The twentieth century shattered time, space, and the atom

Evidence

I believe something has happened to the nature of time, in this century, because something unprecedented, and, for me, unnameable, has happened to human beings in this century. It means something, I think, to observe that, with artists, the century begins with the smashing of the clock—Proust, Joyce, Stein, for example, and even, in fact, Henry James—and the violent rearrangement of space—Picasso, for example—and reaches its terrifying climacteric with the smashing of the atom. So far as we can now know, no age before this one has been so relentlessly cataclysmic—the very word, cataclysmic, in the face of our enormities, fades into a weird nostalgia. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 458

Categorization

• XREF: Baldwin’s ‘smashing of the clock’ to ‘smashing of the atom’ arc echoes themes in the reader’s library about catastrophic modern epochs. — connects to: The concept of the future itself has mutated across the twentieth century; Antirealist science released boundless theoretical inventiveness in early twentieth-century physics — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 56