Laudator Temporis Acti

Guy Davenport and Nicholas Kilmer, "Fragments from a Correspondence," Arion 13.3 (Winter, 2006) 89-130 (at 100-101, Davenport's words):

Civilization was over when the first automobile rolled. I'm not being funny. A civis lives in a city. The whole concept of city was negated by the automobile. Quite literally the Late Pleistocene is eating the Eocene. It is an elegant cycle in world history. Dinosaur to car to zilch.

E.M. Cioran (1911-1995), The Fall Into Time, tr. Richard Howard (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), p. 67:

Thus we were handed over to counterfeits of infinity, to an absolute without metaphysical dimensions, submerged in speed since we were not plunged into ecstasy. This panting contraption, the answer to our fidgets, and these specters that work it, this procession of automata, this parade of hallucinated zombies—where are they going, what are they seeking? What wind of madness bears them onward? Each time I tend to absolve them, each time I entertain doubts as to the legitimacy of the aversion or terror they inspire in me, I need only think of the country roads, on a Sunday, for the image of that motorized vermin to confirm me in my disgust and my dread. Use of the legs being abolished, the walker, among these paralytics behind the wheel, seems an eccentric or an outlaw; soon he will appear to be a monster. No more contact with the ground: all that sinks into it has become alien and incomprehensible to us. Cut off from every root, unfit, moreover, to mix with dust or mud, we have achieved the feat of breaking not only with the depths of things, but with their very surface. Civilization, at this stage, would seem to be a bargain with the Devil, if man still had a soul to sell.