Quote of the Day (Evelyn Waugh, on Building, ‘The Highest Achievement of Man’)

“I have always loved building, holding it to be not only the highest achievement of man but one in which, at the moment of consummation, things were most clearly taken out of his hands and perfected, without his intention, by other means, and I regarded men as something much less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the long, fruitful life of their homes. More even than the work of the great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation, while time curbed the artist's pride and the Philistine's vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman. In such buildings England abounded, and in the last decade of their grandeur, Englishmen seemed for the first time to become conscious of what before was taken for granted, and to salute their achievements at the moment of extinction.” —English novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), Brideshead Revisited (1945)

I would have preferred to use with this passage an image from the great 1980s British mini-series adaptation of Waugh’s novel starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews. But this one, from the 2008 film with Matthew Goode as narrator Charles Ryder, Ben Whishaw as his doomed friend Sebastian Flyte, and Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain, contains in the background the kind of building I associate with this quotation.