"Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life. . . . A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers ... Live things, things that lived -- that are conscious of us -- are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last to have known such things."
--Rainer Maria Rilke