Time & Perspective Quote by Gertrude Stein

Civilization, Stein needles, is less a marble monument than a family anecdote with a short shelf life. By counting history in "grandfathers' granddaughters" she shrinks the supposedly massive distance between modernity and collapse into something domestic, almost gossipy: a lineage you can sketch at a dinner table. The line works because it refuses the comforting scale of centuries and empires. It replaces them with the blunt math of bodies being born, aging, and dying - the only clock most people actually feel.

Stein's phrasing is also slyly destabilizing. "Everybody thinks" targets a smug consensus: the modern belief that progress is self-sustaining, that institutions have deep roots simply because they feel familiar. Then she slips in "dark ages", a deliberately loaded shorthand not for a specific period but for the return of fear, scarcity, and coercion once the systems that buffer us - law, infrastructure, knowledge, norms - stop reproducing themselves. The subtext is that civilization is not a triumph over time; it's a habit, and habits are easy to break.

Context matters: Stein lived through World War I and watched Europe, supposedly the apex of culture, turn mechanized and cruel. Between the wars, the idea that barbarism was always "behind us" became impossible to sustain. Her modernist instinct - to distrust grand narratives and expose how flimsy our stories are - shows up here as a warning: the past isn't distant. It's hereditary. And it doesn't take many generations for the lights to go out.