I wonder if I would ever feel this way if I lived in an Italian hill town, or a village in the cotswolds? Such places are surely aesthetically superior to late twentieth century American settlements with their streets dominated by overbearing garages, and their faux-rustic or post-modern mannerist details glued onto fundamentally industrial structures. At these times, I find myself wondering how people with so much wealth at their disposal have managed to build so much that is, at best, dull, and more often downright ugly.
Most of the time, I try to remain in the world of my imagination as much as possible, and pay attention only to those parts of reality which spring from the earth with a minimum of human interference. But when my imagination fails, or the power of the surviving forest is insufficient to conceal from me the invasive man-made world, I become intensely aware of all these houses, and all the cars in their garages, and all the appliances in their kitchens, and all the glowing digital clocks counting down the hours to doomsday, and all the oblivious inhabitants numb both to the shabbiness they have created around themselves and the remaining beauty that they inexorably displace, then I am overcome with the desire to see it all swept away like Pompeii or Nineveh. But I think I'd have found the buildings in those places far less unsightly than I find the intrusive houses here.