13 November 2012 - in decline

A great story, uphill in the snow both ways, must be set at a great time. The unintended effect is that the world is depicted in decline so that no one again can ever be as great as Chuck Yeager, who broke the sound barrier by the seat of his pants because the windshield hadn’t been invented. In modern times that probably makes sense as a corrective to the exaggerated sense of progress—nothing was invented more than twenty years ago—but where did the trudging ancients find inspiration in their muddied world?