tional
common way of living, struggles out again and again--blindly and always
so far with a disorderly insuccess....

I began to see in their proper proportion the vast enduring normal human
existence, the peasant's agricultural life, unlettered, laborious and
essentially unchanging on the one hand, and on the other those
excrescences of multitudinous city aggregation, those stormy excesses of
productive energy that flare up out of that life, establish for a time
great unstable strangenesses of human living, palaces, cities, roads,
empires, literatures, and then totter and fall back again into ruin. In
India even more than about the Mediterranean all this is spectacular.
There the peasant goes about his work according to the usage of fifty
thousand years. He has a primitive version of religion, a moral
tradition, a social usage, closely adapted by countless years of trial
and survival to his needs, and the whole land is littered with the
vestiges and abandoned material of those newer, bolder, more
experimental beginnings, beginnings that merely began.

It was when I was going through the panther-haunted palaces of Akbar at
Fatehpur Sikri that I first felt how tremendously the ruins of the past
may face towards the future; the thing there is like a frozen wave that
rose and never broke; and once I had caught that light upon things, I
found the same quality in all the ruins I saw, in Amber and Vijayanagar
and Chitor, and in all that I have seen or heard of, in ancient Rome and
ancient Verona, in Paestum and Cnossus and ancient Athens. None of these
places was ever really finished and done with; the Basilicas of Caesar
and Constantine just as much as the baths and galleries and halls of
audience at Fatehpur Sikri express not ends achieved but thwarted
intentions of permanence. They embody repulse and rejection. They are
trials, abandoned trials, towards ends vaguely apprehended, ends felt
rather than known. Even so was I moved by the Bruges-like emptinesses of
Pekin, in the vast pretensions of its Forbidden City, which are like a
cry, long sustained, that at last dies away in a wail. I saw the place
in 1905 in that slack interval after the European looting and before the
great awakening that followed the Russo-Japanese war. Pekin in a century
or so may be added in its turn to the list of abandoned endeavors.
Insensibly the sceptre passes.... Nearer home than any of these places
have I imagined the same thing; in Paris it