Time & Perspective Quote by Eyvind Johnson

A line like this is less a tally of pain than a diagnosis of mood: modernity doesn’t just produce suffering, it amplifies our sense that suffering is unprecedented. Johnson’s phrasing stacks synonyms - “suffering, anguish, the torments of body and soul” - until distress feels total, touching both flesh and conscience. The repetition works the way bad news cycles do: by accumulation. You’re not being asked to verify a statistic; you’re being pulled into the pressure system of an era that experiences itself as overwhelmed.

The subtext is a quiet challenge to historical perspective. “Greater than ever before” is almost certainly not meant as a literal claim (plague centuries and world conquests would like a word). It’s an insight into how the “world of the present” colonizes our imagination: whatever is happening now crowds out memory and makes earlier catastrophes feel abstract. That’s a distinctly 20th-century sensation, shaped by mass media, mechanized war, and bureaucratic violence - the kinds of harms that arrive at scale and with chilling impersonality.

Context matters: Johnson lived through two world wars and the long shadow they cast over European life. For a novelist, the point isn’t to compete in misery Olympics; it’s to capture why the contemporary subject feels uniquely trapped. His sentence is built to mirror that trap: “in the world of the present, in our time” circles back on itself, as if the present is a room with no exit.