intimations of modernity

11-30-07 My book has a motif or theme, a sort of sub-text (in contemporary jargon): ‘intimations of modernity’ I call it. I didn’t put it there, it just happened naturally as I applied my method of inquiry—as Gertrude Stein says, what’s the question?—to a group of plays that I had already begun to think of, vaguely, as being or being about such intimations. So, garbage in, garbage out?

It is hard not to think teleologically about the last four or five hundred years. When mathematics began to become the language of science in the 16th century, the arrow of history began to point toward the future? The answer, I think, is yes. But that’s a real question.