"Nothing recedes like progress"
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Progress, in Cummings' hands, isn’t a staircase; it’s a horizon that keeps moving away. “Nothing recedes like progress” compresses a whole modern anxiety into five words: the better future we’re promised is always just out of reach, and the act of reaching is what makes it retreat. The line works because it turns a triumphalist noun into a vanishing point. “Progress” is supposed to accumulate - more rights, more comfort, more knowledge - but Cummings frames it as optical illusion, a trick of perspective. The closer you think you are, the more the thing you wanted dissolves into distance.
The subtext is not anti-change so much as anti-certainty. Modernity sells improvement as linear and inevitable; Cummings hears the sales pitch and answers with a paradox that punctures it. It’s a poet’s way of saying that the metric keeps changing: new technologies create new dependencies; reforms reveal deeper injustices; convenience breeds fresh forms of restlessness. If progress is defined by whatever hasn’t been achieved yet, it can never be possessed - only pursued.
Context matters. Cummings lived through mechanized war, industrial acceleration, the rise of mass culture and mass propaganda, eras when “progress” was both slogan and justification. His modernist sensibility mistrusted grand abstractions, especially the kind that flatten human scale. The aphorism lands as a quiet rebuke to a century that believed history had a direction - and that direction could be marketed, managed, even weaponized.
The subtext is not anti-change so much as anti-certainty. Modernity sells improvement as linear and inevitable; Cummings hears the sales pitch and answers with a paradox that punctures it. It’s a poet’s way of saying that the metric keeps changing: new technologies create new dependencies; reforms reveal deeper injustices; convenience breeds fresh forms of restlessness. If progress is defined by whatever hasn’t been achieved yet, it can never be possessed - only pursued.
Context matters. Cummings lived through mechanized war, industrial acceleration, the rise of mass culture and mass propaganda, eras when “progress” was both slogan and justification. His modernist sensibility mistrusted grand abstractions, especially the kind that flatten human scale. The aphorism lands as a quiet rebuke to a century that believed history had a direction - and that direction could be marketed, managed, even weaponized.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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