“Material improvement is closely linked, in the early days, with intellectual ascendency. It continues, however, after the ascendancy has been lost. For one thing, it is quantitative, the later railways being merely copies of the first. For another, it is transmissible, people being able to import what they could never invent. With foreign aid they can also import what they could not otherwise afford. Governments based upon practically illiterate populations have their own television and radio. Aircraft of identical pattern bear the brightly painted insignia of Mumbojumbo Airlines and Air Nitwitzerland.”
C. Northcote Parkinson, Left Luggage (1967)
As a man of advancing years and declining powers, I am naturally disposed to see my melancholy condition reflected in the world around me. The poet Wordsworth noted a counterpart disposition of ebullient youth to see in the world the progress and promise they feel bubbling up in themselves. Thus, to ebullient youth, the bloody beheadings in revolutionary Paris were a hopeful sign of good times that were right around the corner—even severed heads being signs of hope to hopeful youth.
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.”
Whereas to hopeless old men of advancing years and declining powers,
“A darker shadow falls upon the gloom,
Like I, the world quakes with impending doom.”
The Orthosphere 