Walker Percy, in Love in the Ruins:
Undoubtedly something is about to happen.
Or is it that something has stopped happening?
Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?
Jean Anouilh, Antigone:
And now the spring is wound up tight! It will uncoil of itself. That is what is so convenient in tragedy. You don’t need to lift a finger. The machine is in perfect order: it has been oiled ever since time began, and it runs without friction.
I find myself constantly hoping that Yeats’ “The Second Coming” is not appropriate to this moment.
But I know it is.
Yeats, The Second Coming:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
It’s a good and subtle insult, no? Tell someone: “Like W.B. Yeats would say, you have always been full of passionate intensity.”
In today’s world, they’d be pleased by the compliment, while one person in a hundred standing by would give you a knowing smile.