The Thing Has Been Done

It is a rather curious thing that is should take a hundred years to change anything that is to change something, it is the human habit to think in centuries and centuries are more or less a hundred years and that makes a grandfather a grandmother to a grandson or a granddaughter if it happens right and it often does about happen right. It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning that they had before, it is a curious thing a very curious thing that everything is a natural thing but it is it is a natural thing and it being a natural thing makes it a very curious thing a very curious thing to anybody’s feeling. One is always having to talk to one’s self about it that a natural thing is not really a strange and a peculiar and a curious thing. So then there we are a hundred years does more or less make a century and this is determined by the fact that it includes a grandparent to a grandchild and that is what makes it definitely different one time from another time and usually there is a war or a catastrophe to emphasize it so that anyone can know about it. It is a very strange thing that such a natural thing is inevitably to all of us such a strange thing such a striking thing such a disconcerting thing. The eighteenth century finished with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars the nineteenth century with the world war, but in each case the thing of course had been done the change had been made but the wars made everybody know it and liberated them from not knowing it not knowing that everything was not just exactly what it had been. - Gertrude Stein