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 ...
This is a book about simplicity-not destitution, not parsimoniousness, not self-denial=but the restoration of wealth in the midst of an affluence in which we are starving the spirit. It is a book about the advantages of living a less cluttered, stressful life than that which many of us are now living in the overcrowded an manic-paced consuming nations. It is a book that has nothing to do with subsistence living on the Lake Isle of Innisfree, but everything to do ...