Olympus rests on the homely Greek soil, the Paradise of the Fathers is a magic garden somewhere in the Universe, but Valhalla is nowhere. Lost in the limitless, it appears with its inharmonious gods and heroes the supreme symbol of solitude. Siegfried, Parzifal, Tristan, Hamlet, Faust are the loneliest heroes in all the Cultures. Read the wondrous awakening of the inner life in Wolfram’s Parzifal. The longing for the woods, the mysterious compassion, the ineffable sense of forsakenness--it is all Faustian and only Faustian. Every one of us knows it.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (1918)
I never tire of reading Decline.
ReplyDeleteMy badly worn edition smells of cordite and Central Asian caves to this day. Beautiful.
'..longing for the woods'; is that what bears do? Where does the Pope stand on this? I think we should be told.
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