possible worlds

It is difficult to imagine something more pharisaic than this demiurge, 
who contemplates all uncreated possible worlds to take delight in his single choice.  
For to do so, he must close his ears to the incessant lamentation that, throughout the infinite chambers of this Baroque inferno of potentiality, arises from everything that could have been but was not, 
from everything that could have been otherwise but had to be sacrificed for the present world to be as it is.

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Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, Collected Essays in Philosophy,  “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” trans. and ed. Daniel Heller-Roasen,  (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 266.

the clank of the old historical machinery

"Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?"
 - Walker Percy Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome

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