>...There's an ancient tendency - wonderfully analyzed in Raymond
>Williams' Country & The City - to think there was a golden age a
>generation or two ago, and things have gone all to hell since.
>Williams traces it back in English poetry to Piers Plowman. Maybe it
>has been a relentless downward spiral since the 13th century, but I
>doubt it.
If you had managed to survive into the later 14th century, when Piers was written, you too would have looked back at the 13th as a pretty damn golden age.
Shane Mage
"Mortals immortals, immortals mortals,
living their deaths, dying their lives"
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 62