Decline Of The West Quotes

The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.

What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears.

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares, And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest, Where can we finde two better hemispheares Without sharpe North, without declining West? What ever dyes, was not mixt equally; If our two loves be one, or, thou and I Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.

One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.

Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage . . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.

To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery(the media) that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed

All genius is a conquering of chaos and mystery.

There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money - and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.

Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.

All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.

The Good-Morrow I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I Did, till we lov'd? Were we not wean'd till then? But suck'd on countrey pleasures, childishly? Or snorted we in the seaven sleepers den? T'was so; But this, all pleasures fancies bee. If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desir'd, and got, 'twas but a dreame of thee. And now good morrow to our waking soules, Which watch not one another out of feare; For love, all love of other sights controules, And makes one little roome, an every where. Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, Let Maps to other, worlds on worlds have showne, Let us possesse one world; each hath one, and is one. My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares, And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest, Where can we finde two better hemispheares Without sharpe North, without declining West? What ever dyes, was not mixed equally; If our two loves be one, or, thou and I Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.

World-history is the history of the great Cultures, and peoples are but the symbolic forms and vessels in which the men of these Cultures fulfil their Destinies.

The decline of the West, which at first sight may appear, like the corresponding decline of the Classical Culture, a phenomenon limited in time and space, we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when comprehended in all its gravity, includes within itself every great question of Being.

At the beginning a man was wealthy because he was powerful — now he is powerful because he has money. Intellect reaches the throne only when money puts it there. Democracy is the completed equating of money with political power.

To Goethe again we owe the profound saying: “the mathematician is only complete insofar as he feels within himself the beauty of the true.

A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They're on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority's blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there's cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I'm easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I'll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome drugs.

A thinker is a person whose part it is to symbolize time according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice; he thinks as he has to think.

Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness

You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove to you that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your ­pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains—I can prove to you that those were characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient States—Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome.

Every thing-become is mortal. Not only peoples, languages, races and Culture are transient.

Let a man be either a hero or a saint. In between lies, not wisdom, but banality.

In place of a true-type people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman...

That there is, besides a necessity of cause and effect — which I may call the logic of space — another necessity, an organic necessity in life, that of Destiny — the logic of time — is a fact of the deepest inward certainty,

The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.

Once again, the point of this discussion is not to accuse Christians of endorsing torture and persecution. Of course most devout Christians today are thoroughly tolerant and humane people. Even those who thunder from televised pulpits do not call for burning heretics alive or hoisting Jews on the strappado. The question is why they don’t, given that their beliefs imply that it would serve the greater good. The answer is that people in the West today compartmentalize their religious ideology. When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years. But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful.

Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and interprets the immediate impressions of his senses. History is that from which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality.

Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia, Hermann Hesse's Glimpse Into Chaos, Edmund Husserl's The Crisis in European Science, Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind, Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, René Guenon's The Reign of Quantity, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Colin Wilson's The Outsider—the list could go on.

The Daisy follows soft the Sun— And when his golden walk is done— Sits shyly at his feet— He—waking—finds the flower there— Wherefore—Marauder—art thou here? Because, Sir, love is sweet! We are the flower—Thou the Sun! Forgive us, if as days decline— We nearer steal to thee! Enamored of the parting West— The peace—the flight—the Amethyst— Night's possibility!

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

The very word “discovery” has something bluntly un-Classical in it. Classical man took good care not to take the cover, the material wrapping, off anything cosmic, but to do just this is the most characteristic impulse of a Faustian nature.

The Rome he has been trained to serve, the Rome of Augustus and Germanicus, was gone. In its place stood Neronopolis, ruled by a megalomaniac brat.

By understanding the world I mean being equal to the world. It is the hard reality of living that is the essential, not the concept of life, that the ostrich philosophy of idealism propounds.

The Classical died, as we shall die, but it died unknowing. It believed in an eternal Being and to the last it lived its days with frank satisfaction, each day spent as a gift of the gods. But we know our history.

Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas are creations of primitive man, and that as spiritual culture “advances”, this myth-forming power is shed. In reality it is the exact opposite, … this ability of a soul to fill its world with shapes, traits and symbols - like and consistent amongst themselves - belongs most definitely not to the world-age of the primitives but exclusively to the springtimes of great Cultures. Every myth of the great style stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality. It is the first formative act of that spirituality. Nowhere else is it to be found. There - it must be.

unalert yet sometimes suffused through and through by an inward light, is characteristic of the primitive and of the child (and also of those moments of religious and artistic inspiration that occur ever less and less often as a Culture grows older) right

For us, the events which took place between 1500 and 1800 on the soil of Western Europe constitute the most important third of “world” history; for the Chinese historian, on the contrary, who looks back on and judges by 4000 years of Chinese history, those centuries generally are a brief and unimportant episode, infinitely less significant than the centuries of the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.), which in his “world” history are epoch-making.

To be clear: the West’s souring mood is about the psychology of dashed expectations rather than the decline in material comforts.

In other words Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

Is there a logic of history? Is there, beyond all the casual and incalculable elements of the separate events, something that we may call a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, something that is essentially independent of the outward forms — social, spiritual and political — which we see so clearly?

The primitive man experiences “soul,” first in other men and then in himself, as a Numen, just as he knows numina of the outer world, and develops his impressions in mythological form. His words for these things are symbols, sounds, not descriptive of the indescribable but indicative of it for him who hath ears to hear.

in the West today public places are no longer named after military victories. Our war memorials depict not proud commanders on horseback but weeping mothers, weary soldiers, or exhaustive lists of names of the dead.

What the Greek called Kosmos was the image of a world that is not continuous but complete. Inevitably, then, the Greek man himself was not a series but a term. What his philosophers occasionally told him on the subject they had heard, not experienced, and what a few brilliant minds in the Asiatic-Greek cities (such as Hipparchus and Aristarchus) discovered was rejected alike by the Stoic and by the Aristotelian, and outside a small professional circle not even noticed.

I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can be kept up only by shutting one’s eyes to the overwhelming multitude of facts, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout it’s whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feelings, its own death. Here indeed are colours, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and the pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves - but there is no ageing “Mankind.” Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in the deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline.

It is a bizarre, but nevertheless psychologically exact, fact that the physics of the Greeks — being statics and not dynamics — neither knew the use nor felt the absence of the time-element, whereas we on the other hand work in thousandths of a second.

Can criticism then, as criticism, solve the great questions, or can it merely pose them? At the beginning of knowledge we believe the former. But the more we know, the more certain we become of the latter. So long as we hope, we call the secret a problem.

In the more remote ages of antiquity, the world was unequally divided. The east was in the immemorial possession of arts and luxury; whilst the west was inhabited by rude and warlike barbarians, who either disdained agriculture, or to whom it was totally unknown.

Radical movements are never successful unless they attract big money and/or outside support. The great historian of the Twentieth Century, Oswald Spengler, was one of those who saw what American Liberals refuse to see- that the Left is controlled by its alleged enemy, the malefactors of great wealth. He wrote in his monumental Decline of the West (Modern Library, New York, 1945):   -> "There is no proletarian, not even a Communist, movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, in the direction indicated by money, and for

Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he. He's left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him beyond an endless swale and dark falls here like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the weeds to gnashing. The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.

I maintain, then, that scientific psychology (and, it may be added, the psychology of the same kind that we all unconsciously practise when we try to "figure to ourselves" the stirrings of our own or others' souls) has, in its inability to discover or even to approach the essence of the soul, simply added one more to the symbols that collectively make up the Macrocosm of the culture-man. Like everything else that is no longer becoming but become, it has put a mechanism in place of an organism. We miss in its picture that which fills our feeling of life (and should surely be " soul " if anything is) the Destiny-quality, the necessary directedness of existence, the possibility that life in its course actualizes. I do not believe that the word "Destiny" figures in any psychological system whatsoever — and we know that nothing in the world could be more remote from actual life-experience and knowledge of men than a system without such elements. Associations, apperceptions, affections, motives, thought, feeling, will — all are dead mechanisms, the mere topography of which constitutes the insignificant total of our "soul-science." One looked for Life and one found an ornamental pattern of notions. And the soul remained what it was, something that could neither be thought nor represented, the secret, the ever-becoming, the pure experience.

Whoever has known the spiritual beauty of the Under­ground Church cannot be satisfied anymore with the emptiness of some Western churches. I suffer in the West more than I suffered in a Communist jail because now I see with my own eyes Western civilization dying. Oswald Spengler wrote in Decline of the West: You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your ­pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains —can prove to you that there are characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient states—Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome. This was written in 1926. Since then, democracy and civilization have

The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. It is the story at the very heart of modern history. It is perhaps the most challenging riddle historians have to solve. And we should solve it not merely to satisfy our curiosity. For it is only by identifying the true causes of Western ascendancy that we can hope to estimate with any degree of accuracy the imminence of our decline and fall.

The staff did have a little difficulty adjusting to Mr. Churchill’s way of living. The first thing in the morning, he declined the customary orange juice and called for a drink of Scotch. His staff, a large entourage of aides and a valet, followed suit. The butlers wore a path in the carpet carrying trays laden with brandy to his suite. We got used to his “jumpsuit,” the extraordinary one-piece uniform he wore every day, but the servants never quite got over seeing him naked in his room when they’d go up to serve brandy. It was the jumpsuit or nothing. In his room, Mr. Churchill wore no clothes at all most of the time during the day.

Perceptive observers saw civilization thinned to a mere veneer, with barbarism surging just beneath the surface, straining for release.

Von Goethe stammt auch das tiefe Wort, daß der Mathematiker nur insofern vollkommen sei, als er das Schöne des Wahren in sich empfinde.

The legislation of Leo VI completed a process by which the former Roman Empire in the West and the empire in the East went in opposite directions with political development.

The man makes History, the woman is History.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days.

War is the creator, hunger the destroyer, of all great things.

A boundless mass of human Being, flowing in a stream without banks; up-stream, a dark past wherein our time-sense loses all powers of definition and restless or uneasy fancy conjures up geological periods to hide away an eternally unsolvable riddle; down-stream, a future even so dark and timeless –– such is the groundwork of the Faustian picture of human history.

Throughout the last century Communist leaders alternated in pretending to be nationalists, agrarian reformers, and/or democrats. The same is true today, only the Communists have grown in sophistication even as their dupes have declined into stupefaction. There is nothing to be gained by talking with liars and tricksters who plot the West’s downfall. Yet we talk and talk as we lose and lose again.

The coming of Caesarism breaks the dictature of money and its political weapon, democracy. After a long triumph of world-city economy and its interests over political creative force, the political side of life manifests itself after all as the stronger of the two. The sword is victorious over the money, the master-will subdues again the plunderer-will. If we call these money-powers 'Capitalism,' then we may designate as Socialism the will to call into life a mighty politico-economic order that transcends all class interests, a system of lofty thoughtfulness and duty-sense that keeps the whole in fine condition for the decisive battle of its history, and this battle is also the battle of money and law. The private powers of the economy want free paths for their acquisition of great resources. No legislation must stand in their way. They want to make the laws themselves, in their interests, and to that end they make use of the tool they have made for themselves, democracy, the subsidized party. Law needs, in order to resist this onslaught, a high tradition and an ambition of strong families that finds its satisfaction not in the heaping-up of riches, but in the tasks of true rulership, above and beyond all money-advantage. A power can be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and no power that can confront money is left but this one. Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood. Life is alpha and omega, the cosmic stream in microcosmic form. It is the fact of facts within the world-as-history. Before the irresistible rhythm of the generation-sequence, everything built up by the waking-consciousness in its intellectual world vanishes at the last. Ever in History it is life and life only race-quality, the triumph of the will-to-power and not the victory of truths, discoveries, or money that signifies. World-history is the world court, and it has ever decided in favour of the stronger, fuller, and more self-assured life decreed to it, namely, the right to exist, regardless of whether its right would hold before a tribunal of waking-consciousness.

So what if people disagree about values? People also disagree about facts. . . . In my view, the great intellectual challenge facing conservatives is to make the case for morality at a time when many in the West have ceased to believe in an external moral order. The decline of belief in such an order is the most important political development of the past two centuries. Indeed, this decline has created the "crisis of the West.

The West is and will remain for years to come the most powerful civilization. Yet its power relative to that of other civilizations is declining. As the West attempts to assert its values and to protect its interests, non-Western societies confront a choice. Some attempt to emulate the West and to join or to "bandwagon" with the West. Other Confucian and Islamic societies attempt to expand their own economic and military power to resist and to "balance" against the West. A central axis of post--Cold War world politics is thus the interaction of Western power and culture with the power and culture of non-Western civilizations. In sum, the post--Cold War world is a world of seven or eight major civilizations. Cultural commonalities and differences shape the interests, antagonisms, and associations of states. The most important countries in the world come overwhelmingly from different civilizations. The local conflicts most likely to escalate into broader wars are those between groups and states from different civilizations. The predominant patterns of political and economic development differ from civilization to civilization. The key issues on the international agenda involve differences among civilizations. Power is shifting from the long predominant West to non-Western civilizations. Global politics has become multipolar and multicivilizational.

Conscious” and “unconscious” are only too obviously derivatives of “above ground” and “below ground.” In modern theories of the Will we meet with all the vocabulary of electrodynamics. Will functions and thought functions are spoken of in just the same way as the function of a system of forces. To analyze a feeling means to set up a representative silhouette in its place and then to treat this silhouette mathematically and by definition, partition, and measurement. All soul examination of this stamp, however remarkable as a study of cerebral anatomy, is penetrated with the mechanical notion of locality, and works without knowing it under imaginary coordinates in an imaginary space.

This so-called culture war, I suspect, is the product of a history in which white America took two different paths to civilization. The North is an extension of Europe and continued the court- and commerce-driven Civilizing Process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that sprang up in the anarchic parts of the growing country, balanced by their own civilizing forces of churches, families, and temperance.

Is the death of a religious-based culture inevitable once a society reaches general affluence? When a nation has overcome the hardships of its infancy and the struggles of its adolescence and manhood, and begins to produce a life of ease and luxury, does it naturally succumb to a disease of the soul that leads to decadence, decline, and death? “America is the only country that has gone from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between,” said Oscar Wilde.42 Did the man have a point?

The story must not be neglected by any modern, who may think in error that the East has finally fallen before the West, that Islam is now enslaved — to our political and economic power at any rate if not to our philosophy. It is not so. Islam essentially survives, and Islam would not have survived had the Crusade made good its hold upon the essential point of Damascus. Islam survives. Its religion is intact; therefore its material strength may return. Our religion is in peril, and who can be confident in the continued skill, let alone the continued obedience, of those who make and work our machines? ... There is with us a complete chaos in religious doctrine.... We worship ourselves, we worship the nation; or we worship (some few of us) a particular economic arrangement believed to be the satisfaction of social justice.... Islam has not suffered this spiritual decline; and in the contrast between [our religious chaos and Islam's] religious certitudes still strong throughout the Mohammedan world lies our peril.

At fourteen he runs away. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark. The firewood, the washpots. He wanders west as far as Memphis, a solitary migrant upon that flat and pastoral landscape. Blacks in the fields, lank and stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton. A shadowed agony in the garden. Against the sun's declining figures moving in the slower dusk across a paper skyline. A lone dark husbandman pursuing mule and harrow down the rainblown bottomland toward night.

It's like the frog that tried to outdo the cow...see, the consequences are reflected in each of us as individuals. A people so oppressed by the West have no mental leisure, they can't do anything worthwhile. They get an education that's stripped to the bare bone, and they're driven with their noses to the grindstone until they're dizzy -- that's why they all end up with nervous breakdowns. Try talking to them -- they're usually stupid. They haven't thought about a thing beyond themselves, that day, that very instant. They're too exhausted to think about anything else; it's not their fault. Unfortunately, exhaustion of the spirit and deterioration of the body come hand-in-hand. And that's not all. The decline of morality has set in too. Look where you will in this country, you won't find one square inch of brightness. It's all pitch black. So what difference would it make...

The truth is, I don’t know what will happen across the entire world in the coming decades, and neither does anyone else. Not everyone, though, shares my reticence. A Web search for the text string “the coming war” returns two million hits, with completions like “with Islam,” “with Iran,” “with China,” “with Russia,” “in Pakistan,” “between Iran and Israel,” “between India and Pakistan,” “against Saudi Arabia,” “on Venezuela,” “in America,” “within the West,” “for Earth’s resources,” “over climate,” “for water,” and “with Japan” (the last dating from 1991, which you would think would make everyone a bit more humble about this kind of thing). Books with titles like The Clash of Civilizations, World on Fire, World War IV, and (my favorite) We Are Doomed boast a similar confidence. Who knows? Maybe they’re right. My aim in the rest of this chapter is to point out that maybe they’re wrong.

On the West’s moral decline: “Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values. Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan. This is the path to degradation.” (11)

Nixon was not entirely wrong when, in his typical fashion, he attributed the opposition to straightforward self-interest and selfishness. The students simply did not want to fight for their country—and he could point out that the demonstrations fell off after he stopped sending draftees to Vietnam. But then one had to explain why previous generations had willingly, even enthusiastically, gone off to do battle in World War I, World War II, and the Korean war while the generation opposing the Vietnam war did not. Those war supporters who followed the logic of their argument through were left complaining about a coddled and spoiled generation so different from what came to be known as the “Greatest Generation,” a growing decadence, an America gone soft, accompanied by Spenglerian laments about the decline of the West. Nixon thought that modern education was undermining the national spirit. “The more a person is educated, he becomes brighter in the head and weaker in the spine,” and he said he thanked God that there were still “uneducated people” around to support him and the war. They were “all that’s left of the character of this nation.” Abraham Lincoln would have been “ruined” if he had had more education, Nixon said.

the democracies of the west, which had been the drivers of 20th century growth, were in rapid decline. Beset with corrupt and bloated governments, bankrupted by decades of appalling mismanagement, riddled with cronyism, and unable to recapture the economic dynamism of their past, they were teetering on the verge of collapse. The

After half a millennium of dominance, the West is being eclipsed in the global era, the United States as the lead society in the West stands on the verge of relative if not absolute decline, and much of the Christian Church in both Europe and North America is in a sorry state of weakness, confusion, unfaithfulness and cultural captivity.

The black conservatives claim that the decline of values such as patience, deferred gratification, and self-reliance have resulted in the high crime rates, the increasing number of unwed mothers, and the relatively uncompetitive academic performances of black youth. And certainly these sad realities must be candidly confronted. But nowhere in their writings do the new black conservatives examine the pervasiveness of sexual and military images used by the mass media and deployed by the advertising industry in order to entice and titillate consumers. Black conservatives thus overlook the degree to which market forces of advanced capitalist processes thrive on sexual and military images.

On all sides, as far as the eye could reach, rose the grass-covered heaps marking the site of ancient habitations. The great tide of civilisation had long since ebbed, leaving these scattered wrecks on the solitary shore. Are those waters to flow again, bearing back the seeds of knowledge and of wealth that they have wafted to the West? We wanderers were seeking what they had left behind, as children gather up the coloured shells on the deserted sands. At my feet there was a busy scene, making more lonely the unbroken solitude which reigned in the vast plain around, where the only thing having life or motion were the shadows of the lofty mounds as they lengthened before the declining sun.

I've been thinking," he said huskily. A tremulous smile curved her lips. "About what?" "Trust. When I told you I couldn't count on someone loving me..." "Yes, I remember." "I realized that before I can have trust... actually feel it... I'll have to start doing it. Trusting blindly. I'll have to learn how. It's... difficult." Her beautiful eyes shimmered. "I know, darling," she whispered. "But if I'm ever going to try it with anyone, it has to be you." Phoebe inched closer to him. Her eyes were so bright, they were like bottled lightning. "I've been thinking, too." "About?" "About surprises. You see, there was no way of knowing how much time Henry and I would have together before his decline started. As it turned out, it was even less time than we'd expected. But it was worth it. I would do it again. I wasn't afraid of his illness, and I'm not afraid of your past, or whatever might leap out at us. That's the chance everyone takes, isn't it? The only ironclad guarantee is that we'll love each other." Her voice thickened with emotion. "And I do, West. I love you so very much.

Initially in the United States, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and then the collapse of the USSR in 1991, there was no sense that America too was in postindustrial decline. The idea that the West had won the Cold War and capitalism had prevailed over communism deflected attention from the troubles of America’s old manufacturing centers and their displaced workers.

In the West, people typically gesture in front of themselves when talking about the future. In one study, participants contemplating the future even tended to lean forward, while those recalling the past tended to lean backward. It seems that we're not in a position to decline our inclination to regard the future as something in front of us. In South America, however, speakers of Aymara gesture behind themselves when talking about the future. Why? In Aymaran culture, the past is ahead because it is already known and can therefore be seen. The future, in contrast, is unknown and can't be seen; therefore, it is located behind the speaker. Aymaran and Western embodied concepts of the past and future are contradictory, yet they are based on identical bodily metaphors.

Of this economic Stoicism of the Classical world the exact antithesis is Socialism, meaning thereby not Marx's theory but Frederick William I's Prussian practice which long prededed Marx and will displace him – the socialism […] that comprehends and cares for permanent economic relations, trains the individual in his duty to the whole, and glorifies hard work as an affirmation of Time and Future.

Somehow I feel that, despite our work as reporters, there is little understanding of the Third Reich, what it is, what it is up to, where it is going, either at home or elsewhere abroad. It is a complex picture and it may be that we have given only a few strong, uncoordinated strokes of the brush, leaving the canvas as confusing and meaningless as an early Picasso. Certainly the British and the French do not understand Hitler’s Germany. Perhaps, as the Nazis say, the Western democracies have become sick, decadent, and have reached that stage of decline which Spengler predicted. But Spengler included Germany in the decline of the West, and indeed the Nazi reversion to the ancient, primitive, Germanic myths is a sign of her retrogression, as is her burning of books and suppression of liberty and learning.

The inner history of the Magian religion ends with Justinian’s time, as truly as that of the Faustian ends with Charles V and the Council of Trent. Any book on religious history shows “the”Christian religion as having had two ages of grand thought movements — 0-500 in the East and 1000-1500 in the West.61 But these are two springtimes of two Cultures, and in them are comprised also the non-Christian forms which belong to each religious development. The closing of the University of Athens by Justinian in 529 was not, as is always stated, the end of Classical philosophy — there had been no Classical philosophy for centuries. What he did, forty years before the birth of Mohammed, was to end the theology of the Pagan Church by closing this school and — as the historians forget to add — to end the Christian theology also by closing those of Antioch and Alexandria. Dogma was complete, finished — just as it was in the West with the Council of Trent (1564) and the Confession of Augsburg (1540), for with the city and intellectualism religious creative force comes to an end. So also in Jewry and in Persia, the Talmud was concluded about 500, and when Chosroes Nushirvan in 529 bloodily suppressed the Reformation of Mazdak.

there is no other civilization that can serve as support; we have to face our problems alone. The only prospect offered us as a counterpart of the cyclical laws, and that only hypothetical, is that the process of decline of the Dark Age has first reached its terminal phases with us in the West. Therefore it is not impossible that we would also be the first to pass the zero point, in a period in which the other civilizations, entering later into the same current, would find themselves more or less in our current state, having abandoned—"superseded"—what they still offer today in the way of superior values and traditional forms of existence that attract us. The consequence would be a reversal of roles. The West, having reached the point beyond the negative limit, would be qualified to assume a new function of guidance or command, very different from the material, techno-industrial leadership that it wielded in the past, which, once it collapsed, resulted only in a general leveling. This rapid overview of general prospects and problems may have been useful to some readers, but I shall not dwell further on these matters. As I have said, what interests us here is the field of personal life; and from that point of view, in defining the attitude to be taken toward certain experiences and processes of today, having consequences different from what they appear to have for practically all our contemporaries, we need to establish autonomous positions,

Neither Ginsberg nor Burroughs achieved the level of fame that Kerouac did in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This is partly because, of the three, Kerouac was the least counter-cultural, the least anti-American in sentiment and purpose. To the contrary, he had a deep love of America as land, as place — On The Road is basically a prose love poem to America — which naturally translated itself into conservative political leanings, albeit of a nonconventional sort. (He famously watched the McCarthy hearings while getting high on marijuana and cheering for McCarthy.)

Oh the Beat generation was just a phrase I used in the 1951 written manuscript of On the Road to describe guys like Moriarty who run around the country in cars looking for odd jobs, girlfriends, kicks. It was thereafter picked up by West Coast Leftist groups and turned into a meaning like “Beat mutiny” and “Beat insurrection” and all that nonsense; they just wanted some youth movement to grab on to for their own political and social purposes. I had nothing to do with any of that. I was a football player, a scholarship college student, a merchant seaman, a railroad brakeman on road freights, a script synopsizer, a secretary … And Moriarty-Cassady was an actual cowboy on Dave Uhl’s ranch in New Raymer, Colorado … What kind of beatnik is that?”[22]

The language of the rebuild eludes me. It may as well be in Malay for all that I can grasp it. No, that’s not true. If it were Malay, in my limited experience of it, there would be a kindness to it, with declined nouns that invoke a sense of shared communities and values; and qualifiers that allow for misunderstandings, acknowledging this to be perfectly natural and human, and more importantly, a mutually adjustable state of affairs. The language of the insurer, however, is that of the worst of the corporate West. It is management-speak that hears only its own voice. It has closed meanings known only to the initiated; and omissions deliberately designed to confuse. The language of the builder is exclusive; dwangs, thermal-broken, and rondo battens are all terms that are potential minefields of extra expense, if they are not examined, priced, queried, rolled around the tongue for size and spat out for effect.

Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he. He’s left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him beyond an endless swale and dark falls here like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the weeds to gnashing. The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less. He keeps from off the king’s road for fear of citizenry. The little prairie wolves cry all night and dawn finds him in a grassy draw where he’d gone to hide from the wind. The hobbled mule stands over him and watches the east for light. The sun that rises is the color of steel. His mounted shadow falls for miles before him. He wears on his head a hat he’s made from leaves and they have dried and cracked in the sun and he looks like a raggedyman wandered from some garden where he’d used to frighten birds.

In the first place, this is a history of Europe’s reduction. The constituent states of Europe could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or imperial status. The two exceptions to this rule—the Soviet Union and, in part, Great Britain—were both only half-European in their own eyes and in any case, by the end of the period recounted here, they too were much reduced. Most of the rest of continental Europe had been humiliated by defeat and occupation. It had not been able to liberate itself from Fascism by its own efforts; nor was it able, unassisted, to keep Communism at bay. Post-war Europe was liberated—or immured—by outsiders. Only with considerable effort and across long decades did Europeans recover control of their own destiny. Shorn of their overseas territories Europe’s erstwhile sea-borne empires (Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal) were all shrunk back in the course of these years to their European nuclei, their attention re-directed to Europe itself. Secondly, the later decades of the twentieth century saw the withering away of the ‘master narratives’ of European history: the great nineteenth-century theories of history, with their models of progress and change, of revolution and transformation, that had fuelled the political projects and social movements that tore Europe apart in the first half of the century. This too is a story that only makes sense on a pan-European canvas: the decline of political fervor in the West (except among a marginalized intellectual minority) was accompanied—for quite different reasons—by the loss of political faith and the discrediting of official Marxism in the East. For a brief moment in the 1980s, to be sure, it seemed as though the intellectual Right might stage a revival around the equally nineteenth-century project of dismantling ‘society’ and abandoning public affairs to the untrammelled market and the minimalist state; but the spasm passed. After 1989 there was no overarching ideological project of Left or Right on offer in Europe—except the prospect of liberty, which for most Europeans was a promise now fulfilled. Thirdly, and as a modest substitute for the defunct ambitions of Europe’s ideological past, there emerged belatedly—and largely by accident—the ‘European model’. Born of an eclectic mix of Social Democratic and Christian Democratic legislation and the crab-like institutional extension of the European Community and its successor Union, this was a distinctively ‘European’ way of regulating social intercourse and inter-state relations. Embracing everything from child-care to inter-state legal norms, this European approach stood for more than just the bureaucratic practices of the European Union and its member states; by the beginning of the twenty-first century it had become a beacon and example for aspirant EU members and a global challenge to the United States and the competing appeal of the ‘American way of life’.

The truth was that the city was losing manufacturing jobs at a pace five times worse than the national average, and one of the reasons for its loss of 800,000 industrial jobs since 1962 was, expert after expert concluded, the decline of rail freight service. Several government studies had to concede, despite the bias toward the more glamorous and profit-intensive Trump-like development of these yards, that “a substantial market demand” existed for a real rail terminal at either 60th or 34th Streets. In fact, the ailing railroad industry was beginning to make a strong comeback outside of New York by the end of the seventies, aided by escalating fuel costs, which were putting truckers at a sudden disadvantage. A West Side terminal at either of the Trump yards would not only have positioned the city to take advantage of this economic shift, it would also have dramatically reduced truckload traffic through clogged Manhattan streets. Trump’s simultaneous hold on both of the potential terminal sites for almost half a decade may have been a fatal blow to a manufacturing revival in New York.

It is life, not the individual, that is conscienceless. The essential, therefore, is to understand the time for which one is born. He who does not sense and understand its most secret forces, who does not feel in himself something cognate that drives him forward on a path neither hedged nor defined by concepts, who believes in the surface, public opinion, large phrases and ideals of the day — he is not of the stature for its events. He is in their power, not they in his. Look not back to the past for measuring-rods! Still less sideways for some system or other! There are times, like our own present and the Gracchan age, in which there are two most deadly kinds of idealism, the reactionary and the democratic. The one believes in the reversibility of history, the other in a teleology of history. But it makes no difference to the inevitable failure with which both burden a nation over whose destiny they have power, whether it is to a memory or to a concept that they sacrifice it. The genuine statesman is incarnate history, its directedness expressed as individual will and its organic logic as character.

There is far more to the Islamic way of life than fasting and segregating women, of course. Praying five times a day, avoiding alcohol, the custom of eating with the right hand, leaving the left for ablutions and many health measures associated with Islam, such as ritual washing. Then there is the Qur’an itself and the sonorous power of the Arabic language, with an attractive system of ethics including a focus on alms-giving and the equality of believers. Putting all this together created a powerful religious technology which made its followers more aggressive, confident, united and with a higher birth rate than any competing civilization. [...] People in the West see the traditional culture of the Muslim Middle East as primitive and “backward,” and there are constant calls for modernization. In fact, as had been seen, Islamic culture is anything but backward. Civilization first arose in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan. It is no coincidence that these lands, with the longest experience of civilization, are now strongly and fervently Muslim. Long experience of civilization has bred a high-S genotype and culture which perfectly adapt people to survive and expand their numbers in dense agricultural and urban populations. Such countries tend to be poor (if we leave out the anomalous effects of oil wealth), since their peoples lack the temperament for industrialization. But wealth at that level is of no benefit in the long-term struggle for survival and success. To paraphrase Christian scripture, what does it benefit a civilization if it gains wealth but loses its strength and vigor? The advantages of Islam can be clearly seen in countries with mixed populations. Lebanon once had a Christian majority but is now 54% Muslim. In Communist Yugoslavia the provinces with Muslim populations grew much faster and received tax revenue from the wealthier Christian states. The population of Kosovo, the spiritual homeland of Christian Serbia, grew from 733,000 in 1948 to over two million in 1994, with the Muslim component surging from 68% to 90%, and lately going even higher. Meanwhile, Muslims are migrating into Europe where Christianity is in decline, the birth rate is far below replacement level, and people no longer have much faith in their own culture. Over the next few decades, as the next chapter will indicate, the native peoples of the West will become feebler and fewer. This means that on current trends Europe will become an Islamic continent in a century or so. The 1,400-year struggle between Islam and the West is coming to end. pp. 227 & 229-230

The United States dollar took another pounding on German, French, and British exchanges this morning, hitting the lowest point ever known in West Germany. It has declined there by 41% since 1971, and this Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous, and possibly the least-appreciated, people in all the earth. As long as sixty years ago, when I first started to read newspapers, I read of floods on the Yellow River and the Yangtze. Well who rushed in with men and money to help? The Americans did, that's who. They have helped control floods on the Nile, the Amazon, the Ganges, and the Niger. Today, the rich bottom land of the Mississippi is under water and no foreign land has sent a dollar to help. Germany, Japan, and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy, were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of those countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States. When the franc was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up, and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. And I was there -- I saw that. When distant cities are hit by earthquake, it is the United States that hurries into help, Managua,

Later, on April 15, 1999, a crowd of protestors led by the Reverend Al Sharpton shut down half of the Brooklyn Bridge, capping ten weeks of demonstrations following the killing of a twenty-three-year-old West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, by four white New York City police officers. The officers had sprayed forty-one bullets into Mr. Diallo's apartment building vestibule, striking him nineteen times. Mr. Diallo was unarmed and had no police record. New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican, declined to criticize the police department whose tactics he had historically endorsed. As the crowd, estimated from fifteen to twenty-five thousand, gathered at Brooklyn's Cadman Plaza, jury selection proceeded next door in the trial of four different white New York City police officers accused of torturing Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, in a Brooklyn police station in 1997. The demonstrations, growing larger and more multiracial, had begun to spread around the country in response to the horrific acts of police brutality. The canvas, stood back from, had a chilling Kafkaesque quality about it. Instrumentalities of the state had been used to spectacularly kill one completely innocent and defenseless man and brutally maim another. Mayor Giuliani appeared to accept this as a reasonable price of effective law enforcement.

With the formed state having finished its course, high history also lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb and enduring. The timeless village and the "eternal" peasant reappear, begetting children and burying seed in Mother Earth—a busy, easily contented swarm, over which the tempest of soldier-emperors passingly blows. In the midst of the land lie the old world-cities, empty receptacles of an extinguished soul, in which a historyless mankind slowly nests itself. Men live from hand to mouth, with petty thrifts and petty fortunes, and endure. Masses are trampled on in the conflicts of the conquerors who contend for the power and the spoil of this world, but the survivors fill up the gaps with a primitive fertility and suffer on. And while in high places there is eternal alternance of victory and defeat, those in the depths pray, pray with that mighty piety of the Second Religiousness that has overcome all doubts forever. There, in the souls, world-peace, the peace of God, the bliss of grey-haired monks and hermits, is become actual—and there alone. It has awakened that depth in the endurance of suffering which the historical man in the thousand years of his development has never known. Only with the end of grand History does holy, still Being reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimlessness, noble and aimless as the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and alternance of land and sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at it or we may lament it—but so it is.

You are familiar with The Decline of the West, in which Oswald Spengler takes note of the current decadence of painting, as well as literature and music, and concludes that the end of our cultural epoch has arrived. He is a philosopher, but one descended from the natural sciences. He arranges observations, he records insights and knowledge. He takes a graphic view of history. And if he sees that a line curves downward, he considers the trend a proven fact, so that zero must be reached at a particular time and place. And that moment represents the end, the decline of the West! "But his graphing has no bearing on any of my ideas and plans as architect and politician. I study the reasons why the line curves downward, and I try to remove the causes. But at the same time, I examine the reasons why at an earlier time the line curved upward! And then I set out to restore the conditions of that day, to awake anew the creative wall of that time, and to bring about a new crest in the constantly fluctuating curve of history. "No doubt about it! Our culture has entered on stagnation, it looks like old age. But the reasons for this state do not lie in the fact that it has genuinely passed its manhood, but rather that the upholders of this culture, the Germanic-European peoples, have neglected it and have turned their attention to material tasks, to technology, industry, to hunger for material possessions, to rapacity, and to an economic egocentrism that overwhelms everything else. All their thinking and striving reaches its only climax in account books and in the outward show of the worldly goods they possess. "I am overcome with disgust, a vexing scorn, when I see the way such people live and behave! [ . . . ] But thank God, it is only the top ten thousand who think along these lines. It is true that the whole of the bourgeoisie is already strongly infected and sickly. But bourgeois youth are still healthy and can be shown the way back to nature, to a higher development, to new cultural will, provided only that they do not become enmeshed in the treadmill of meaningless and wholly materialistic contemporary life, only to drown either in the cupidity of business or in the tedium of the middle-class workaday routine or in the corruption of the big city. “If we succeed in replacing the egocentric cupidity of business with a socialist communal wall and a work-affirming responsibility for the common-weal; in abolishing the tedium of middle-class workaday monotony by substituting for it the potential enjoyment of personal liberty, the beauty of nature, the splendor of our own Fatherland and the thousandfold diversity of the rest of the world; and if we put an end to the corruption of omnipresent degeneracy, bred in the warrens of buildings and on the asphalt streets of the cities of millions - then the road is clear to a new life, to a new creative will, to a new flight of the free, healthy spirit and mind. And then, my dear Herr Roselius, your bricks will form themselves into entirely new shapes all by themselves. Temples of life will be built, cathedrals of a higher cult will be raised, and even thousands of years later, the walls will bear witness to the exalted times out of which even more exalted ones were bom!” When Roselius had left Hitler’s room with me, he took my hand and said: “Wagener, I thank you for having made this hour possible. What a man! And how small we feel, concerned as we are with those things that preoccupy us! But now I know' what I have to do! In spite of my sixty years, I have only one goal: to join in the work of helping the young people and the German Volk to find internal and external freedom!

Mr Casaubon’s behaviour about settlements was highly satisfactory to Mr Brooke, and the preliminaries of marriage rolled smoothly along, shortening the weeks of courtship. The betrothed bride must see her future home, and dictate any changes that she would like to have made there. A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards. And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it. On a grey but dry November morning Dorothea drove to Lowick in company with her uncle and Celia. Mr Casaubon’s home was the manor-house. Close by, visible from some parts of the garden, was the little church, with the old parsonage opposite. In the beginning of his career, Mr Casaubon had only held the living, but the death of his brother had put him in possession of the manor also. It had a small park, with a fine old oak here and there, and an avenue of limes towards the south-west front, with a sunk fence between park and pleasure-ground, so that from the drawing-room windows the glance swept uninterruptedly along a slope of greensward till the limes ended in a level of corn and pastures, which often seemed to melt into a lake under the setting sun. This was the happy side of the house, for the south and east looked rather melancholy even under the brightest morning. The grounds here were more confined, the flower-beds showed no very careful tendance, and large clumps of trees, chiefly of sombre yews, had risen high, not ten yards from the windows. The building, of greenish stone, was in the old English style, not ugly, but small-windowed and melancholy-looking: the sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows, and little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a joyous home. In this latter end of autumn, with a sparse remnant of yellow leaves falling slowly athwart the dark evergreens in a stillness without sunshine, the house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr Casaubon, when he presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown into relief by that background. ‘Oh dear!’ Celia said to herself, ‘I am sure Freshitt Hall would have been pleasanter than this.’ She thought of the white freestone, the pillared portico, and the terrace full of flowers, Sir James smiling above them like a prince issuing from his enchantment in a rosebush, with a handkerchief swiftly metamorphosed from the most delicately-odorous petals—Sir James, who talked so agreeably, always about things which had common-sense in them, and not about learning! Celia had those light young feminine tastes which grave and weather-worn gentlemen sometimes prefer in a wife; but happily Mr Casaubon’s bias had been different, for he would have had no chance with Celia.

It may be cheap, but it should also be sturdy. What must be avoided at all costs is dishonest, distorted and ornate work. What must be sought is the natural, direct, simple, sturdy and safe. Confining beauty to visual appreciation and excluding the beauty of practical objects has proven to be a grave error on the part of modern man. A true appreciation of beauty cannot be fostered by ignoring practical handicrafts. After all, there is no greater opportunity for appreciating beauty than through its use in our daily lives, no greater opportunity for coming into direct contact with the beautiful. It was the tea masters who first recognized this fact. Their profound aesthetic insight came as a result of their experience with utilitarian objects. If life and beauty are treated as belonging to different realms, our aesthetic sensibilities will gradually wither and decline. It is said that someone living in proximity to a flowering garden grows insensitive to its fragrance. Likewise, when one becomes too familiar with a sight, one loses the ability to truly see it. Habit robs us of the power to perceive anew, much less the power to be moved. Thus it has taken us all these years, all these ages, to detect the beauty in common objects. The world of utility and the world of beauty are not separate realms. Users and the used have exchanged a vow: the more an object is used the more beautiful it will become and the more the user uses an object, the more the object will be used. When machines are in control, the beauty they produce is cold and shallow. It is the human hand that creates subtlety and warmth. Weakness cannot withstand the rigors of daily use. The true meaning of the tea ceremony is being forgotten. The beauty of the way of tea should be the beauty of the ordinary, the beauty of honest poverty. Equating the expensive with the beautiful cannot be a point of pride. Under the snow's reflected light creeping into the houses, beneath the dim lamplight, various types of manual work are taken up. This is how time is forgotten; this is how work absorbs the hours and days. yet there is work to do, work to be done with the hands. Once this work begins, the clock no longer measures the passage of time. The history of kogin is the history of utility being transformed into beauty. Through their own efforts, these people made their daily lives more beautiful. This is the true calling, the mission, of handicrafts. We are drawn by that beauty and we have much to learn from it. As rich as it is, America is perhaps unrivalled for its vulgar lack of propriety and decorum, which may account for its having the world's highest crime rate. The art of empty space seen in the Nanga school of monochrome painting and the abstract, free-flowing art of calligraphy have already begun to exert considerable influence on the West. Asian art represents a latent treasure trove of immense and wide-reaching value for the future and that is precisely because it presents a sharp contrast to Western art. No other country has pursued the art of imperfection as eagerly as Japan. Just as Western art and architecture owe much to the sponsorship of the House of Medici during the Reformation, tea and Noh owe much to the protection of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa ( 1436-1490 ). The most brilliant era of Japanese culture, the Higashiyama period ( 1443-1490 ). Literally, sabi commonly means "loneliness" but as a Buddhist term it originally referred to the cessation of attachment. The beauty of tea is the beauty of sabi. It might also be called the beauty of poverty or in our day it might be simply be called the beauty of simplicity. The tea masters familiar with this beauty were called sukisha-ki meaning "lacking". The sukisha were masters of enjoying what was lacking.