In recent decades it has become customary, and right, I guess, 
and easy enough with hindsight, to damn the ancestral frame of mind 
that ravaged the world so fully and so soon. What I myself seem to 
damn mainly though, is just not having seen it. Without any virtuous
hindsight I would likely have helped in the ravaging as did even most 
of those who loved it best.

But God! To have viewed it entire, the soul and guts of what we had 
and gone forever now, except in books and such poignant remnants as 
small swift birds that journey to and from the distant Argentine, 
and call at night in the sky.