In my opinion, a closer new look at the modern would disclose the root of its distinctive experience of temporality in the modernization processes and dynamics of turn-of-the-century capitalism, with its glorious new machinery (celebrated by the futurists and so many others, but no less dramatically deplored and demonized by other writers we also call "modernists"), which has nonetheless not yet completely colonized the social space in which it is emergent. Arno Mayer has reminded us, with a salutary shock, of the persistence of the old regime well up into the twentieth century, and the very partial nature of the "triumph of the bourgeoisie" or of industrial capitalism in the modernist period, still predominantly rural and at least statistically dominated by peasants and landlords with feudal habits, among which the occasional motorcar strikes a jarring but exciting note, along with intermittent electrification and even the sparse aviational pyrotechnics of World War I. First and foremost of the great oppositions not yet overcome by capitalism in this period is therefore that between town and country, and the subjects or citizens of the high-modern period are mostly people who have lived in multiple worlds and multiple times -- a medieval pays to which they return on family vacations and an urban agglomeration whose elites are, at least in most advanced countries, trying to "live with their century" and to be as "absolutely modern" as they know how. The very value of the New and of innovation (as these are reflected in everything from First World hermetic forms to the great drama of Old and New played out variously in the Third and Second World countries) clearly enough presupposes the exceptionality of what is felt to be "modern"; while deep memory itself, which inscribes and scars the differentiation of experience into time and evokes something like the intermittencies of alternate worlds, would seem also to depend on "uneven development" of an existential and psychic, fully as much as on an economic, kind. Nature is related to memory not for metaphysical reasons but because it throws up the concept and the image of an older mode of agricultural production that you can repress, dimly remember, or nostalgically recover in moments of danger and vulnerability.