Word: decays
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...river darkened and thundered towards the mill race, light came full on the high façade of decay. Incredible in its loneliness, roofless, floorless, beams criss-crossing the dank interior daylight, the whole place tottered, fit to crash at a breath. Hinges rustily bled where a door had been wrenched away...
...scoring does not greatly differ from that used in two-old-cat; but cricket is unique among all games for profound, untechnical and subtle reasons. Its rhythm, the pace at which its climaxes are reached and at which they disappear, is slower than anything except the growth and decay of empires...
Beset by doubts, historical philosophers base their theories on one certitude. Civilizations are never static. They are always in motion, creatively toward stronger outpourings of their spirit or destructively toward decay and dissolution. Thus Western civilization, with its vaulting expression in Gothic cathedrals, Beethoven, da Vinci, Einstein, Manhattan's sun-smitten towers, is either seething onward toward mightier transactions, more luminous cultural & scientific manifestations, or suffering the nervous, senile disintegration which desolated Rome, Egypt, ancient China...
Spengler is historian, mathematician, esthete, economist, political scientist, philosopher. With a curious and powerful alternation of Teutonic intellectual despotism and entranced mysticism, he analyzes history by huge analogies. Civilizations he sees as emerging & disappearing in cycles, each one, like a flower, experiencing birth, growth, decay, death. Our own Western civilization he declares to be in the phase of decay, characterized by material expansion, effete spirituality. Collapse is imminent in perhaps 300 years. But by that time another human group will be unwittingly generating a new civilization to flourish and sink in its own long turn. Herein lies the refutation...
...Wind: Lillian Gish on the prairies. Shadows of Fear: Crime and decay of a Zola heroine. Show People: Marion Davies making comedy-making comedy. While the City Sleeps: Lon Chancy is the man with the nickel badge. White Shadows in the South Seas: Still Hawaii. The Singing Fool: For people who have no radio...