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What has The Decline and Fall to do with it?” “It became his Bible. He was chilled to the bone by it. You should read it, but with caution. It’s quite capable of strangling the soul. Dickinson was a rationalist; he recognized the ultimate truth in the Roman tragedy: that once expansion has stopped, decay is constant and irreversible. Every failure of reason or virtue loses more ground. “I haven’t been able to find his book on Gibbon, but I know what he’ll say: that Gibbon was not writing only of the Romans, nor of the British of his own time. He was writing of us … . “To anyone who thinks in those terms, who looks around him, this world is fast sliding toward a dark age.” We drank silently for a few minutes. I had the sense that time had locked in place, that we sat unmoving, the world frozen around us.
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