the times that created them, as viewed from a more austere era after World War 2:
“I went to Newport not long ago, to see the great stone fin-de-siècle ‘cottages’ in which certain rich Americans once summered. The places loom still along Bellevue Avenue and Cliff Walk, one after another, silk curtains frayed but gargoyles intact, monuments to something beyond themselves; houses built, clearly, to some transcendental point. No one had made it clear to me exactly what the point was. I had been promised that the great summer houses were museums and warned they were monstrosities, had been assured that the way of life they suggested was graceful beyond belief and that it was gross beyond description, that the rich were very different from you and me and yes, the had lower taxes, and if ‘The Breakers’ was perhaps not entirely tasteful, still, où sont les croquet wickets d’antan. I had read Edith Wharton and I had read Henry James, who thought that the houses should stand there always, reminders ‘of the peculiarly awkward vengeances of affronted proportion and discretion’”.
Bibliography
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion, Flamingo, 1968
This article was posted by Ronan McDonnell on
Monday, November 22nd, 2010 at
14:55.
It is archived in America, Culture, Dublin, History, Ireland, Writing and tagged economics, joan didion, learning, past, wealth.
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