The Time of Return

On or about February 2025, the twentieth century ended. Rarely does the beginning or close of an epoch align precisely with its calendar dates; it takes time for the years to settle into the exact note, the timbre, of what is to come. When Virginia Woolf wrote in 1910 that “human character changed,” she was ushering in a century that, in the winter of this year, as a new American political administration began to clumsily, brutally assert its power, has now seemingly concluded on both sides of the Atlantic, leaving in its stead an ever-tensing shift in human relations not seen since the years before World War I.