Timeless Beauty

In the Arts and Everyday Life

“I see this courageous book as a sign marking the beginning of the end of the tide of materialism that has prevailed for the last century. It meets a deep and as yet scarcely recognized need. . . . We disregard and undervalue the beautiful at our peril.”

—Kathleen Raine, author, poet and Blake scholar

Once people were instinctively tuned to the beautiful. In those distant days before the advent of the motor car and the washing machine, the electric toothbrush and the wheel, craftsmen and musicians, masons and poets, painters and dancers simply did not know how to make an ugly thing; they could not close their hearts to the light of heaven. For them--countless numbers of them—beauty was as necessary as the air they breathed. It gave dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives and inspired great (but often brutal) civilizations in which people lived creative and useful lives.

Beauty is the nourishment of the soul. It is something that gives us dignity as a species. John Lane calls us to awaken to the possibilities of a culture that recognizes the importance of beauty and to acknowledge that we are only fully human when in contact with the beautiful.

About the author
John Lane is a painter, author and educator. He was Chairman of the Dartington Hall Trust, founding director of the Beaford Arts Centre, and instrumental in the creation of Schumacher College. His books include The Living Tree: Art and the Sacred, A Snake’s Tail Full of Ants: Art, Ecology and Consciousness and Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society (all published by Green Books).