#modernit

A paradox: the same century invented History and PHotography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening. ↗

— Roland Barthes

#modernity #photography #age

Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign of the unexpected munificence of a divine creator, but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#fruit #impatience #modernity #equality

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#modern-life #modern-society #modernity #modernity-is-a-sickness #slavery

The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. ↗

— Matthew Arnold

#modernity #secularization #faith

Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself. ↗

— Robert Hughes

#modernity #age

A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us. ↗

— St. Anthony the Great

#christian #coptic #modernity #orthodox #saint

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#being #contingent #eternal #fleeting #half

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#being #changing #constantly #contingent #despised

Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing. ↗

— Rowan D. Williams

#age #ageing #anxiety #communicates #culture