“Added to all this is the universal dread of reality. We ‘pale faces’ have it, all of us, although we are seldom and most of us never, conscious of it. It is the spiritual weakness of the ‘Late’ man of the higher civilizations, who lives in his cities cut off from the peasant and the soil and thereby from the natural experiencing of destiny, time, and death.”—Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Destiny.

  I laughed reading this, thinking of the weekend just past. Friends had gathered at a beautifully peaceful lake front house and after some chopping wood and swimming we were enjoying a delicious evening meal with all the fixings, wine aplenty and a nip of whisky too. 

  After the meal is when the conversation always gets going, and when I begin the cleanup. It’s become something of a joke, this me leaving of the table around which all the post-prandial talk takes place. But it’s nothing new. I practiced it when I was married and the extended family would sit around after dinner and discuss the happenings of the world. 

  I’m not married anymore. Maybe that was a contributing factor. 

  We all do it though. We’re educated enough today to think we can ‘fix’ a troubled world with our ideas of how things ‘should be.’ I hear it everywhere, it is practically an undercurrent in every conversation, every discussion. But we are lying to ourselves, and the lie is based, as Spengler writes, on a profound dread of reality. 

  It is bright and fresh outside. I’ve returned from a trip to the grocery store which always involves a stop for an alongé at my local Cafe. I pulled out Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn while there, plus of course my notebook for whatever errant jots come to mind. Back home I felt an urge to delve back into Spengler and opened it on my iPad, never having found a hard or soft cover copy of it. 

  “God,” I immediately thought, “this is the real thing! But how does one bring this stuff up when sitting around a comfortably middle class dinner table after a veritable feast?”

  Better to just do the dishes, and smile inwardly at the terrible beauty of the moment and the vast wonder of Life!