A sad fate it is to be born in an age where everything is so known. No mistique or wonder about how the people of the past may have behaved or lived, what they believed or heard. One element that the present has always known about the people of past is what they saw, and this is the most tragic thing of all. When the city of Londinium became London, its medieval inhabitants lived amongst the beautiful ruins of the fallen roman empire. How those ruins, however damaged, must've looked in contrast to the rickety wooden houses of the 6th, 7th, 10th and 12th centuries I cannot be sure. But maybe, just maybe, those medieval Londoners felt much the same way as some of us do now, in the present; horribly discontent at the ugliness and aesthetic inferiority of our art compared to the art of centuries prior.

Living as a lover of beautiful things is constant mourning.