It seems that there is a penalty to pay after all for living in the time after the invention of deodorant. You can’t have it all ways. You never will. The human experience is never going to be ‘perfect.’ For all the wondrous modern inventions that westerners have today: teeth whitening, vagasil, mammograms, facebook – there’s something lacking. We certainly don’t have it rough these days like they did in Medieval Europe, dodging shit thrown out a window as someone shouts ‘guarde loo.’ Women in our society don’t fade away from consumption anymore and there’re generally fewer problems with boils and skin rottings in public. I suspect that the penalty we’ve had to pay for dental hygiene and microwave pizza is community. We don’t have to deal with whole towns smelling like open sewers and we do have epidurals but it seems to be that plumbing and pain relief have come at a cost of loneliness. As feudal peasants we would wade in mud and pee where we stood – now we live shower fresh, but with a sense of quiet sadness.
Would you agree?
