A passage from Oswald Spengler‘s Der Mensch und die Technik:
Wir sind in diese Zeit geboren und müssen tapfer den Weg zu Ende gehen, der uns bestimmt ist. Es gibt keinen andern. Auf dem verlorenen Posten ausharren ohne Hoffnung, ohne Rettung, ist Pflicht. Ausharren wie jener römische Soldat, dessen Gebeine man vor einem Tor in Pompeji gefunden hat, der starb, weil man beim Ausbruch des Vesuv vergessen hatte, ihn abzulösen. Das ist Größe, das heißt Rasse haben. Dieses ehrliche Ende ist das einzige, das man dem Menschen nicht nehmen kann.
A possible translation would be:
We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to our destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.
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Source:
Oswald Spengler, Der Mensch und die Technik. Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Lebens, München 1931.
August 16, 2011 at 11:59 |
Thanks! Bookmarked the book for a read over the next month putting aside the set queue. Decline of the West is such a great work that people tend to forget that there might be other writings by Spengler.
August 19, 2011 at 07:41 |
This is just chatter: Spengler’s ideas though very good and refined were quite heavily borrowed from ancient India (Even Carl Sagan speaks about them in COSMOS). There was another interesting character who wrote similar things on the cyclic nature of civilizations and used that to construct quite interesting conclusions – Evola (often used by far right propaganda unfortunately and largely unknown) even borrowing terms from the Vedas (Vedas are not really religious scriptures) such as Kal-yug.
I find this very interesting. Though I have no opinion on it as such.