Time & Perspective Quote by Susan Sontag

The line lands like a cool, unnerving diagnosis: modernity doesn’t just change the present, it changes the past. Sontag is writing against the comforting idea that history sits behind us as settled fact. When “historical change continues to accelerate,” yesterday becomes unfamiliar at speed; the recent past starts to feel like a foreign country with strange customs. That’s the sly turn of “surreal”: not a dreamy aesthetic pose, but the lived sensation that what was ordinary a moment ago now reads as artifact.

Her intent is double-edged. She’s naming an emergent way of looking - the modern gaze that treats the past as an image-bank, a set of styles and atmospheres to be consumed - while also admitting its seduction. “A new beauty” isn’t innocent; it’s the beauty of distance, the pleasure of watching something disappear. The ellipsis (“making it possible...”) is doing ethical work, staging a hesitation: the very conditions that produce this beauty are also the conditions of loss.

Context matters: Sontag spent her career interrogating how representation alters experience - photographs, cinema, camp, the aestheticization of suffering. Here she extends that critique to time itself. Acceleration turns history into spectacle; it invites nostalgia that feels like connoisseurship. The subtext is a warning about how easily mourning becomes taste. When vanishing becomes beautiful, the viewer risks becoming complicit, admiring the fade-out instead of asking who or what is being erased, and why the machine is speeding up in the first place.