“As soon as Life is fatigued,” says Spengler, “as soon as a man is put on to the artificial soil of great cities—which are intellectual worlds to themselves—and needs a theory in which suitably to present Life to himself, morale turns into a problem.”
There are phrases, sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs from The Decline of the West which seem to be engraved in my brainpan. The first reading went deep. Since then I have read and reread, copied and re-copied the passages which obsess me. Here are a few at random, as inexpungeable as the letters of the alphabet.…
“To bring up, out of the web of world-happening, a millennium of organic culture-history as an entity and person, and to grasp the conditions of its inmost spirituality—such is the aim.”
“Only the insight that can penetrate into the metaphysical is capable of experiencing in dates the symbols of that which happened, and so of elevating an Incident into a Destiny. And he who is to himself a Destiny (like Napoleon) does not need this insight, since between himself as a fact and the other facts there is a harmony of metaphysical rhythm which gives his decisions their dreamlike certainty.”
“To look at the world, no longer from the heights as Aeschylus, Plato, Dante and Goethe did, but from the standpoint of oppressive actualities is to exchange the bird’s perspective for the frog’s.”
“The classical spirit, with its oracles and its omens, wants only to know the future, but the Westerner would shape it. The Third Kingdom is the Germanic ideal. From Joachim of Floris to Nietzsche and Ibsen … every great man has linked his life to an eternal morning. Alexander’s life was a wondrous paroxysm, a dream which conjured up the Homeric ages from the grave. Napoleon’s life was an immense toil, not for himself nor for France, but for the Future.”
“From the high and distant standpoint it matters very little what ‘truths’ thinkers have managed to formulate in words within their respective schools, for, here as in every great art, it is the schools, conventions and repertory of forms that are the basic elements. Infinitely more important than the answers are the questions—the choice of them, the inner form of them.…”
“With the Name comes a new world-outlook.… The Name grazes the meaning of consciousness and the source of fear alike. The world is not merely existent, a secret is felt in it.… Man names that which is enigmatic. It is the beast that knows no enigmas.… With the name the step is taken from the everyday physical of the beast to the metaphysical of man. It was the greatest turning-point in the history of the human soul.”
“A true system of thoughts emphatically cannot exist, for no sign can replace actuality. Profound and honest thinkers are always brought to the conclusion that all cognition is conditioned a priori by its own form and can never reach that which the words mean.… And this ignorabimus is in conformity also with the intuition of every true sage, that abstract principles of life are acceptable only as figures of speech, trite maxims of daily use underneath which life flows, as it had always flowed, onward. Race, in the end, is stronger than languages, and thus it is that, under all the great names, it has been thinkers—who are personalities—and not systems, which are mutable, that have taken effect upon life.”
“For the sake of the machine, human life becomes precious. Work becomes the great word of ethical thinking: in the eighteenth century it loses its derogatory implication in all languages. The machine works and forces the man to co-operate. The entire Culture reaches a degree of activity such that the earth trembles under it.… And these machines become in their forms less and ever less human, more ascetic, mystic, esoteric.… Man has felt the machine to be devilish, and rightly. It signifies in the eyes of the believer the deposition of God. It delivers sacred Causality over to man and by him, with a sort of foreseeing omniscience, is set in motion, silent and irresistible.…”
“A power can be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and no power that can confront money is left but this one. Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood. Life is alpha and omega, the cosmic onflow in microcosmic form. It is the fact of facts within the world-as-history.… Ever in History it is life and life only—race-quality, the triumph of the will-to-power—and not the victory of truths, discoveries, or money that signifies. World-history is the world court, and it has ever decided in favor of the stronger, fuller, and more self-assured life—decreed to it, namely, the right to exist, regardless of whether its rights would hold before a tribunal of waking consciousness. Always it has sacrificed truth and justice to might and race, and passed doom of death upon men and peoples in whom truth was more than deeds, and justice than power. And so the drama of a high Culture—that wondrous world of deities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities—closes with the return of the pristine facts of the blood eternal that is one and the same as the ever encircling cosmic flow.…”
“For us, however, whom a Destiny has placed in this Culture and at this moment of its development—the moment when money is celebrating its last victories, and the Caesarium that is to succeed approaches with quiet, firm step—our direction, willed and obligatory at once, is set for us within narrow limits, and on any other terms life is not worth the living. We have not the freedom to reach to this or to that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing.…”
“What really signifies is not that an individual or a people is ‘in condition,’ well-nourished and fruitful, but for what he or it is so.… It is only with the coming of the Civilization, when the whole form-world begins to ebb, that mere life-preserving begins to outline itself, nakedly and insistently—this is the time when the banal assertion that ‘hunger and love’ are the driving forces of life ceases to be ashamed of itself; when life comes to mean, not a waxing in strength for the task, but a matter of ‘happiness of the greatest number,’ of comfort and ease, of ‘panem et circenses’; and when, in the place of grand politics, we have economic politics as an end in itself.…”
I could go on and on, do as I have done time and again—quote and quote until a veritable handbook accumulates. Almost twenty-five years since I made the first reading! And the magic is still there. For those who pride themselves on being always in the van, all that I have quoted, as well as all that lies between the quotes, is now “old hat.” What matter? For me Oswald Spengler is still alive and kicking. He enriched and uplifted me. As did Nietzsche, Dostoevski, Elie Faure.
Perhaps I am somewhat of a juggler, since I am able to balance such incongruous ponderables as The Decline of the West and the Tao Tê Ching. The one is made of granite or porphyry and weighs a ton; the other is light as a feather and runs through my fingers like water. In eternity, where they meet and have their being, they cancel one another out. An exile like Hermann Hesse understands this sort of juggling perfectly. In the book called Siddhartha he presents two Buddhas, the known and the unknown. Each perfect in his way. They are opposites—in the sense of Systematic and Physiognomic. They do not destroy one another. They meet and part. Buddha is one of those names which “grazes the meaning of consciousness.” The real Buddhas are without name. In short, the known and the unknown balance perfectly. Jugglers understand.…
When I think of it now, how remarkably this “Untergang” music corresponded with my “underground” life! Strange, too, that virtually the only person with whom I could then speak of Spengler was Osiecki. It must have been in Joe’s restaurant, during one of my promenades nocturnes, that we met again. He had not lost that weird gnomic grin—the teeth all loose and rattling louder than ever. As far as “actualities” went he was still off the beam. But he could take in the Spenglerian music with the same ease and understanding as he did the music of Dohnanyi for whom he had conceived a passion. To while away the long, weary nights he had taken to reading in bed. All that related to the driving number, engineering, architecture (in Spengler) he had swallowed like predigested food. And money, I should add. Of this subject he had an uncanny knowledge. Strange to what ends the “unfit” develop their faculties! Listening to Osiecki, I used to t
hink how sweet it would be to be locked up in the bughouse with him—and Oswald Spengler. What marvelous discussions we would have held! Out in the cold world all this grand music went to waste. If critics and scholars were interested in the Spenglerian view of things it was not at all in the way we were. For them it was but another bone to gnaw at. A juicier bone than usual, perhaps, but a bone nevertheless. To us it was life, the elixir of life. We got drunk on it every time we met. And of course we developed our own mutual “morphological” sign language. With each other we could cover huge tracts of thought in jig time, because of this code language. As soon as a stranger entered the discussion we got bogged down. To him our talk was not only unintelligible, it was sheer nonsense.
With Mona I developed another kind of language. By dint of listening to my monologues she soon picked up the glittering tag ends, all the (to her) “fantastic” terminology—definitions, meanings, and, so to speak, “morphological excreta.” She often read a page or two while sitting on the stool. Just sufficient to emerge with a mouthful of phrases and outlandish references. In short, she had learned to bounce the ball back to me, which was pleasant and (for me) stimulating. All I ever required of a listener, when wound up, was a semblance of understanding. Long practice had developed in me the art of instructing my listener in the fundamentals, of giving him just enough of a stance to permit me to wash over him like a fountain. Thus at one and the same time I instructed or informed him—and mystified him. When I sensed that he felt himself on firm ground I would sweep the ground away from him. (Does not the Zen master endeavor to rob his disciple of every foothold he has ever had—in order to supply him with one that is really no foothold?)
With Mona this was infuriating. Naturally. But then I would have the delicious opportunity of reconciling my contradictory statements; this meant expansion, elaboration, distillation, condensation. In this wise I stumbled on some remarkable conclusions, not only about Spengler’s dicta but about thought in general, about the thought process itself. Only the Chinese, it seemed to me, had understood and appreciated “the game of thought.” Passionate as I was about Spengler, the truth of his utterances never seemed so important to me as the wonderful play of his thought.… Today I think what a pity it is that, as a frontispiece to this phenomenal work, there is not reproduced the horoscope of the author. A clue of this sort is absolutely requisite to an understanding of the character and nature of this intellectual giant. When one thinks of the significance with which Spengler weights the phrase—“man as intellectual nomad”—one begins to realize that, in pursuing his high task, he came close to being a modern Moses. How much more frightful is this wilderness in which our “intellectual nomad” is forced to dwell! No Promised Land in sight. Nothing on the horizon but empty symbols.
That gulf between the dawn man, who participated mystically, and contemporary man, who is unable to communicate except through sterile intellect, can only be bridged by a new type of man, the man with a cosmic consciousness. The sage, the prophet, the visionary, they all spoke in apocalyptic terms. From earliest times the “few” have been attempting to break through. Some undoubtedly have broken through—and will remain forever outside the rat trap.
A morphology of history, valid, exciting, inspiring though it may be, is still a death science. Spengler was not concerned with what lies beyond history. I am. Others are. Even if Nirvana be only a word, it is a pregnant word, it contains a promise. That “secret” which lies at the heart of the world may yet be dragged into the open. Even ages ago it was pronounced to be an “open” secret.
If the solution to life is the living of it, then let us live, live more abundantly! The masters of life are not found in books. They are not historical figures. They are situated in eternity, and they beseech us unceasingly to join them, in eternity.
At my elbow, as I write these lines, is a photograph torn from a book, a photograph of an unknown Chinese sage who is living today. Either the photographer did not know who he was or he withheld his name. We know only that he is from Peking: that is all the information which is vouchsafed. When I turn my head to look at him, it is as though he were right here in my room. He is more alive—even in a photograph—than anyone I know. He is not simply “a man of spirit”—he is all spirit. He is Spirit itself, I might say. All this is concentrated in his expression. The look which he gives forth is completely joyous and luminous. It says without equivocation: “Life is bliss!”
Do you suppose that, from the eminence on which he is poised—serene, light as a bird, with a wisdom allembracing—a morphology of history would mean anything to him? No question here of exchanging the perspective of the frog for that of the bird. Here we have the perspective of a god. He is “there” and his position is unalterable. Instead of perspective he has compassion. He does not preach wisdom—he sheds light.
Do you suppose that he is unique? Not I. I believe that all over the world, and in the most unsuspected places (naturally), there are men—or gods—like this radiant being. They are not enigmatic, they are transparent. There is no mystery about them whatever: they are out in the open, perpetually “on view.” If we are removed from them it is only because we cannot accept their divine simplicity. “Illumined being,” we say, yet never ask with what it is they are illumined. To be aflame with spirit (which is life), to radiate unending joy, to be serene above the chaos of the world and still be part of the world, human, divinely human, closer than any brother—how is it we do not yearn to be thus? Is there a role which is better, deeper, richer, more compelling? Then shout it from the roof tops! We want to know. And we want to know immediately.
I do not need to wait for your response. I see the answer all about me. It is not really an answer—it is an evasion. The illustrious one at my elbow looks straight at me: he fears not to gaze upon the face of the world. He has neither rejected the world nor renounced it: he is part of it, just as stone, tree, beast, flower and star are part of it. In his being he is the world, all there can ever be of it.… When I look at those around me I see only the profiles of averted faces. They are trying not to look at life—it is too terrible or too horrible, too this or too that. They see only the awesome dragon of life, and they are impotent before the monster. If only they had the courage to look straight into the dragon’s jaws!
In many ways what is called history seems to me nothing more than a manifestation of this same fearsome attitude towards life. It is possible that what we call “the historical” would cease to be, would be erased from consciousness, once we performed that simple soldierly movement of “Eyes Front!” What is worse than a backward glance at the world is an oblique one.
When we speak of men “making history” we mean to say that they have in some measure altered the course of life. But the man at my elbow is beyond such silly dreams. He knows that man alters nothing—not even his own self. He knows that man can do one thing only, and that that is his sole aim in life—open the eyes of the soul! Yes, man has this choice—to let in the light or to keep the shutters closed. In making the choice man acts. This is his part vis-à-vis creation.
Open the eyes wide and the stir must die down. And when the stir dies down then commences the real music.
The dragon snorting fire and smoke from his nostrils is only expelling his fears. The dragon does not stand guard at the heart of the world—he stands at the entrance to the cave of wisdom. The dragon has reality only in the phantasmal world of superstition.
The homeless, homesick man of the big cities. What heart-rending pages Spengler devotes to the plight of “the intellectual nomad!” Rootless, sterile, skeptical, soulless—and homeless and homesick to boot. “Primitive folk can loose themselves from the soil and wander, but the intellectual nomad never. Homesickness for the great city is keener than any other nostalgia. Home is for him any one of these giant cities, but even the nearest village is alien territory. He would sooner die upon the pavement than go ‘back’ to the land.”
Let me say it unequivocally—after a “r
eading” nothing in the world of actualities had meaning or importance for me. The daily news was about as remote as the Dog Star. I was in the very center of the transformative process. All was “death and transfiguration.”
There was only one headline which still had power to excite me, and that was—THE END OF THE WORLD IS IN SIGHT! In that imaginary phrase I never sensed a menace to my own world, only to “the” world. I was closer to Augustine than to Jerome. But I had not yet found my Africa. My point of repair was a stuffy little furnished room. Alone in it I experienced a strange sort of peace. It was not the “peace that passeth understanding.” Ah no! It was an intermittent sort, the augur of a greater, a more enduring peace. It was the peace of a man who was able to reconcile himself with the condition of the world in thought.
Still, it was a step. The cultured individual seldom gets beyond this stage.