Modernization, by stripping away the traditional representations with which human temporality was disguised and domesticated, revealed for one long stark moment the rift in existence through which the unjustifiability of the passing of time could not but be glimpsed, by Baudelaire, who called it ennui, the ticking away of the meter still running, the look downward into the meaninglessness of the organic, which does not set you any tasks but only condemns you to go on existing like a plant.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 84-85