Word: spenglerism
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When Oswald Spengler speaks, many a Western Worldling stops to listen. His monumental Decline of the West galvanized the attention of European and U. S. intellectuals, caused a hopeful pricking-up of Asiatic ears. Uncompromising pessimist, Spengler sounded the knell of Western civilization, which he said had passed maturity, was beginning a swift senescence. No defeatist, in The Hour of Decision he rings a tocsin...
...HOUR OF DECISION-Oswald Spengler-Knopf...
...himself tall, thin, handsome, mildly theatrical. Lover of parlor games, including drinking, expert ping-pong player, indefatigable host, he likes to keep long and late hours. No busman on a holiday, he reads few detective stories, much philosophy. An insomniac, it often takes a whole volume of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West to put him to sleep. Unenergetic, he spent last summer at Sands Point, L. I. within a few feet of the beach, never went swimming. A slow writer, he works on a typewriter, rarely redoes his copy. Other books: The Maltese Falcon, The Glass...
...been hearing much of late about the organic nature of culture. Your author must confess to a certain haziness upon precisely what this neat idea means, which haziness is not cleared up by reading the many treatises on the subject, Herr Spengler included. Yet many things which are happening today throw themselves so forcibly upon the mind of any reflective person that they simply cannot be ignored. We who live today are apparently going to have the good fortune to observe the break-up of a culture and the relativity of its erstwhile eternal truths, and also the misfortune...
...ward off suicidal despair Spengler recommends the psychological attitude of the Roman soldier who died at his post in Pompeii. When the volcano under civilization explodes, and the burning dust begins to descend, the more honorable Spenglerian carnivores will take it standing, polish up their buttons as the lava rises. With its men all dead but its honorable buttons bright, Western civilization can then rest forever on its yews...