Your sense of acceleration has not blinded you to the brevity of the present moment. Oh, perhaps sometimes we allow ourselves to think we have a long history, but mostly we know that the peculiar hastening of our culture and ourselves has occurred in an instant. Any of the usual defined eras in human history—the Middle Ages, say, or the Ming dynasty—lasted many times longer than has the technocracy in which we live. And in those eras, by comparison, not much happened. We know that, however we define modern times, these times have been a mere eyeblink; that all recorded history has been just an eyeblink in the lifetime of the species; that Homo sapiens, information gatherer, has lived for barely an eyeblink in the history of terrestrial fauna… .

Your sense of acceleration has not blinded you to the brevity of the present moment. Oh, perhaps sometimes we allow ourselves to think we have a long history, but mostly we know that the peculiar hastening of our culture and ourselves has occurred in an instant. Any of the usual defined eras in human history—the Middle Ages, say, or the Ming dynasty—lasted many times longer than has the technocracy in which we live. And in those eras, by comparison, not much happened. We know that, however we define modern times, these times have been a mere eyeblink; that all recorded history has been just an eyeblink in the lifetime of the species; that Homo sapiens, information gatherer, has lived for barely an eyeblink in the history of terrestrial fauna… .