(Think, too, of all the great or fine cities and towns built by lower class or ordinary male workers.)
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who built civilizations (European, Egyptian, Asian, and so forth) and the most beautiful and remarkable edifices and buildings of human history. Thought of this morning watching the Vienna Philharmonic’s summer concert with the palace and all its other glorious buildings, fountains, grounds, and sculpture. Too often ordinary folk dwell about what it would be like to live or have lived there as nobility without remembering that only the peons and plebeians ever physically worked on these structures, took all the risks, etc. to raise them. Low or no-pay labor and laborers, sometimes over decades and centuries. We will never see the like again. The age of the great passionate building has long past and we are in the long infrastructure phase to preserve them from the ravages of time, tourists, and terrorists. We have long passed the apex of Western civilization. And, significantly, still, it is only in the past that one will continue to find such powerful meanings, beauty, and significance on a grand scale. It sure as hell ain’t in a tiny smartphone screen. No Shakespeare, Beethoven or Michelangelo will ever arise from our obsessively plugged-in microcosmic private worlds.