Time & Perspective Quote by Raymond Queneau

Queneau’s sentence has the clipped fatalism of someone who’s watched the 20th century chew through “ordinary life” like paper. It’s not a lyrical lament so much as a cold correction: the default setting of history isn’t continuity; it’s rupture. The sly move is in the phrase “individual histories.” He’s talking about the small, private narratives people imagine as self-authored: careers, romances, plans, inheritances. Then he frames them as things that only “rarely” get to “run their course,” a metaphor borrowed from rivers or illnesses, implying a natural arc that modernity keeps interrupting.

The subtext is a jab at the bourgeois fantasy that life is a steady project, managed by prudence and personality. Queneau, shaped by two world wars, ideological convulsions, and the French experience of occupation and liberation, treats war and revolution less as exceptions than as the hidden editors of everyone’s biography. It’s also a poet’s way of narrowing the lens: grand events matter not because they are grand, but because they crash directly into the mundane and rewrite it.

There’s irony in the calm tone. By refusing melodrama, he makes the claim more brutal: catastrophe doesn’t arrive with gothic thunder; it arrives as the historical weather. Queneau’s intent isn’t to glorify upheaval or to moralize it, but to puncture the comforting story that individuals are the main characters of their own time. History, he suggests, is the co-author you never asked for.