The poetics of progress

“I meet an American sailor,” writesAlexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America,“and I ask him why the vessels of his country are constituted so as not to last for long, and he answers me without hesitation that the art of navigation makes such rapid progress each day, that the most beautiful ship would soon become nearly useless if it lasted beyond a few years.In these chance words said by a coarse man and in regard to a particular fact, I see the general and systematic idea by which a grea...