It occurred to me as we wandered the Ramblas in Barcelona that the manifestations of our existence, all of us, of our presence on earth, are becoming uglier and uglier - ugly cars, ugly clothes, ugly buildings and parks and fountains, footbridges and barriers, shopping centers, sidewalks, signs. The old is still beautiful of course, in kind of a suspect way. Old things seem to have long ago skulked beyond the reach of aesthetic reproach. Or earned a free pass by virtue of persistence. The plainest, creaking, hundred-year-old tenement glooming up a narrow city street has this authority for some reason, and I'm loath to question it. But its upstart neighbor, the bank building with the curved-glass facade, is naked to judgment, and the verdict can't be good. Did the world look this way a hundred years ago? Certainly many people were appalled by modernist architecture, and reviled those fume-belching motorcars, and were scandalized by the immodest dress of the youth. But look at a picture, a crowd scene or a streetscape, from the forties, sixties, even the eighties - every detail has a period charm and conspires with the others to tell a poignant, coherent story. Not so today, with all our rounded, plasticky cars in colors of unearthly dreariness; our garish storefronts, billboards and marquees; our bad shirts and belts and hats and sunglasses. Are we reaching a fever pitch of postindustrial hideousness? Or maybe it'll all look different when we see it from the future. Maybe it's just the curse of the now.