30 March 2015

Ruskin on tsnius



...or something.
 Not Torah, just interesting.

“...I said of that great and pure society of the dead, that it would allow 'no vain or vulgar person to enter there.' What do you think I meant by a 'vulgar' person? What do you yourselves mean by 'vulgarity'? You will find it a fruitful subject of thought; but, briefly, the essence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation. Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped bluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a deathful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure, without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, that men become vulgar; they are for ever vulgar, precisely in proportion as they are incapable of sympathy, ---of quick understanding, ---of all that, in deep insistence on the common, but most accurate term, may be called the “tact” or “touch-faculty” of body and soul; that tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman has above all creatures; ---fineness and fulness of sensation beyond reason...”

Sesame and Lilies, para. 28.

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