Three immense forces, Heilbroner contends, transformed the Distant Past into Yesterday — science, capitalism and the revolutionary belief that people might become masters of their own fates. For the first time, mankind saw the future as a beckoning prospect. The growth of technology and science, in particular, rapidly transformed the world for the better — a process that everyone assumed would stretch forever into the future.
“She was breathing, not hard so much as fast, rapid, panting almost, still trying to draw on the cigarette which would have been too short to smoke even if her hand had been steady enough to hold it steady, sitting huddled in the chair in a kind of cloud of white tulle and satin and the rich dark heavy sheen of little slain animals, looking not wan so much as delicate and fragile and not even fragile so much as cold, evanescent, like one of the stalked white early spring flowers bloomed ahead of its time into the snow and the ice and doomed before your eyes without even knowing that it was dying, feeling not even any pain.”
William Faulkner | “Knight’s Gambit”