This is why I love Anne Rice
"Behold, earthshaking inventions which are usless or obsolete in the same century. The steamboat, the railroads, yet do you know what these meant after 6 thousand years of gallery slaves and men on horseback? And now the dance hall girl buys a chemical to kill the seed of her lovers, and lives to be 75 in a room full of gadgets which cool the air and veritably eat the dust. And yet for for all the costume movies and the paperback history thrown at you in every drugstore, the public has no accurate memory of anything; every social problem is observed in relation to 'norms' which in fact never existed, people fancy themselves 'deprived' of luxuries and peace and quiet which in fact were never common to any people anywhere at all."
"But the Venice of your time, tell me..."
"What? That it was dirty? That it was beautiful? That people went about in rags with rotting teeth and stinking breath and laughed at public executions? You want to know the key difference? There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings, dim-witted souls hover in luxorious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great kind of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone."
"But the Venice of your time, tell me..."
"What? That it was dirty? That it was beautiful? That people went about in rags with rotting teeth and stinking breath and laughed at public executions? You want to know the key difference? There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings, dim-witted souls hover in luxorious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great kind of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone."