Wordy Wednesday: No Moral Right at All

Two weeks ago, Magistratrium at Myriads of Thoughts posted some quotes from The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill.  They were so wonderful – beautiful and enticing – that I ordered it for my Kindle and planned to start it soon.  I started last Thursday and finished yesterday.  What a lovely, satisfying book.  You can see my review here.

So, now I follow with some quotes of my own … I’m trying to not duplicate hers – lovely as they are – because so much of the book is beautiful.  One theme I noted in the book of seasonality is the idea that we have a responsibility to update (choose your noun here) without destroying the character of the past.  This is a idea that resonates with me as a Classical Educator even though Hill was mostly talking about houses.

I believe you need to handle an old house
carefully, restrain the first urge to knock down and replace and add on,
or even to restore; you need to settle to a place, give it time to
speak to you, about itself, rub along with things as they are and see
how they work. There has been so much lost, so much alteration and
modernisation and ruination at the transitory whim of individual taste
and fashion, so many excrescences have been added which are entirely
wrong in style, so many plain, sensible features, walls, roofs, window
frames, ripped out. It is not a question of my liking or not liking
open-plan living or picture-windows. When you buy an old house, you buy a
small part of the past, a piece of history, and yet you do not become
the owner of that, and never can, you have only taken it on trust for
your lifetime or, more likely nowadays, until you move on and pass it to
someone else, in a cash transaction. You have every legal right,
preservation orders withstanding, to alter and take down and put up, to
imprint your own personality, to wrench a house into a new shape to fit
your own living requirements. But no moral right at all.

 … the castles and the great houses, our national
heritage lies in all those modest, small-scale public and domestic
buildings that still remain in the villages of Great Britain.

… the church of St Nicholas is nothing if not
traditional in its celebrations and so just as, without fail at Harvest
time, ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’, on Easter Day we sing the
resurrection hymn and at Whitsuntide ‘Come Holy Ghost our hearts
inspire’. And so I like it, so it should be, as long as repetition of
what has always been said and sung is not all, and the spirit of each
festival is re-created every year, to renewed …

Our apples are tiny and hard, sour, more or less
inedible even after cooking. This is an old tree, after all. We do not
keep it for what we can get from it – or at least, not in terms of
fruit.

I dread what someone insensitive may do in
rebuilding the place, and dread the smartening and tidying of the
garden, for then no badgers, or owls, or nightjars or parties of
long-tailed tits will come so close to us, the creatures will retreat
further back, on to the Fen again. I shall not see a badger feeding off
the windfall apples next autumn.

(Quoting Thomas Traherne, emphasis mine) “I seemed as one brought into the estate of
innocence. All things were spotless and pure and glorious, yea and
infinitely mine and joyful and precious. I knew not that there were any
sins or complaints or laws. I dreamed not of poverties, contentions or
vices. All tears and quarrels were hidden from mine eyes. Everything was
at rest, free and immortal. I knew nothing of sickness or death or
exaction, in the absence of these I was entertained like an angel with
the works of God in their splendour and glory. I saw all in the peace of
Eden. Heaven and earth did sing my creator’s praises and could not make
more melody to Adam than to me. All time was eternity and a perpetual
Sabbath. Is it not strange that an infant should be heir of the world
and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?”

  Linked to Wednesdays with Words at Ordo-Amoris. Join us with a quote from your current read!