A Literary Prescription for

Restoration

For mending rather than replacing.

Restoration is what happens to buildings, furniture, gardens, paintings and people, and the word is worth taking literally. It is not the same as being returned to how you were, because that is rarely on offer. It is the slower business of making something usable again with the damage still visible in it: the beam replaced, the wall relaid, the year of doing very ordinary things until the place is habitable. People arrive at this after an illness, a breakdown, a marriage, a bereavement, a stretch of work that took more than it gave. And the honest news is that it responds to conditions rather than to effort. It wants warmth, time, something to tend and somebody nearby, and it cannot be hurried by wanting it more. These books, poems and quotes are for that work, and for the idea underneath it, which is that a mended thing carries its history and is not the poorer for it.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Four of these are about repairing things that are not people — a garden, a hedge, a broken bowl, six hundred years of the same fields — on the principle that it transfers. The novels are about the human version, and neither of them lets it be quick: a disgraced physician doing unthanked work in a fen asylum, and five wrecked people in one cold house at Christmas.

The Well-Gardened Mind

Sue Stuart-Smith · 2020

Stuart-Smith is a psychiatrist married to a garden designer, and this is her account of why growing things repairs people: the prison horticulture programmes, the shell-shocked soldiers set to work in market gardens after the First World War, the neuroscience of putting your hands in soil. Her argument is that restoration happens at the pace of a growing season rather than a treatment plan, and cannot be hurried by wanting it more.

Restoration

Rose Tremain · 1989

Robert Merivel is a physician at the court of Charles II, wildly out of his depth, given everything and then stripped of all of it. What makes the novel earn its title twice over is that his rebuilding is nothing like his rise: it happens slowly, in a Quaker asylum in the fens, doing unglamorous work he is not thanked for. One of the great English novels about a man being remade rather than restored to what he was.

Craeft

Alexander Langlands · 2017

An archaeologist goes looking for the old meaning of the word craft, which had less to do with making pretty things and more to do with knowing how to do something properly with the materials to hand. Hedgelaying, thatching, dry stone walls, scythes. It belongs here because it is about mending and maintaining rather than replacing, and about the satisfaction of work that leaves something standing.

Miss Benson’s Beetle

Rachel Joyce · 2020

Margery Benson, forty-six and going nowhere, abandons her teaching job to go to New Caledonia in search of a gold beetle nobody believes exists, taking an entirely unsuitable assistant. Both women are more damaged than they let on. Joyce is very good on the fact that restoration frequently arrives sideways, by way of an absurd project undertaken with the wrong person, rather than through anything that could be called healing.

Wabi Sabi

Beth Kempton · 2018

The Japanese idea that things are more beautiful for being weathered, mended and unfinished, explained by an Englishwoman who studied in Japan and is careful not to turn it into a lifestyle. The chapter that matters here is on kintsugi, the practice of repairing broken pottery with gold so the break is emphasised rather than disguised. It is a small idea with a very long reach.

The Shepherd’s Life

James Rebanks · 2015

Rebanks farms in the Lake District on land his family has worked for six hundred years, and the book is partly a defence of a way of life the rest of the country has decided is picturesque. What earns it a place here is the year of it: the same fields mended and walled and grazed and mended again, and the argument that maintenance is not the boring part of a thing but the whole of it.

Winter Solstice

Rosamunde Pilcher · 2000

Five people, each privately wrecked, end up in one cold Scottish house at Christmas. Nothing dramatic is attempted: they cook, they walk, they leave each other alone, and a house that had been shut up gets lived in again. It is here as the domestic version of the argument this whole page makes, which is that a great deal of repair is simply somewhere warm and enough time.

Poems about restoration

Three arguments that it comes back

A sonnet about a world that has been seared and smeared and is somehow not used up, an old thrush singing into a frozen landscape for no reason anyone can name, and eight lines about the morning feeling returns.

from “God’s Grandeur”

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hopkins has spent the first half of the sonnet on everything humans have done to the ground — seared, bleared, smeared, the soil bare because feet are shod. Then the turn, and it is the most hopeful thing in English poetry about damage: nature is never spent. There is a freshness deep down in things that has not been used up, and it is still there under whatever has been done on top of it.

Shop Gerard Manley Hopkins prints →

“The Darkling Thrush” (extract)

Thomas Hardy, 1900

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

Hardy wrote this at the very end of the nineteenth century, standing in a frozen landscape he describes as a corpse, and then an old and battered thrush starts singing for no reason he can identify. He does not claim to share the bird’s reason. He simply reports that something in worse condition than he is has decided to sing, which on certain days is as much as anyone can honestly offer.

Shop Thomas Hardy prints →

“A Birthday”

Christina Rossetti, 1861

My heart is like a singing bird
  Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
  Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
  That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
  Because my love is come to me.

It is here for what it does rather than what it is about. Rossetti reaches for four images in eight lines and none of them is adequate, which is exactly what it is like when feeling comes back after a long flat stretch. You cannot say it properly, you have too much to say, and the excess is the evidence. Keep it for the morning you notice you have started noticing things again.

Shop Christina Rossetti prints →

Quotes & Prose

Quotes about restoration to keep

Short lines for the long middle of it.

Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Get this quote as a print →

When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandise the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something has suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful.

Barbara Bloom

Get this quote as a print →

Out of the ruins rises the new city, more glorious than before.

Henry Ward Beecher

Get this quote as a print →

Nature is never spent.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Get this quote as a print →

Repair is slower than replacement and it is the only version that keeps the history. A mended thing has been somewhere. A new one has not.

Georgia Clare

Get this quote as a print →

From Georgia

Conditions rather than effort

A few short practices for the stretch where nothing looks like progress and the work is mostly turning up.

Coming Home to Yourself

Premium meditation · Georgia Clare

A gentle forest-inspired meditation to move from overwhelm into stillness and inner safety, settling your nervous system and reconnecting you with your own quiet rhythm.

Listen to the preview →

Rebuilding Your Life Meditation

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A calm, forward-looking practice for a life that is changing shape, with room to picture the version of things you actually want.

Listen Now For Free

Healing Doesn’t End. It Deepens.

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On why repair is not a finish line you cross once, but something that keeps deepening long after you assumed it was done.

Read the Essay →

The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations — small and repeated, which is how most things are actually mended.

Start the 21-Day Course →

Questions people ask

Reading for Restoration

Where should I start?

Start with The Well-Gardened Mind by Sue Stuart-Smith, which is a psychiatrist explaining why growing things repairs people and why it happens at the pace of a season rather than a treatment plan. If you would rather have a novel, Restoration by Rose Tremain is the great one about a man being remade rather than returned to what he was.

What is the difference between restoration and healing?

Healing tends to imply a return to how things were. Restoration, in the sense this page uses it, is closer to what happens to a building or a piece of furniture: the damage stays visible, the repair becomes part of the object, and what you end up with is not the original. Kintsugi makes the point deliberately by mending broken pottery with gold. The break is emphasised rather than disguised.

Which quotes about restoration are worth keeping?

Lines worth keeping include “Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation” (Elizabeth Gilbert), “Out of the ruins rises the new city, more glorious than before” (Henry Ward Beecher) and Hopkins’s “nature is never spent”. You will find these and others in the quotes section above.

How long does it take?

Longer than you want and less time than you fear, and almost never in a straight line. What the books here agree on is that repair responds to conditions rather than effort: warmth, time, ordinary work, somebody nearby, a season passing. Stuart-Smith is good on why you cannot hurry it by wanting it more, and Pilcher is good on how much of it is simply somewhere warm and enough of it.

Restoration

Prescribed reading

Three arguments that it comes back

Quotes about restoration to keep

Conditions rather than effort

Reading for Restoration

Where should I start?

What is the difference between restoration and healing?

Which quotes about restoration are worth keeping?

How long does it take?

More prescriptions await.