From, George Orwell, 'Homage to Catalonia'.

This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, and 
yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events 
have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 
1905, for that matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper 
articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time 
and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The 
Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was 
still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it 
probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was 
ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was 
something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been 
in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building 
of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with 
the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the 
hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost 
every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were 
being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an 
inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been 
collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers 
looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial 
forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Senior' or 'Don' or 
even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' and 'Thou', and said 
'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first 
experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a 
lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and 
all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and 
black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in 
clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs 
of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of 
people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing 
revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the 
crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town 
in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small 
number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. 
Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some 
variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in 
it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I 
recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I 
believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers' 
State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or 
voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realize that great numbers 
of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as 
proletarians for the time being. 

Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The 
town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the 
streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air--raids, the shops were mostly 
shabby and half-empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there 
was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of 
bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. 
Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was 
no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very 
few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gipsies. Above 
all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having 
suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying 
to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the 
barbers' shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) 
solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were 
coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes. To anyone 
from the hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the English--speaking races there 
was something rather pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic 
Spaniards took the hackneyed phrases of revolution. At that time revolutionary 
ballads of the naivest kind, all about proletarian brotherhood and the 
wickedness of Mussolini, were being sold on the streets for a few centimes each. 
I have often seen an illiterate militiaman buy one of these ballads, laboriously 
spell out the words, and then, when he had got the hang of it, begin singing it 
to an appropriate tune. 

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COMPARE; END CHAPTER.....

In the end we crossed the frontier without incident. The train had a first 
class and a dining-car, the first I had seen in Spain. Until recently there had 
been only one class on the trains in Catalonia. Two detectives came round the 
train taking the names of foreigners, but when they saw us in the dining-car 
they seemed satisfied that we were respectable. It was queer how everything had 
changed. Only six months ago, when the Anarchists still reigned, it was looking 
like a proletarian that made you respectable. On the way down from Perpignan to 
Cerberes a French commercial traveller in my carriage had said to me in all 
solemnity: 'You mustn't go into Spain looking like that. Take off that collar 
and tie. They'll tear them off you in Barcelona.' He was exaggerating, but it 
showed how Catalonia was regarded. And at the frontier the Anarchist guards had 
turned back a smartly dressed Frenchman and his wife, solely--I think--because 
they looked too bourgeois. Now it was the other way about; to look bourgeois was 
the one salvation. At the passport office they looked us up in the card--index 
of suspects, but thanks to the inefficiency of the police our names were not 
listed, not even McNair's. We were searched from head to foot, but we possessed 
nothing incriminating, except my discharge--papers, and the carabineros who 
searched me did not know that the 29th Division was the P.O.U.M. So we slipped 
through the barrier, and after just six months I was on French soil again. My 
only souvenirs of Spain were a goatskin water-bottle and one of those tiny iron 
lamps in which the Aragon peasants bum olive oil--lamps almost exactly the 
shape of the terra-cotta lamps that the Romans used two thousand years ago-- 
which I had picked up in some ruined hut, and which had somehow got stuck in my 
luggage.  

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Interestingly, Herman Melville,

'The Confidence Man'......

CHAPTER XLV.

the cosmopolitan increases in seriousness.

In the middle of the gentlemen's cabin burned a solar lamp, swung from the ceiling, and whose shade of ground glass was all round fancifully variegated, in transparency, with the image of a horned altar, from which flames rose, alternate with the figure of a robed man, his head encircled by a halo. The light of this lamp, after dazzlingly striking on marble, snow-white and round—the slab of a centre-table beneath—on all sides went rippling off with ever-diminishing distinctness, till, like circles from a stone dropped in water, the rays died dimly away in the furthest nook of the place.

Here and there, true to their place, but not to their function, swung other lamps, barren planets, which had either gone out from exhaustion, or been extinguished by such occupants of berths as the light annoyed, or who wanted to sleep, not see.

[wikisource.org]

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Old Lamps? for New? hahahaha!