June 2025, 13 Minutes

The Aesthetics of Decay

The What

Left alone, things fall apart. So says the Second Law of Thermodynamics. When it comes to laws, that particular one is quite the humdinger. It doesn’t brook much in the way of push back, and when the gavel falls on judgment, it falls for good.

This process of inevitable decay is known as entropy, which can be understood as meaning randomness or disorder, and states that in a closed system, things will naturally (and always) move from order to entropy. This process can only be interrupted if energy is added to halt the course and restore order. For example, the body, without being fuelled and hydrated will wither away until death, and then until dust. Additionally, ice melts in warm room; a hot cup of tea cools down, the heat energy speared outwards into the surrounding environment (as mine currently is, as I write); and a building, if left alone, falls into ruin – its material breaks down, its order decays.

If you would like to see it another way: heat will always flow spontaneously from a hotter body to a colder one, and never the other way around – unless, of course, work is done to make it so.

Entropy also has implications for time. The Second Law gives us the concept of “Time’s Arrow”. We know time is moving forward because entropy is increasing. For instance, you will never see a broken egg reassemble itself (unless you’re ingesting the really good stuff), as this would mean entropy is decreasing, which in the closed system of our universe, is not possible based on our current understanding of physics and cosmology. This actually runs counter to the time symmetry of most of the laws of physics. That is, that these laws work the same going forward through time as they do going backwards. Entropy, however, is nonsymmetric, moving only forward, ever forward. The irreversible changes that entropy brings – like the above broken egg – are the reason we can tell that time has actually passed. Pretty handy, so! Next time you’re late for work, just tell your boss you did not see enough entropic signs indicating you were late.

The discovery of the law rests primarily with three men, one French, one German, and a Scot, born on Irish shores (I bet, dear reader, without my adumbration, you’ll be able to tell who is from where, based only on the names). As with the dual Newton-Leibniz uncovering of calculus, it was a zeitgeist movement of simultaneous scientific inquiry, made by Rudolf Clausius (1882-1888) and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) (1824-1907), who worked independent of one another, though they were aware of each other’s work.

Clausius – who actually coined the word “entropy” – noticed the closed system aspect of the law, and also developed clear mathematical formulas related to heat, work and energy, for its study.

As well as tying the second law to the first – that though energy maintains over time, its quality degrades – Thomson – who gave use the concept of absolute zero, i.e., the Kelvin temperature scale – also gave us the time’s arrow idea, linking entropy to time itself.

The shoulders of giants being wide and sturdy, there is room for many to gather on them, and both men built on the earlier work of Sadi Carnot (1796–1832), a young father of a field (thermodynamics) of inquiry that wasn’t even formally invented until after his death. As with all great scientists, Carnot was imbued with the sense of ceaseless wonder and curiosity that is inherent to that noble line. His inquiries began with a simple question “How much work can be extracted from heat, and what limits that process?” A seedling of a thing, from which a great forest grew. Unfortunately, Carnot’s works and ideas were largely overlooked in his short lifetime, and to that extent he is a tragic scientific figure. But the debt owed by Clausius and Thomson was not overlooked by either man, with both acknowledging the groundwork laid by the reclusive Frenchman, though also addressing – and fixing – some of the problems in their predecessor’s work.

So, now that we have a good idea of what decay is (etymology, the developmental science of how words are bon and how they grown up, tells us that decay’s parents were Latin, and it means to “fall down or away” {think: cadaver, cadence, cascade}) let’s put some manners on this conversation and try to figure out why it holds such a fascination for us.

In my experience, the most reliable place to start any inquiry into the human experience is normally history, and there’s plenty of history here - for isn’t there always?

In 18th and 19th century Europe, so-called “Ruin Lust” emerged from the depths of the Romantic movement. As its name would imply, it glorified ruins – roman and Greek temples, gothic cathedrals, crumbling estates, early Christian churches. For the lusty ruin-hunters, these were not simply historical sites battered by the passing of time; they evoked the sublime and the melancholic, they allowed the mind to drift to dreamier places.

The Grand Tour (not the show, behave – a humanist rite of passage for elite young Europeans, typically commencing in London, making landfall in Calais, and concluding in that synthesising city, Naples) often included visits to ancient Roman, Greek and Egyptian ruins — symbols of lost grandeur.

Percy Shelley, who himself embarked on this tour as a young man, wrote one of my personal favourite poems on the topic of how all things must end, and the grander they live, the more tragic that ending – Ozymandias (1818). You should allow yourself the time to read; I assure you it’s worth it:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

In addition to Shelley’s sensible words, other artists got in on the trend: Piranesi’s atmospheric etchings – both real and imagined - made ruin a kind of spiritual genre. Typically focusing on the Roman, things are engorged and magnified, the buildings become colossus, the human wandering among them tiny, overwhelmed by scene.

In his painting, Turner, as well as portraying ruins and fading grandiosity, storms, shipwrecks and fire feature heavily. One of his more famous pieces, The Fighting Temeraire (1839), depicts the titular old warship, beloved of two navies, that saw most of the world’s oceans, being towed by a grimy, industrial, steam tugboat, to be broken for scrap. Here we see another feature of the decay genre – replacement. The old pushing (or in the case pulling) out the old.

Moving east, in direct counterpoint to Western Romanticism, Japan’s Wabi-Sabi movement (beginning in the 14th century and persisting to this day) finds beauty in the traditionally unbeautiful. Impermanence, imperfection, and that natural ageing of all things becomes central to an artistic perspective that holds story above prettiness – thus, a cracked teacup or a weathered wall carry more emotional truth than the pristine earlier versions of themselves. The time between the beginning and the now tells a tale, and in that tale, we find true beauty. Perhaps the most meme-able example of Wabi-Sabi today is the kintsugi – the art of mending broken pottery with gold lacquer, therefore highlighting rather than downplaying the cracks, the flaws.

Coming back to Europe, and now finding ourselves in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Dutch, in their Golden Age, developed the artistic school of Vanitas – still life paintings of death and decay. Skulls, rotting fruit, hourglasses, half-melted candles – all designed to remind the viewer of death and transience, the briefness of it all. It’s an art of memento mori and, as with all great art forms, it goes far beyond the aesthetic and enters confidently strides into the realms of morality and philosophy.

The word may seem familiar to you – is it related to vanity? Why yes, of course – a Latin root word which has given us vanity ("Vanity of vanities; all is vanity") denoting emptiness, futility, worthlessness.

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The Why

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” - W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

What’s going on here? Like, legit - why are we, animals as afraid of death as any other - possibly, due to our cognitions - even more so, so captivated with death and how are we able to find so much life-affirming goodness in it? Psychology may have the answer. So too may philosophy.

At its core, decay is a bludgeoning reminder of mortality. Life is, as Heidegger put it, being-towards-death (sein-zum-tode) and, as Freud noted, our constant companion is a death drive (Thanatos), an unconscious pull towards destruction, stasis, or inorganic stillness. I’m not a big fan of Freud, for reasons that would require a separate essay, but he almost certainly derived this idea from Schopenhauer, who I am an intellectual admirer of, so it’s all good. Freud, however, had the benefit of Darwinian insight to build upon Schopenhauer’s themes. There is room on those afore mentioned shoulders for more than just scientists.

This reminder of mortality is to be found in physical ruins, and the grander and more beautiful they were in their bloom, the harder the reminder punches us in the gut, a heavyweight pugilist reaching across time to remind us life is for the living, and that the time after us will be a lot longer than the time we had. The party will go on, but we will politely, but firmly, be asked to leave. Most of us can accept a party coming to an end but, having to leave when we know fun will be had without us is a lot to take. Perhaps sometimes too much.

So, admiring decay, finding wonder in them, permitting their presence to move our hearts to breaking point, allows us to cope with the tragedy of humanity – that no matter how well we live, how deeply, lovingly, fiercely, we, all of us, exit all the same, and are remembered only by our ruins.

We must endeavour to make those ruins wonderful.

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Ars Gothica

Recently, I have come to conclude it to be a truth that the gothic genre of all things – literature, music, architecture, painting, and so forth – is fundamentally about decay, and that is why it so fascinate and inspires the human mind (Of course, the reader may have already figure this out years ago, so you will have to forgive me for my late arrival at this particularly obvious station {7:59, calling at: Duh, No Shit Sherlock, and You Don’t Say})

For the sake of clarity, it is worth defining what exactly I mean by gothic here. The original gothic eras – early, high and late – were chiefly architectural movements that redefined what the European eyes saw when wandering around urban environments, often on their way to worship. The gothic I refer to in this section should be understood to mean the Gothic Revival of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Interestingly - and I’m going to pull a handbrake tangent here, but we will get back to smooth driving shortly, - did you know that gothic began as a pejorative? It makes sense when thought about – the southern Europe that was exiting the dark ages would still have held the Roman conception of goth close to their hearts. Despite the goths permeating what were once roman lands, their blood and culture well and truly mixed and mingled, the notion of them being savage, cultureless barbarians rampaging, pillaging and sacking would have persisted. The exact originator of the word to define the style is unclear, though most historians of art now accept that it was Giorgio Vasari (1507 – 1574), the Florentine painter and architect. Vasari and his peers admire the symmetry, balance and proportion of the Greco-Roman style and saw gothic as crude, chaotic, fundamentally uncivilised. So artistic point-scoring and high-roading is not new and will probably never end.

To further my argument that respect of the gothic is a respect for the decay, allow me to take a look at some examples from a cross-section of the creative spectrum.

In The Castle of Otranto (1764), Horace Walpole shows us a Gothic castle that is the site of both ancestral pride and physical crumbling. It has been convincingly argued that Walpole started the genre, and many of the tropes that became indemnified can be found in his work of betrayal and ghosts. One such staple of the genre are hidden tunnels and secret passages, and there is no shortage of them here in the castle hanging off the craggy Italian coast. It’s a dark place, lit by swollen candles and spidering lightening. It is a place that speaks of former glory, a family’s greatness lost to Shelley’s shifting sands of time.

Mervyn Peake’s (the man to whom Terry Pratchett owes a bottle of something very nice to) underrated and often misunderstood Gormenghast trilogy tells the sweeping tale of a vast, crumbling, castle-city of unimaginable size (Castle Gormenghast), surrounded by wilderness and cut off from the outside world. It is a place governed by ritual and stagnation — ancient traditions are followed for their own sake, long after their meaning is lost. Arbitrary rules being arbitrary. The castle is not just a physical place; it has unseen boundaries that exists in the minds of the characters: it is an agent, a prison, a metaphor for institutional inertia and spiritual rot.

Arguably the most obvious sign of decay (more so rot?) in literature is Wilde’s Dorian Gray. In this instance the decay is hidden, shameful, contrasted severely with youth and freshness. Hedonism is divine, and the crueller and more excessive it is, all the better for our tragic lead. Certainly, it catches up with him, and the self-haunting he is plagued by comes to an end, the payment processor collecting on the Faustian debt. Unlike other tales of comeuppance, this one does not always leave the reader feeling a sense of righteousness – a feeling that justice was served. Rather, a combined undercurrent of sadness and unease settles in for the long ride.

Moving on from physical decay, and echoing the experiences in the labyrinthine Castle Gormenghast, we find ourselves at the front door of the house of usher, a building constructed by Poe’s steady hand. We knock, and we are greeted by mental and moral disintegration. The dread of the setting is captured perfectly by the author, and long precedes the return of Madeline, rigid and pale. As with the lingering denizens of Otranto, wen the Usher’s are gone, they are gone – and so they are gone.

In the vein of psychological decay, we have the bipolar madness of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. Potion and lab evoke Promethean nightmares, and the smog-filed streets of late-Victorian London hint at dark things dwelling in the shadows. Gradually yet relentlessly, Mr Hyde comes his alter Dr Jekyll, withering the latter to nothingness. With the demise of Jekyll comes the end of shame and an unbinding of permissiveness. Thus, the once proud doctor, a man of oath and honour, has decayed in the face of temptation and craving, and has joined Mr Gary and the Usher’s as remembered things, and remembered things only.

Similarly, pathological obsession dominates two other classics of the genre, Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights. Here I will go into less detail, as I don’t want this essay to turn into a tumbledown of book reviews, but I would urge the reader to consider these takes and ask themselves if they can see any of the above themes embodied within them.

The death and afterdeath fascination is so powerful that Jane Austen – ever a cunning eye for human fancy – summed it up quite nicely in her decidedly unheroic heroine, the ever-naïve Catherine Moreland, on her visit to Northanger Abbey. A tragic consumer of gothic literature, Catherine imagines her new surrounds to be crumbling and in a state or disrepair, much like the settings of her beloved tales. She pictures hidden tunnels running beneath the stone floors, locked doors holding back unspeakable secrets, nightly goings-on of the spooky variety. But unlike the not-so-bonnie Prince Hamlet holding aloft Yorick’s skull under cold lunar rays of a Danish sky, Catherine has no such catharsis as, of course, it was all in her very active imagination As the author tells us “The abbey is not a place of literal decay or horror, but a well-appointed country estate”.

Oh, but only if it were so, Catherine, wouldn’t life be so much…fuller!

I consider Northanger Abbey Austen best work plot-wise. Perhaps not the most literary or insightful or twee, but it contains an unravelling that is entertaining and contains within its pages humour so dry, it threatens to dehydrate the reader.

Caspar David Friedrich paints one helluva picture. Paintings like Abbey in the Oakwood or The Cemetery Gate depict ruined churches and fog-shrouded landscapes. Nature is reclaiming what man once built — symbolizing spiritual and civilizational decay. Here we see hope in the decomposition – the energising principle behind death; that just as life implies death, so to does death imply life.

The part inside that shifts upon viewing such pieces is what Art means to me. It’s mostly ineffable, and I want it to stay that way – perhaps to put something like that into words would ultimately detract. Some things just need to be felt.

Once again counterposing the physical with the psychological, Henry Fuseli gifted us The Nightmare, a Gothic classic showing a bedbound woman in a tormented pose, unnatural and tonic, with a demonic, apelike, incubus squatting atop her. The decay here is emotional — the breakdown of the mind and body under unseen forces.

The moving arts gives us Paris’ Théâtre du Grand-Guignol – a theatre of the macabre, long ago closed down. It specialised in short, punchy performances packed with themes of insanity, mutilation, murder, psychological breakdown, and medical horrors. This was Gothic at its most visceral: blood and rot onstage.

It’s arguable, however, if this tips over into the realm of horror and gore, losing the subtly and horror-in-the-mind-of-the-observer that is typical of the genre. Such places are the fuzzy borders that can be found in any artform, and is often where the pioneering spirits are to be found, pushing the medium forward.

Movies and talkies propelled the genre into the 20th century. Nosferatu (the 1922 original, you didn’t think I would, did you?) Count Orlok himself is visibly decaying — more rat than man. His castle is falling apart. Death is everywhere. He lacks any of the sexual charisma of Dracula - a predator without charm - and is physically grotesque, Marfan’s taken in extremis. Implying that no woman would ever share his coffin-bed, thus ensuring that he is the last of his cursed line.

Hitchcock’s’ Rebecca (1940), based on the du Maurier novel, shows us Manderley, the grand estate, steeped in emotional decay — a place haunted by the memory of a dead wife and crumbling with the rot of secrets. These images aestheticize decay — turning rust, mould, and broken glass into a visual meditation on loss, time, and failed modernity. The spores of horrible truths grow from every corner of the story, squeezing the characters towards an unavoidable conclusion.

Now, we must once again reacquaint ourselves with that frozen music, architecture.

Concurrent with many of these artistic works, and helping to seed the zeitgeist in which they bloomed, we had Gothic Revival Architecture. Neo-Gothic structures sprung up across Europe and north America, deliberately imitated the crumbling forms of medieval cathedrals, abbeys, and castles. Decay was aestheticized: pointed arches, ivy-covered ruins, gargoyles — all evoking age, death, melancholic sublime. Additionally, among the bien pensant of the Victorian world, actual ruins became monuments. Landscaped ruins were fashionable in English gardens, some the crumbling rubble of a bygone era, naturally present on the land, or imported from elsewhere - conscious effort being made to maintain the debris visual - others imitation Greco-Roman temples, standing intentionally and anachronistically on lawns among recessed ha-ha walls, hotbeds and ornamental lakes.

I will end this colophon with music, what Plato thought of as the noblest of all the artforms - so it deserves the final say (it may be said that this is how the gothic artform stays active today; musically, one could argue that we currently find ourselves in a gothic revival revival. It’s back, baby). Now, I’m not actually a great enthusiast of gothic music, though I do have a few pieces in the genre that I appreciate. It just wouldn’t be my go-to on a Sunday afternoon. Bauhaus, The Cure, Dead Can Dance, Joy Division - lyrics and tones often evoke decay of the self, spiritual disintegration, or post-industrial gloom. The necromantic anthems began earlier though, and it could be compelling argued that Gregorian chant was gothic music in protozoic form. Indeed, the chansons of those robed men often find their way into the samples of later artists. Likewise, the graveyard sonatas of Franz Liszt, evoking a Central Europe in gloom, arouse madness, intensity and decadence – demivirtues the man himself lived by.

It could confidently be maintained that gothic music is not so much a genre but a mood - it speaks to the beauty of the broken, tells again that in death must come life anew, and gives form to the formless

Now that, I’m sure, Plato would approve of.

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Coda – a Haunting

We now exist in a time when there are more ghosts than there are living, and, in true entropic fashion, this gap will continue to increase exponentially until the end. I’ve heard it said that 30 billion of us have come and gone. This number seems excessive, but even half that would still nearly double our current population. Two ghosts per citizen, a healthy ration.

So, be nice to your ghosts – you’ll be one of them someday.