I’m taking a break from a DVD of a documentary series called “Byzantium: The Lost Empire” from The Learning Channel. I had to stop because it was too evocative, and after all the descriptions of the wonders of Constantinople I started to feel like whoever it is in Richard II who says, “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.”

This documentary is patterned after “Connections,” and so we have the fifty-something British knower-of-all-things-Byzantine going about everywhere while the camera tracks him talking to you in greatest awe of the plentitude of that lost world. He has taken poetic license here and there, but where’s the harm? I can forgive a fair amount of inexactitude, given that the narrator tells of jeweled golden chalices, silks and spices, beautiful princesses, icon-bedecked churches, elaborate enameled mosaics, fabulous art and architecture with such feeling that you can almost see it. But of course he’s walking in bustling, dirty streets or fields littered with unrecognizeable chunks of worn stone. Whenever he wants to rhapsodize about the city itself, the obligatory footage is helicopter views of Hagia Sophia, sometimes mercifully cropped to eliminate the desecration of the minarets at its corners. The greatness of Constantine and Justinian only exists in our imaginations except for the silhouette and skeletal grandeur of the great cathedral. There must’ve been many fallen empires in human history. I’m sure it’s just a mark of being an Ortho-centric that this one is always too poignant for me to bear for long.

As I puttered downstairs, I was amused to find that the narrative had made such an impression that my brain was mimicking it automatically. As I packaged up my leftovers: “The natives thought nothing of dining on swordfish from an ocean hundreds of miles away, frozen and delivered to stores so fast that it was still flavorful and succulent …”. As I washed a plate: “Sturdy dishes festooned with patterns in every conceivable color and theme were made to ornament the table and cheer the heart.”

It’s all true, of course. The houses of those of humblest means have goods imported from China, clothes from India, spices from around the world — things that were once the exclusive province of nobility. We may not have real gold and jewels to fill our eye with, but everything down to our merest knick-knacks is elaborately embellished and much of it at a level of mechanical perfection that no artisan could have dreamed. We don’t think of it that way, and we take the unbelievable bounty of affordable and appealing goods for granted, even grumbling about the price if they’re not on sale. But for all the ill that industrialization brought to fallen man, there’s no point in denying that it fulfilled a kind of dream. We wanted to live like kings and queens. We wanted beautiful things and lots of them and we didn’t want to have to pay much.

We have them now. Chinese sweat shops and factories and mills everywhere churn them out and ship them halfway across the world so I can get them and then ignore them most of the time. Only now, when it’s really too late, do we have some sense of what it cost us and still costs, because only now do we realize that there’s no way to go back. We can’t return to hand-carving and family farms and simple ways. We have things everywhere, and we hardly see them.

I wonder if the Byzantine people did. I wonder if they knew when they were in a Golden Age, or if they only got used to what they had without knowing how much — centuries later — I would’ve given just to spend a day walking their streets.

Oh well. Enough romanticism for one evening. The DVD is still paused upstairs and I’m only up to the 1300’s. It’s not like I don’t know the ending, but you just have to let things play out sometimes.