“The roar of traffic… Ceaselessly, in great surges, the waves roll in over the length and breadth of our cities, rising higher and higher, breaking in a kind of frenzy when the roar reaches its peak and then discharging across the stones and the asphalt even as the next onrush is being released from where it was held by the traffic lights. For some time now I have been convinced that it is out of this din that the life is being born which will come after us and will spell our gradual destruction, just as we have been gradually destroying what was there long before us.”
W.G. Sebald, Vertigo. There is a life that we have been destroying: the slowness of the past, the monuments and movements of which seem to have taken an incomprehensible amount of time to unfold, is ontologically unintelligible to us; scale of sufficient magnitude begins to be a difference not of degree but of kind.
We are a life being destroyed: already the teenagers stacked on motorbikes in Beijing, texting as they weave through traffic while chatting and listening to music, cannot understand how it takes us so long to say anything or why we should want a bit of quiet while writing out our over-long notes, some more than 140 characters, to one another.
