We are never as modern as we would like to think. We see our transcendence of, or our unmooring from, the past. We feel as if we are adrift, even as we search for some provenance in history for our predicament, like a child seeking its parent. We name our era in such a way as to capture our awestruck, revelatory disenfranchisement. In a few years, we all die, and future generations take that very name to mean something historical, categorical, transitory, and in no way to be compared with their own sense of thrownness into the Void, that crystal cold terror-in-joy, which, though they may deny it, is exactly the same as ours. Our name was intended to sound a gong through the ages, as if to say, 'from now on, everything will be different'. But that gong has been sounding through the ages, and we are just the ringing of it.
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