"In relation to the history of organic life on earth,” writes..." — Walter Benjamin

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In relation to the history of organic life on earth,” writes a modern biologist, “the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.” The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.

— Walter Benjamin

(trans. Harry Zohn)

Illuminations

Time How Time Really Is Time As Felt Outside of Humans Geological Time

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We know that in his work Proust did not describe a life as it actually was, but a life as…

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