I am chastened.

Okay, you always hear about John Ruskin, Ruskin this, Ruskin that, Ruskin was so brilliant, blah-de-blah-de-blah. And perhaps you have thought, as I have thought, "Big deal. Not as famous as, say, Friedrich Nietzsche or, or, George Bernard Shaw, or even Benjamin Disraeli. I will now go and read something not by Ruskin."

On my recent travels, I picked up a relatively inexpensive, and encouragingly slim, volume of Ruskin's writings. It begins with a piece called "The Nature of Gothic." This essay starts out being about what makes Gothic architecture what it is — what distinguishes it from, say, Byzantine. Yawn. But wait —

Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul's force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last — a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned: saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also, and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him. And, whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind and within them.

I am breathless.