Time & Perspective Quote by Lytton Strachey

Strachey is doing what he does best: puncturing the lazy timeline that says “modernity” arrives on schedule. By calling Pascal’s style “modern” while insisting his thought is “deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages,” he separates surface from engine. The prose can feel brisk, analytical, almost journalistic; the metaphysics underneath are haunted by older anxieties - sin, grace, eternity, the terror of a silent God. That split is the point. Pascal isn’t a stepping-stone toward Enlightenment confidence so much as a fault line where medieval theology and emerging scientific reason grind against each other.

The phrasing “deeply impregnated” is deliberately tactile and faintly improper, Strachey’s way of reminding you that ideas aren’t clean abstractions; they seep, they inherit, they reproduce. He also refuses the comforting story of linear progress. “Almost equally, to the future and to the past” casts Pascal as a double agent: a mathematician and early analyst of probability who still writes as if the soul’s fate is the only urgent datum.

Context matters: Strachey, a Bloomsbury-era critic, is skeptical of Victorian pieties about heroes marching history forward. His portraits relish contradiction, and Pascal is tailor-made - at once a lucid stylist and a man driven by religious extremity. The subtext is a warning aimed at Strachey’s own modern readers: you can adopt the newest rhetorical tools and still be ruled by older structures of belief. Modern language doesn’t automatically mean modern thought; it can just be an updated costume for ancient dread.