Acceleration

Milan Kundera, on the strange nostalgia and longing in the works of Philip Roth and the strange necessity for novelists in general to make the past their familiar landscape:

“The acceleration of history has profoundly transformed individual lives that, in centuries past, used to proceed from birth to death within a single historical period; today a life straddles two such periods, sometimes more.  Whereas history used to advance far more slowly than human life, nowadays it is history that moves fast, it tears ahead, it slips from a man’s grasp, and the continuity, the identity, of a life is in danger of cracking apart.  So the novelist feeds the need to keep within reach, alongside our own way of life, the memory of the bashful and the half forgotten one our predecessors lived.”