Chapter 45: Body & Soul

[Scott Badger]

> Scott,
>
> Please please please expand on this quote.  It sounds very Platonian (if
> that is an adjective).  Plato is always a good jumping point.
>
> David Morris
>
> >"*Pure* Civilization [as a succession to Culture], as a
> historical process,
> >consists in a progressive exhaustion of forms that have become
> inorganic or
> >dead."    Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

Page 25. I'm not even through the intro yet and the Pynchon parallels are
quite, er, prolific...Haven't gotten far enough to offer any expansion
(maybe you can rouse Charles) but you might be interested in this:

"No great Greek ever wrote any recollections that would serve to fix a phase
of experience for his inner eye. Not even Socrates has told, regarding his
inward life, anything important in our sense of the word. It is questionable
indeed whether for a Classical mind it was even possible to react to motive
forces that are presupposed in the production of a Parzival, a Hamlet, or a
Werther. In Plato we fail to observe any conscious evolution of doctrine;
his separate works are merely treatises written from very different
standpoints which he took up from time to time, and it gave him no concern
whether and how they hung together." page 10

...and this...
"The Egyptian soul, conspicuously historical in its texture and impelled
with primitive passion towards the infinite, perceived past and future as
its *whole* world, and the present (which is identical with waking
consciousness) appeared to him simply as the narrow common frontier of two
immeasurable stretches. The Egyptian Culture is an embodiment of *care* -
which is the spiritual counterpoise of distance - care for the future
expressed in the choice of granite or basalt as the craftsman's materials,
in the chiselled archives, in the elaborate administration system, in the
net of irrigation works, and, necessarily *bound up therewith*, care for the
past." page 9

Scott Badger