No, no one was thinking consciously and deliberately in term of a world decline. The decline was none the less real, and it was hollowing us out. It revealed itself in unsuspected ways. For example, nothing was worth getting excited about. Nothing. Or, one job was as good as another, one man the equal of another. And so on. All boloney, naturally.
Nietzsche, my first great love, hadn’t seemed very German to me. He didn’t even seem Polish. He was like a fresh-minted coin. But Spengler immediately impressed me as being German to the core. The more abstruse and recondite his language, the easier I followed him. A pre-natal language, his. A lullaby. What is erroneously called his pessimism struck me as nothing more than cold Teutonic realism. The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death. Let us be honest. In the whole metaphysic of Europe has there ever been any truth but this sad German truth which, of course, is a lie? Suddenly, thanks to this historical maestro, we glean that the truth of death need not be sad, particularly when, as happens, the whole civilized world is already part of it. Suddenly we are asked to look into the depths of the tomb with the same zeal and joy with which we first greeted life.
Alles Vergangliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.
Try as I might, I could never finish a chapter without succumbing to the temptation to glance at the succeeding chapters. The headings of these chapters obsessed me. They were enchanting. They belonged to a grimoire rather than to a philosophy of history. The Magian World: Act and Portrait: On the Form of the Soul: Physiognomic and Systematic: Historic Pseudo-morphoses … And the last chapter of all, what else could it be but MONEY? Had anyone ever written of Money in this fascinating language? The modern mystery: MONEY.
From The Meaning of Numbers to Money—a thousand large, dense pages, all written out in three years. A bomb that failed to go off because another bomb (World War One) had blown the fuse.
And what footnotes! To be sure, the Germans love footnotes. Was it not about the same time that Otto Rank, one of the twelve disciples of Freud, was busy appending his fascinating footnotes to his studies of the Incest Motif, Don Juan, Art and Artist?
Anyway, from the footnotes to the index in the back of the book—like a journey from Mecca to Lhassa, on foot. Or from Delphi to Timbuctoo, and back again. Who but Spengler, moreover, would have grouped such figures as Pythagoras, Mohammed and Cromwell? Who other than this man would have looked for homologies in Buddhism, Stoicism and Socialism? Who had dared to speak of the glorious Renaissance as a contretemps?
Walking the streets, my head spinning with all the dazzling references, I get to thinking of similar periods, periods in the distant past, it now seems, when I was completely absorbed in books. One period especially comes back to me vividly. It is the period when I first got to know Maxie Schnadig. There he is, dressing the show window of a haberdashery store not far from Kosciusko Street, where he lived. Hello Dostoievsky! Hoorah! Back and forth through the winter snows—with Dostoievsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Andreyev, Chekov, Artzibashev … And Oblomov! A new calendar of time for me. New friends, new perspectives, new sorrows. One of these new friends proves to be none other than Maxie’s cousin. He is a man much older than us, a physician from Novgorod. That is to say a Russian Jew, but a Russian just the same. And because he is bored with family life he suggests to us that we form a little study group, the three of us, to while the evenings away. And what do we choose to study? The sociology of Lester F. Ward. But Lester F. Ward is only a spring-board for the good doctor. He literally bounces into those subjects which represent the missing links in our lamentable scheme of knowledge—magic, symbols, herbology, crystalline forms, the prophets of the old Testament, Karl Marx, the technique of revolution, and so on. A samovar always on the boil, tasty sandwiches, smoked herring, caviar, fine teas.
A skeleton dangling from the chandelier. He is happy that we are acquainted with the Russian dramatists and novelists, delighted that we have read Kropotkin and Bakunin, but—do we know the real Slavic philosophers and thinkers? He reels off a string of names which are utterly unknown to us. We are given to understand that in all Europe there never were such daring thinkers as the Russians. According to him, they were all visionaries and Utopists. Men who questioned everything. Revolutionaries all of them, even the reactionary ones. Some had been fathers of the Church, some peasants, some criminals, some veritable saints. But they had all endeavored to formulate a new world, usher in a new way of life. And il you consult the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I recall him saying, you will discover nothing about them.
They are not even mentioned. What these Russians were striving for, he emphasized, was not the creation of a rich cultural life but the perfect life. He would discourse at length about the great wealth of the Russian language, how superior it was even to the language of the Elizabethans. He would read Pushkin aloud to us in his own tongue, then throw the book down with a sigh and exclaim: What’s the use? We’re in America now. A kindergarten. He was bored, supremely bored with the American scene. His patients were nearly all Jewish, but American Jews, and he had little in common with them. To him America meant apathy. He missed the talk of revolution. To be truthful, I think he also missed the horrors of the pogrom. He felt that he was rotting away in the hollow tomb of democracy. Sometime you must ask me about Fedorov, he remarked once. But we never got that far. We got bogged down in Lester F. Ward’s sociology. It was too much for Maxie Schandig. Poor Maxie was already poisoned by the American virus. He wanted to go ice-skating, wanted to play hand-ball, tennis, golf. And so, after a few months the study group dissolved. Never once since have I heard mention of Lester F. Ward. Nor have I ever again seen a copy of this great work. As compensation, perhaps, I took to reading Herbert Spencer. More sociology! Then one day I fell upon his Autobiography, and I devoured it. There was indeed a mind. A lame one, but it served its purpose. A mind dwelling alone on an arid plateau. Not a hint of Russia, of revolution, of the Marquis de Sade, of love. Not a hint of anything but problems. The brain rules, because the soul abdicates.
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 brain-pan. The first reading went deep. Since then I have read and re-read, copied and re-copied the passages which obsess me. Here are a few at random, as inexpugnable as the letters of the alphabet…
To bring up, out of the web of world-happening, a millenium 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 …
