Romantic Rot.(Review)

The Way of All Flesh: The Romance of Ruins, by Midas Dekkers, translated by Sherry Marx-Macdonald (Farrar, Straus, 280 pp., $25)

Hubert Robert, a.k.a. "Robert des Ruines," made a splash at the French Academy's Salon of 1767 with a painting of a landing on the Tiber, which showed the ancient Pantheon looming in the background like a weathered Rock of Ages. Robert's imaginary scene somehow moved Diderot to declare: "There is more poetry, more that is accidental, not merely in a thatched cottage, but in a single tree which has endured the years and the seasons, than in the entire facade of a palace. One must ruin a palace to make it an object of interest."

In this occasionally entertaining but distinctly unsatisfying book, the Dutch writer and biologist Midas Dekkers offers a similarly precious aphorism, Plus belle que la beaute est la ruine de la beaute-"More beautiful than beauty is its ruin." Indeed, Dekkers clumsily echoes Diderot when he proclaims that "three fallen columns, with the tympanums that once adorned them lying at their feet, radiate more dignity than an entire basilica celebrating high Mass." Dekkers's proposition is that decay and ruin should be allowed to take their course, in nature and culture alike. Centuries ago, he notes, pictures portraying a "stairway of life"-with a man ascending by steps from infancy to middle age and then descending to old age and, finally, to the grave-hung in European sitting rooms. But the modern world's infatuation with youth, vitality, and good-as-newness has replaced the stairway with a ladder that leads only upward. The result, he says, is that "we've lost half our lives."

What follows is a rambling, whimsical "symphony of decay." We learn how the human body ages, stone crumbles, steel rusts, paint fades, and corpses rot. We are informed about the life cycles or longevity of green turtles, salmon, mayflies, whales, lake sturgeon, elephants, and the silver-crested cockatoo. We are introduced to bacon beetles and firebrats (little critters that devour libraries) and illuminated as to changing cultural attitudes towards toadstools and bats. We also receive a woefully inadequate account of the significance of ruins for European artists. Everything from entropy to zoos and natural-history museums to the relative size of the scrota of chimps, gorillas, and humans finds its way into the hodgepodge. Some of the information is interesting, some of it trivial-but it just keeps coming, as one digression leads to another. This gets tiresome, as does the author's fashionably off-color postmodern sense of humor.

One of Dekkers's aims is to rid us of any residual 19th-century illusions of inexorable progress in civilization or nature, and he succeeds. But his success, alas, is largely unintentional. The late-romantic sensibility we encounter in The Way of All Flesh points not to romanticism's development, but instead to its decomposition.

Yes, Dekkers is a romantic biologist. And why not? Goethe, a founding father of romanticism, which exalted nature and gave sentiment free rein, was profoundly influenced by his extensive forays into the natural sciences. Goethe's study of the formation and transformation of plants shaped his ideas about the development of art and culture. And romantics long ago naturalized the guiding principles of art and architecture with such catchphrases as "truth to nature" and "organic architecture," while propagating the notion of culture itself as an organism. Darwin, no romantic, abetted this process, insofar as social and cultural phenomena came to be interpreted in terms of his great theory. "Cultural evolution" became a routine justification for modernism, which stipulates that the modern age of rapid scientific and technological progress must generate an art fundamentally distinct from the art of ages past. But Darwin's theory also has been used to justify a materialistic form of naturalism that Goethe would have abhorred-the notion that nothing exists apart from what the senses can detect. Naturalism has thus undermined the spiritual underpinnings of our civilization through different channels-through scientific materialism, and through increasingly ...