It turns out the grief one feels at the loss of such defining global wonders does not decline as we get older, being as strong at 85 as 40.

Why? Because we humans are capable of imagining beyond our immediate selves both physically and temporally.

We cherish the treasures of the planet even if we've never personally experienced them. Beyond their critical function (the Amazon is dubbed the lungs of the planet) we simply like knowing they are there. Who wants a world without Jerusalem, Paris, or koalas?

Tellingly, we care about a future world even if we can't be there for it.

This is what being a morally developed human means. You don't hear the word 'love' used enough to characterise our extra-personal attachment to the world. But this long-neglected loyalty may be the most persistent of all the romantic loves: love of one's country despite its imperfections, love of history despite its horrors because it has delivered us to now, and of course love of the wider world itself. Its people, its oceans, its towering arts and sciences, and natural jewels.

I got thinking about these things when I read a diary entry last week by Charmian Clift (1923-1969), contained in an article by her biographer, Nadia Wheatley.

Clift, a perceptive Australian essayist, famously decamped with her two young children and husband, George Johnson (who would later write My Brother Jack), from a comfortable life in 1950s London marked by cosmopolitan gaiety and intellectual richness.

They yearned for a plainer (and poorer) life on the secluded Greek island of Kalymnos.

But arriving at their rudimentary new digs, many locals sought their help in securing access to work in Australia.

"How to explain that we were civilisation sick, asphalt and television sick, that we had lost our beginnings and felt a sort of hollow that we had not been able to fill up with material success," a slightly perplexed Clift diarised. "We had come to Kalymnos to seek a source, or a wonder, or a sign, to be reassured in our humanity."

I read this poignant plea, with its embedded hopes and its brazen escapism, and was bowled over by the even starker contrast it strikes all these years later against our current "material" world.

Clift's words stilled, if only briefly, a mind turbulent with the rapid cadence of world news. An accretion of misery on misery which tugs at the fraying edges of that very humanity, she lauded.

It was almost too much to process. The sudden, if false, allure of quiet in our hyper-connected and environmentally brutalised world. The beguiling call of nature, when all around is rancour and noise, competition and violence.

Is it possible to become news-sick?

I had just read of escalating Russian attacks on Ukrainian electricity infrastructure as that humiliated psychopath, Vladimir Putin, sought to fill up the "hollow" where his heart should be.

I'd listened to radio reports of 150 dead in Seoul in a pointless crush, squeezing the life out of young people for no reason at all

I'd read news of an assassination attempt on House Majority Leader, Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco during which her 82 year old husband was smashed in the head with a hammer by a deluded Trumpian conspiracy nutter. The attempted murder of the most senior Democrat on Capitol Hill was under-reported, suggesting political violence in America is becoming predictable. Next stop, passe.

I had watched reports of a pedestrian suspension bridge collapsing in the Indian state of Gujarat, killing at least 140 people - the result of over-crowding and the actions of young men who tried to get the whole structure swinging. It swung, then collapsed.

Elsewhere, floods, famine, Ebola and violence. Always violence.

Later in the week, though, there was some good news. That neo-fascist Trump of the southern hemisphere, Jair Bolsonaro, was ditched as Brazilians opted for change. The new president Luiz Incio "Lula" da Silva, has promised to end logging of the Amazon and a return to the centre.

But in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu was back, and by Saturday, Trump was telling his cult-like devotees he is, too.

"I won twice, and did much better the second time than I did the first, getting millions more votes in 2020 than I got in 2016 ... I will very, very, very probably do it again," he told his white Pentecostal base.

The world feels like it's cleaving apart, as if there is a widening chasm between progress and regression, lovers and haters. The latter, debauching the very faiths they cite.

The revenge of religious zealotry for the crime of modernity is a threat more insidious and consequential than the frontal aggression of the Nazis and Imperial Japan.

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This cowardly denial of human progress aims to achieve something the maniacal totalitarianism of the 20th century could not - the collapse of secular liberal democracy from within.

I glance down at Vincent our schnauzer who dozes nearby in the morning rays. His eyes open staring straight back into mine and, as I lean forward, his ears separate the better to facilitate the head-pat he knows is coming. Such easy connections.

And then I remember, there's a lot to smile about, too. Being fully human means being part of something bigger.