“Life has an aim. It is the fulfillment of that which was ordained at its conception.”—Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West 

So I’m sitting in my preferred Saturday morning coffee shop, Gravity, working on my next viral blockbuster of a video when a few quotes jump off the digital page and slap me upside the head.

Damn, I say to myself while scanning the place, a young mother sitting at the raised counter with her four or five year old son, another crinkly looking ma having a morning coffee with her grown daughter, “…the fulfillment of that which was ordained at its conception.” Beautifully put, gloomy old Mr. Spengler.

Will Durant, who wrote a ten or eleven volume Story of Civilization also wrote that Spengler was possibly the greatest German thinker of the twentieth century. Joseph Campbell claimed reading Spengler (which he did seven times!) was possibly the greatest event of his intellectual career, and yet I have never met a single soul who has read a single line of Spengler. A month or so before I dropped out of school for good, and this goes back some thirty years, I asked one of the history professors what they thought of him. “Dated,” came the reply. Meaning he probably hadn’t read a line of it either.

“I see world-history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvellous waxing and waning of organic forms.”—Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West

  Oh man, stop me before I get going here!

Ok, one more, I promise:

“There is a wondrous music of the spheres which wills to be heard and which a few of our deepest spirits will hear.”—Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West 

  Pure Zen that.

Which of course is why it cannot be taught in school.

What is the sound of one hand clamping a heavy volume of Oswald Spengler shut?

…..