"The law of unintended consequences pushes us ceaselessly through the years, permitting no pause for perspective"
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Unintended consequences, in Schickel's telling, are less a policy footnote than a motor: history as a machine with no off switch. The sentence moves like what it describes. "Pushes" is physical, impatient; "ceaselessly" denies the consolations of a clean ending; "through the years" stretches the shove across a lifetime. Then comes the sting: "permitting no pause for perspective". It's not just that outcomes surprise us. It's that the pace of living makes it hard to even recognize surprise as it happens.
Schickel, a critic by temperament and trade, understood how culture manufactures momentum. In film, in politics, in personal life, an action rarely arrives alone; it drags a chain of side effects that become the next day's premise. The line reads like an indictment of modernity's churn: the news cycle, the career ladder, the technological upgrade path. You don't get to stop the story to understand the scene; you're already in the next one.
The subtext is quietly bleak but not nihilistic. Schickel isn't arguing that intention is meaningless; he's warning that intention is structurally outgunned. "Perspective" here isn't wisdom in the abstract. It's the basic human capacity to interpret our own lives, to assign proportion, to say: this mattered, that didn't. The tragedy is procedural: by the time we learn what we did, we're doing something else, and the bill has already come due.
Schickel, a critic by temperament and trade, understood how culture manufactures momentum. In film, in politics, in personal life, an action rarely arrives alone; it drags a chain of side effects that become the next day's premise. The line reads like an indictment of modernity's churn: the news cycle, the career ladder, the technological upgrade path. You don't get to stop the story to understand the scene; you're already in the next one.
The subtext is quietly bleak but not nihilistic. Schickel isn't arguing that intention is meaningless; he's warning that intention is structurally outgunned. "Perspective" here isn't wisdom in the abstract. It's the basic human capacity to interpret our own lives, to assign proportion, to say: this mattered, that didn't. The tragedy is procedural: by the time we learn what we did, we're doing something else, and the bill has already come due.
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