Justin Raimondo writes a lovely tribute to Nicole Curtis, who rehabilitates old houses. Excerpt:

The houses of the modern era—the McMansions, the jerry-built cardboard boxes of the lower-middle class, the soulless “planned communities”—aren’t homes, at least not in the sense that they impart to us a sense of place.  Indeed, they exude the exact opposite: a sense of placelessness, of floating in a void, unanchored to anything real.  They are simply four walls, a roof, and a mortgage.

This bland uniformity married to shoddy workmanship perfectly reflects the spirit of our age: a characterless indifference that eventually collapses in on itself.

Yet all around us are relics of a bygone era that had different values and, therefore, a different architecture.  Instead of the sharp angles of “modernity,” these houses had gables that curlicued and flowed.  They had porches in those days, often encircling the house, where families sat and actually talked to one another on those long summer evenings as the sun set behind hundred-year-old trees.

Raimondo sees in her example a practical conservatism:

With her tools, she scrapes off the detritus of the present, peeling back the plastic overlay to reveal the old wood underneath.  All the modern “improvements”—the vinyl windows that can’t be fixed when they’re damaged; the cheap “Made in China” fixtures; the hollow fiberglass doors, as empty inside as the society that produced them—are swept away, demolished by those skinny little arms swinging a sledgehammer.  And in their place arises the essential soul of the house, its cornices and stained-glass windows restored to life by some miraculous process of architectural faith healing—Nicole’s faith in her own vision of a past that, if it never existed, should have existed.

Restoration: It’s what conservatives are all about.  It is what they dream of, but Nicole Curtis is actually doing it.  She doesn’t write manifestos.  She doesn’t try to convert anyone.  She doesn’t run for office.  She takes direct action.

Read the whole thing. Best thing you’ll read all day, I think. Nicole Curtis’s vision is a perfect illustration of Balzac’s insight: Hope is memory plus desire.