Time & Perspective Quote by Bruce Sterling

The jolt here is the calibration of joy against catastrophe. By pegging “a good time” to “Since September 11, really,” Sterling makes happiness sound almost illicit, like a guilty pleasure smuggled through an era of mandated seriousness. It’s a deliberately awkward hinge: a personal travel-high slammed against a collective trauma. The effect is less confession than provocation, a reminder that after history “changes everything,” ordinary delight doesn’t vanish so much as become morally complicated.

Sterling’s phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “Really” is the tell: it signals he knows how that comparison lands and chooses it anyway, daring the listener to accuse him of insensitivity. Then he swerves into weather and tourism cliché - “sun came out of the clouds” and “I love Italy” - the kind of line you’d expect on a postcard, not in the shadow of 9/11. That banality is the point. The subtext is that the world didn’t become a tragedy permanently; it became a place where even clichés are hard-won, where relief arrives not as revelation but as a simple return of appetite, ease, and sensory pleasure.

Coming from a cyberpunk-era writer attuned to systems, shocks, and aftereffects, the remark reads like an offhand cultural diagnosis: trauma reorganizes the emotional economy. Italy, here, isn’t just a location; it’s a temporary counter-programming - a lived reminder that beauty and conviviality still run, even when the background process is grief.