/lit/ - Literature

sein Geschehen

What is practiced as art today--be it music after?Wagner?or painting after?Manet,?C?zanne, Leible and Menzel-- is impotence and falsehood. One thing is quite certain, that today every single art-school could be shut down without art being affected in the slightest. We can learn all we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in order to forget that its art is dead form the Alexandria of the year 200. There, as here in our world-cities, we find a pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of "the new style," of "unsuspected possibilities," theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells--the "Literary Man" in the Poet's place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism, which the art-trade has organized as a "phase of art-history," thinking and felling and forming as industrial art. Alexandria, too, had problem-dramatists and box-office artists whom it preferred to Sophocles and painters who invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their public. The final result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms which we see today in Indian Chinese and Arabian-persian art. Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and musical compositions--all is pattern-work. We cease to be able to date anything within centuries, let alone decades, by the language of its ornamentation. So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures.

Pessimism is bravery, Optimism is cowardice. We must be willing to face destiny in the eyes, and like three Roman soldier at Pompeii who stood his ground as the world crumbled before him, so shall we face our destiny as our civilization comes to a close.

Each Culture has its own possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, but many. Each is in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained...
I hope to show that without exception all great creations and forms in religion, art, politics, social life, economy and science appear, fulfill themselves, and die down contemporaneously in all the cultures; that the inner structure of one corresponds strictly with that of all others; that there is not a single phenomenon of deep physiognomic importance in the record of one for which we could not find a counterpart in the record of every other; and that this counterpart is to be found under a characteristic form and in a perfectly definite chronological position.

Every Culture has its own Civilization. In this work, for the first time, the two words are used in a periodic sense, to express a strict and necessary organic succession. The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture. Civilizations are the most external and artificial states which a species of developed humanity is capable

>>4570752
>no historical investigation
Riight..

Is it true that the West is culturally dead? Do civilizations become more decadent as they get less religious?

OP, this is all you need.

OP here. my pic was random, has nothing to do with traditionalism. Im really talking about authors like

>Julius Evola
>Oswald Spengler (and his Neitschze/Goethe influences)
>Frithjof Schuon
>Rene Guenon
>Hossein Nasr

What do you think about this book? Has it affected your perception of human history in any way?

>want to talk about this book on /lit/
>get attacked by postmodern leftists

Can we talk about this book? Its interesting as fuck but I don't want this thread to dissolve into a shitfest

Oswald Spengler general

I'm looking for books that talk about patterns and cycles of civilizations and how they rise and fall. The best book I've read on the subject has been pic related. Is there anyone who can hold a flame to Spenglers ominous prophecy? The only name I can think of would be Rene Guenon

This