keep going

two quotations from Peter Conrad's excellent Modern Times, Modern Places:

To close the gaps or to conceal the evidence of incompleteness would have seemed dishonest. We inherit waste, or whatever has survived the modern campaign--in science, warfare and culture--to destroy the past and (possibly) the world. Eliot in The Waste Land gathered poetic quotations together to solace him in what he gloomily called 'my ruin.' Later in the century, the Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz--having lived through a series of historical calamities and geographical dislocations--took a less doleful and defeated view of the matter. 'Man,' Milosz argues, 'constructs poetry out of the remnants found in ruins.' For a child, a ruin is a playground, an innocent field of new possibilities. (716)

and

This, confounding all prognostications, is the simplest truth about the twentieth century. Doomsday did not occur. Nor was the individual exterminated, as the ideologues of both the left and right wished. (713)