Decline of the West - 07
-接上回
But “Time” is no abstract phrase, but a name for the actuality of
Irreversibility不可逆转性. Here there is only forward, never back. Long,
long ago the country bore the country town and nourished it with her best blood.
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Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably贪婪地 and
incessantly不断地 demanding and devouring吞食 fresh streams of men,
till it wearies疲倦的 and dies in the midst of an almost
uninhabited waste of country.
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Once the full sinful beauty of this last marvel of all history
has captured a victim, it never lets him go. Primitive folk can loose
themselves from the soil and wander, but the intellectual nomad never.
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Home is for him any one of these giant cities, but even
the nearest village is alien territory. He would sooner
die upon the pavement than go “back” to the land.
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They take the City with them into the mountains or on the sea.
They have lost the country within themselves and will
never regain it outside.
Tension without cosmic pulsation脉动 to animate使有生机 it is the
transition to nothingness. But Civilization is nothing but tension.
The head, in all the outstanding men of the Civilizations,
is dominated exclusively by an expression of extreme tension.
Intelligence is the replacement of unconscious living by
exercise in thought,masterly, but bloodless and jejune浅薄的/贫瘠的.
p637
★★★contest 竞赛
“Unless Woman repudiates否认 her womanliness女兴气质, her duty to her
husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself,
she cannot emancipate姐放 herself.”
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The primary woman, the peasant woman,is mother. The whole
vocation天职/使命 towards which she has yearned向往 from
childhood is included in that one word.
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But now emerges the Ibsen woman,the comrade, the heroine英雌 of
a whole megalopolitan大都会 literature from Northern drama to
Parisian巴黎的 novel. Instead of children, she has soul conflicts; marriage
is a craft工艺 art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.”
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★★★★★
At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for
centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man
vanishes. It crumbles弄碎 from the summit峰值, first the world cities, then the
provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has
incontinently不能自制地 poured into the towns, merely to bolster支撑 them up
awhile一会儿. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive,
but robbed of its strongest and most promising有希望的 elements.
★This residue残渣 is the Fellah阿拉伯农民 type.
The Imperiu绝对桶治权m enjoyed the completest完全的 peace; it was rich and
highly developed; it was well organized; and it possessed in its emperors.
And yet the population dwindled逐渐变少, quickly and wholesale大规模的.
If we turn to our own civilization, we find that the old families of the
French noblesse贵族阶 were not, in the great majority of cases,
eradicated根除/摧毁 in the Revolution, but have died out since 1815,
and their ★sterility不毛/不结果实 has spread to the bourgeoisie and,
since 1870, to the peasantry which that very Revolution almost re-created.
★★★
Consequently we find everywhere in these Civilizations that the provincial cities
at an early stage, and the giant cities in turn at the end of the evolution,
stand empty, harboring in their stone masses a small population of
fellaheen who shelter避难 in them as the men of the Stone Age sheltered
in caves and pile dwellings居所.
This, then, is the conclusion of the city’s history; growing from
primitive barter物物交换 center to Culture city and at last to world city,
it sacrifices first the blood and soul of its creators to the needs
of its majestic壮丽的 evolution, and then the last flower of that growth to the
spirit of Civilization — and so,doomed, moves on to final self-destruction.
