"The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing"
About this Quote
As modern life speeds up, what once seemed familiar stiffens into something uncanny. Objects, customs, neighborhoods, even ways of speaking are shed so quickly that they begin to look like artifacts from a dream. The past does not recede gently; it tilts, warps, and becomes surreal, a cabinet of curiosities assembled almost overnight. Susan Sontag traces this sensation to the culture of images that both records and estranges. Photography, her great subject, freezes what is slipping away and presents it as an object of contemplation, detached from its lifeworld. A rotary phone, a hand-lettered shop sign, a face in a wartime portrait suddenly wear the aura of the marvelous because the present has made them improbable.
Surrealism reveled in the beauty of juxtaposition and the shock of the ordinary made strange; accelerated history performs that trick on a civilizational scale. The quicker the turnover of forms, the more the very fact of survival confers glamour. Museums and archives multiply, antiques markets bloom, retro aesthetics cycle through fashion, and digital feeds curate endless remembrances, each frame offering a small elegy. The beauty that appears is mixed with loss: a sweetness of obsolescence, the appeal of ruins, the tenderness we feel for fragile things.
Sontag is not merely celebrating nostalgia. She understands the lure and also its risk. To see beauty in what is vanishing can dull urgency, aestheticizing decay and diverting attention from causes and responsibilities. Her later work on images of suffering underlines this ethical edge: the gaze that turns hardship into a poignant picture can soothe conscience as much as stir it. There is an echo of Walter Benjamin’s angel, blown backward into the future while staring at piling wreckage; the spectacle captivates even as it warns.
The line points to a modern paradox. The faster we move, the more we look back, converting loss into style. The task is to keep looking clearly, to let the new beauty sharpen, not soften, our sense of what is disappearing and why.
Surrealism reveled in the beauty of juxtaposition and the shock of the ordinary made strange; accelerated history performs that trick on a civilizational scale. The quicker the turnover of forms, the more the very fact of survival confers glamour. Museums and archives multiply, antiques markets bloom, retro aesthetics cycle through fashion, and digital feeds curate endless remembrances, each frame offering a small elegy. The beauty that appears is mixed with loss: a sweetness of obsolescence, the appeal of ruins, the tenderness we feel for fragile things.
Sontag is not merely celebrating nostalgia. She understands the lure and also its risk. To see beauty in what is vanishing can dull urgency, aestheticizing decay and diverting attention from causes and responsibilities. Her later work on images of suffering underlines this ethical edge: the gaze that turns hardship into a poignant picture can soothe conscience as much as stir it. There is an echo of Walter Benjamin’s angel, blown backward into the future while staring at piling wreckage; the spectacle captivates even as it warns.
The line points to a modern paradox. The faster we move, the more we look back, converting loss into style. The task is to keep looking clearly, to let the new beauty sharpen, not soften, our sense of what is disappearing and why.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
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