How Modern Civilization Is So Temporary
Modern buildings are so shit compared to cathedrals and climates
I was walking up the stairs at the St. Something train station and I saw a mural. It was so garish and cheap. So temporary. You can dig up someone’s bathroom from centuries ago and it’s art. This was just advertising. Such is the nature of everything under capitalism. Everything is built for the next quarter, nothing for the next quarter-century, and it actively destroys the next quarter millennia entirely.
You can feel it when you walk into an old church, or round an old stupa, or see the pyramids. What were they thinking? How did they do it? People built things they might never see finished, but which have lasted for centuries. Then you look around at what we have built. What does it even mean? We build office towers and casinos, and then demolish them to build other ones. They’re all effectively temporary. We build roads that get weathered away to drive cars that get replaced every 10 years.
When we built our house our father-in-law contributed (among other things) reclaimed wood from an old spinning factory. Big, thick beams that you can’t get anymore, they must have been a hundred years old. An antiques dealer came to the house, looked around, and said the whole place would be worthless one day, except for the…
