"Great breakthroughs are always followed by great catastrophes"
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Progress, de Castro suggests, doesn’t arrive as a clean upgrade. It arrives like a storm front: a sudden clearing that also tears roofs off. “Great breakthroughs” is an optimistic phrase she immediately booby-traps with “always,” a word that refuses the comfort of exception. The line works because it denies the modern fairy tale that innovation equals improvement. It’s not anti-hope so much as anti-innocence.
As a 19th-century Galician poet writing in a Spain churned by political upheaval, uneven modernization, and cultural marginalization, de Castro knew “breakthrough” could mean railroads and liberal reforms, but also displacement, backlash, and the tightening grip of a centralized state. Her own project - resurrecting Galician language and dignity in literature - was itself a breakthrough shadowed by catastrophe: poverty, migration, and the contempt of dominant culture. The subtext is that advances tend to redistribute power before they redistribute wellbeing, and that the bill comes due for someone.
The sentence is built like a historical law, but it’s really a moral warning. It tells the reader to look for the hidden cost baked into triumph. Catastrophe isn’t an accident that follows progress; it’s the part progress pretends not to see. Read now, the line feels eerily current: tech revolutions that fracture attention, medical miracles that deepen inequality, political “new eras” that unlock new kinds of violence. De Castro’s bleak clarity is also a call for responsibility: if you’re cheering the breakthrough, you should be scanning the horizon for who it will break.
As a 19th-century Galician poet writing in a Spain churned by political upheaval, uneven modernization, and cultural marginalization, de Castro knew “breakthrough” could mean railroads and liberal reforms, but also displacement, backlash, and the tightening grip of a centralized state. Her own project - resurrecting Galician language and dignity in literature - was itself a breakthrough shadowed by catastrophe: poverty, migration, and the contempt of dominant culture. The subtext is that advances tend to redistribute power before they redistribute wellbeing, and that the bill comes due for someone.
The sentence is built like a historical law, but it’s really a moral warning. It tells the reader to look for the hidden cost baked into triumph. Catastrophe isn’t an accident that follows progress; it’s the part progress pretends not to see. Read now, the line feels eerily current: tech revolutions that fracture attention, medical miracles that deepen inequality, political “new eras” that unlock new kinds of violence. De Castro’s bleak clarity is also a call for responsibility: if you’re cheering the breakthrough, you should be scanning the horizon for who it will break.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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