Time & Perspective Quote by Susan Sontag

Sontag is taking a scalpel to one of modernity's favorite bedtime stories: progress as a smooth line. The phrasing is deceptively mild - "can be described" - but it's doing heavy work, reminding you that catastrophe is often a product of narration before it becomes a product of physics. Call something "changing steadily" and you have already framed it as a trend, and trends invite extrapolation. Extrapolation is where panic lives: the imagination extends the line past the present, past tolerance, until the only coherent endpoint is collapse.

The sting is that "catastrophe" here isn't merely a doomsday prophecy; it's a critique of how we metabolize time. Steady change feels legible, managerial, even reassuring, which is exactly why it can be misread as inevitability. The subtext is aimed at the habits of technocracy, journalism, and theory alike: our hunger for clean trajectories turns complex systems into moral fables. Climate, demographic shifts, cultural "decline", political polarization - once they're charted as consistent motion, the chart becomes a script.

Coming from Sontag, a writer obsessed with the politics of interpretation (illness as metaphor, photography as a way of seeing and possessing, the seductions of aestheticizing suffering), the line lands as both warning and diagnosis. Catastrophe is not only what happens; it's also a style of understanding - a way of making history feel dramatic, fated, and therefore oddly usable.