Let's see if I can remember what I was reading last night. Campbell's Myths to Live By, V: The Confrontation of East and West in Religion (1970).

In the 1920s, the intellectuals from the West declared the death of religion, because of all the scientific progresses including psychology. However, Spengler's The Decline of the West says that the West is not on its way up, but on its way down. "When he sought for analogies in the classical world, our moment today corresponded to that of the late second century B.C., the time of the Carthaginian Wars, the decline of the culture-world of Greece into Hellenism, and the rise of the military state of Rome, Caesarism, and what he termed the Second Religiousness, politics based on providing bread and circuses to the megalopolitan masses, and a general trend to violence and brutality in the arts and pastimes of the people." What I wrote in the margin is something like: All civilizations are different but similar; none is better or worse; just different. This corresponds to the new insight that everything is different but similar. Nothing is absolute. The Western civilization is not necessarily better than the Eastern, or the past, or the future. All are equal but different. I like this notion very much. This opens one to many more possibilities when studying a particular subject. One can always find parallels in two seemingly different things. The western thoughts are very into the specifics, especially the Americans. Probably this has to do with their relatively shorter history and smaller population. Just a thought.

OK, next. "Frobenius, like Nietzsche before him, saw the present as an epoch of
irreversible advance in the one life course of the entire human race, here
passing from its youthful, locally bounded stages of cultural growths to a new
and general future of as yet unforeseen creative insights and realizations".

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I am tired and I don't want to think or write or be anymore. I am going to take
a break and be low. These states of bliss are sometimes so tiring....

Not really bad, but just, not so great. No longer the ocean. No longer life. Nothing. Just me on my porch with a beer and a wireless laptop.

-- email to JA.