This passage from "The Age of the World Picture" recaps the event of modernity that defines the age, manifested in the globalization made possible by miniaturization, and indicates that the response must be neither railing against "Americanism" nor turning back.

A sign of this event is the appearance everywhere, and in the most varied forms and disguises, of the gigantic. At the same time, the huge announces itself in the direction of the ever smaller. We have only to think of the numbers of atomic physics. The gigantic presses forward in a form which seems to make it disapear: in destruction of great distances by the airplane, in the representations of foreign and remote worlds in their everydayness produced at will by the flick of a switch. One thinks too superficially, however, if one takes the gigantic to be merely an endlessly extended emptiness of the purely quantitative. One thinks too briefly if one finds the gigantic, in the form of the continual never-having-been-here-before, to spring merely from a blind impulse to exaggerate and excel. One thinks not at all if one takes oneself to have explained this appearance of the gigantic with the slogan "Americanism".

The gigantic is, rather, that through which the quantitative acquires its own kind of quality, becomes thereby, a remarkable form of the great. A historical age is not only given in a different way from others; it also has, in every case, its own concept of greatness. As soon, however, as the gigantic, in planning, calculating, establishing, and securing, changes from the quantitative and becomes its own special quality, then the gigantic and the seemingly calculable become, through this shift, incalculable. This incalculability becomes the invisible shadow cast over all things when has become the subiectum and the world has become picture.

Through this shadow the modern world withdraws into a space beyond representation and so lends to the incalculable its own determinateness and historical uniqueness. This shadow, however, points to something else, knowledge of which, to us moderns, is refused. Yet man will never be able to experience and think this refusal as long as he goes around merely negating the age. The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, achieves, in itself, nothing, is merely a closing the eyes and blindness towards the historical moment [Augenblick].

P. 72-73

That the current circumstances are referred to as a moment [Augenblick] and not an event [Ereignis] indicates that the latter term is reserved for the uncovering of the invisible shadow.  ¶ 8:39 AM