Rescue and Reuse

7.Learn

Chatham Dock Yard Museum.

In a society preoccupied with instant gratification, pausing and learning can seem a little old-fashioned and too much like hard work. Ruskin, writing in 1860, was adamant that art is not play:

The end of Art is as serious as that of all other beautiful things … Whatever delight we take in them, be it less or more, is not the delight we take in play … The joy of surprise and incident mingles in music, painting, architecture, and natural beauty itself, in an ennobled and enduring manner … Whenever we care only for new tunes, and new pictures, and new scenes, all power of enjoying Nature or Art is so far perished ...