Bact to AtD. Frank. Meteorites

[alice wellintown]

It is an allusion to Henry Adams:


XXXV
Nunc Age (1905)


NEARLY forty years had passed since the ex-private secretary landed at
New York with the ex-Ministers Adams and Motley, when they saw
American society as a long caravan stretching out towards the plains.
As he came up the bay again, November 5, 1904, an older man than
either his father or Motley in 1868, he found the approach more
striking than ever,—wonderful—unlike anything man had ever seen,—and
like nothing he had ever much cared to see. The outline of the city
became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning.
Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its
freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone
and steam against the sky. The city had the air and movement of
hysteria, and the citizens were crying, in every accent of anger and
alarm, that the new forces must at any cost be brought under control.
Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man,
speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world
irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid. All New York
was demanding new men, and all the new forces, condensed into
corporations, were demanding a new type of man,—a man with ten times
the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type,—for whom they
were ready to pay millions at sight. As one jolted over the pavements
or read the last week’s newspapers, the new man seemed close at hand,
for the old one had plainly reached the end of his strength, and his
failure had become catastrophic. Every one saw it, and every municipal
election shrieked chaos. A traveller in the highways of history looked
out of the club window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue, and felt
himself in Rome, under Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious
of the compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to conceive
whence the next impulse was to come or how it was to act. The
two-thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward from
Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight.


[...]

 In that, or any other case, a nineteenth-century education was as
useless or misleading as an eighteenth-century education had been to
the child of 1838; but Adams had a better reason for holding his
tongue. For his dynamic theory of history he cared no more than for
the kinetic theory of gas; but, if it were an approach to measurement
of motion, it would verify or disprove itself within thirty years. At
the calculated acceleration, the head of the meteor-stream must very
soon pass perihelion. Therefore, dispute was idle, discussion was
futile, and silence, next to good-temper, was the mark of sense. If
the acceleration, measured by the development and economy of forces,
were to continue at its rate since 1800, the mathematician of 1950
should be able to plot the past and future orbit of the human race as
accurately as that of the November meteoroids.