Decline of the West - 06
==CITIES AND PEOPLES(A) THE SOUL OF THE CITY:==
He who digs and plows犁地 is seeking not to plunder掠夺, but to alter Nature.
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To plant implies, not to take something, but to produce something.
But with this, man himself becomes plant — namely, as peasant.
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Hostile敌意的/不友善的 Nature becomes the friend; earth becomes Mother Earth.
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Between sowing播种 and begetting生产, harvest and death, the child and
the grain, a profound affinity密切关系 is set up.
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The peasant’s dwelling住所 is the great symbol of settledness. It is
itself plant, thrusts刺 its roots deep into its “own” soil. It
is property in the most sacred★神圣的 sense of the word.
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This is the condition precedent先前的 of every Culture, which itself
in turn grows up out of a mother landscape and renews and intensifies加强
the intimacy亲密 of man and soil.
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What his cottage is to the peasant, that the town is to the
Culture man.
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The town, too, is a plantlike being, as far removed as
a peasantry is from nomadism and the purely microcosmic.
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Hence the development of a high form language is linked always to a
landscape. Neither an art nor a religion can alter the site of its
growth; only in the Civilization with its giant cities do we come
again to despise轻视 and disengage分离/脱离 ourselves from these roots.
It is a conclusive确凿的 fact — yet one hitherto never appreciated —
that all great Cultures are town Cultures. Higher man of the Second
Age is a town-tied animal.
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Peoples, states, politics, religion, all arts, and all sciences
rest靠 upon one prime phenomenon of human being, the town.
★★？But the real miracle is the birth of the soul of a town.
As soon as it is awake, it forms for itself a visible body.
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Out of the rustic粗野的/纯朴的 group of farms and
cottages, each of which has its own history, arises a totality.
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Thenceforward, in addition to the individual house, the temple,
the cathedral, and the palace, the town figure itself becomes a unit
objectively expressing the form language and style history that
accompanies the Culture throughout its life course.
It goes without saying that what distinguishes a town from a village is
not size, but the presence of a soul.
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Not only in primitive conditions, such as those of central Africa, but
in Late conditions too — C, India, and industrialized Europe
and America — we find very large settlements that are nevertheless
not to be called cities. They are centers of landscape; ★★★they do not
inwardly form worlds in themselves. They have no soul.
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Every primitive population lives wholly as peasant and son
of the soil — the being “City” does not exist for it.
Every springtime of a Culture is (ipso facto事实上) the springtime
of a new city type and civism公德心/公民精神.
There, separated from the power of the land — cut off from it, even,
by the pavement underfoot — Being becomes more and more
languid没活力的, sensation知觉 and reason more and more powerful.
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Man becomes intellect, “free” like the nomads游牧民, whom he comes to
resemble, but narrower and colder than they. “Intellect,”
“Geist感性,” “esprit才智,” is the specific urban form of the understanding
waking consciousness. All art, all religion and science, become
slowly intellectualized, alien to the land,incomprehensible to
the peasant of the soil.
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With the Civilization sets in the climacteric更年期. The immemorially无法追忆的
old roots of Being are dried up in the stone masses of its cities.
And the free intellect — fateful word! — appears like a
flame, mounts登上 splendid辉煌的 into the air, and pitiably可怜地 dies.
★★★evoke 产生/唤起
we cannot comprehend political and economic history at all unless we realize
that the city, with its gradual detachment from and final bankrupting of the
country乡下, is the determinative决定的 form to which the course and sense
of higher history generally conforms使一致. World history is city history.
In all countries of all Late Cultures, the great parties, the revolutions, the
Caesarisms, the democracies, the parliaments, are the form in which the spirit
of the capital tells the country what it is expected to desire and, if called
upon, to die for.
All effectual奏效的 history begins with the primary classes, nobility and
priesthood, forming themselves and elevating提升 themselves
above the peasantry as such.
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The opposition of greater and lesser nobility, between king and
vassal, between worldly and spiritual power, is the basic
form of all primitive politics
The village stands outside world
history, and all evolution from the “Trojan” to the Mithridatic War, from the
Saxon emperors to the World War of 1914, passes by these little points on the
landscape, occasionally destroying them and wasting their blood, but never in
the least touching their inwardness心灵.
The peasant is the eternal man, independent of every Culture that
ensconces舒服地坐/躺着 itself in the cities. He precedes it, he outlives
it, a dumb creature propagating himself from generation to generation,
limited to soil-bound callings and aptitudes, a mystical soul, a dry,
shrewd机灵的 understanding that sticks to practical matters, the origin and
the ever-flowing不断流动的 source of the blood that makes world
history in the cities.
The city assumes the lead and control of economic
history in replacing the primitive values of the land, which are forever
inseparable from the life and thought of the rustic乡下人, by the
absolute idea of money as distinct from goods.
Democracy is the political form in which the townsman’s outlook展望/观点
upon the world is demanded of the peasantry also.
Presently there arrived an epoch when the development of the city had
reached such a point of power that it had no longer to defend itself against
country and chivalry骑士制, but on the contrary had become a despotism against
which the land and its basic orders of society were fighting a hopeless
defensive battle — in the spiritual domain against nationalism, in the political
against democracy, in the economic against money.
But the earth is actual and natural, and money is abstract
and artificial, a mere “category” — like “virtue” in the
imagination of the Age of Enlightenment.
Money has become, for man as an economic animal, a form of the
activity of waking consciousness, having no longer any roots in Being.
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This is the basis of its monstrous极其可恶的 power over every
beginning Civilization, which is always an unconditional dictatorship
of money, though taking different forms in different Cultures.
The stone Colossus巨像 “Cosmopolis国际大都市” stands at the end
of the life’s course of every great Culture.
Their houses are no longer, as those of the Ionic and
the Baroque were, derivatives衍生物 of the old peasant’s
house, whence the Culture took its spring into history.
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the mass of tenants and bed occupiers in the sea of houses leads a
vagrant流浪者/漂泊者 existence from shelter to shelter like the hunters and
pastors of the “pre” time, then the intellectual nomad游牧者/流浪者
is completely developed.
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This city is a world, is the world. Only as a whole, as a human
dwelling住所 place, has it meaning, the houses being merely
the stones of which it is assembled装配.
p635-巨型城市的演变(土地面积没拓宽，而是不断加高)
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But no wretchedness悲惨, no compulsion冲动, not even a clear vision of the
madness of this development, avails to neutralize抵消/中和 the attractive
force of these daemonic恶魔般的 creations. The wheel of Destiny rolls on to
its end; the birth of the City entails使..成为必要 its death. Beginning and end,
a peasant cottage and a tenement租户 block are related to one another as
soul and intellect, as blood and stone.
