The beggar had crept closer as I watched. He pointed at the old man, and said, “Still come from north and south to study here. Someday we are great again.” Then I thought of my own lovely country, whose eclipse–though without genetic damage–lasted twenty-three hundred years. And I gave him money, and told him that, yes, I was certain America would be great again someday, and left him, and returned here.
I have opened the shutters so that I can look across the city to the obelisk and catch the light of the dying sun. Its fields and valleys of fire do not seem more alien to me, or more threatening, than this strange, despondent land. Yet I know that we are all one–the beggar, the old man moving among the machines of a dead age, those machines themselves, the sun, and I.
“Seven American Nights,” Gene Wolfe (1978)
Fun fact (?): As well as anticipating the worst and dumbest slogan of the early twenty-first century, “Seven American Nights” arguably also anticipated deepfakes.