“I'm interested on your take...its 20 mins long…”

-Rusty

I very much enjoyed Rusty’s soliloquy on the Faustian Spirit in Marlow’s Doctor Faustus, which is not a book I have read. There are many books that an educated man is supposed to have read, which I have not, Including Milton’s Paradise, most of Shakespeare. Being unschooled, and reading only what appealed to my teen age fancy during school years, and then reading out of the news stand and the library as a man when educated people were in college, has left me unable to comment on a number of these works.

‘Into this Arrogance Before God,’ is one of my fixations about people which Rusty brings up as my apish fellows insist on becoming part of a collective god. My sole thought on Doctor Faust, based only on this monologue by Rusty, is that the plot and protagonist seems to be inspired by the Biblical Book of Job.

As for Spengler, whose work I have partially read, I suspect that his naming of the Northern European—a breed of man gone westward from his beginnings—as being inclined in his nature to make a devil’s bargain in the pursuit of discovery, invention or other dynamic pursuits, is probably related to the fact that Western Man was defined by the creation of civilization in the most extreme hostility of climate and that this placed him as the eventual displacer and conqueror of those peoples who had maintained a Stone Age symbiosis with that vey same climate in the Western Hemisphere.

There is no interracial empathy greater than the regret of the conquerors of North America for those people they so often intermarried and allied with amongst the Amerindians.

As Rusty points out, as Post-Christian civilization gains the ascent it is important to understand not only what Christianity extinguished in the indigenous lands of Northwestern Europe and North America, but what it assimilated, included, syncretized, and in some cases, found to be pre-existing and in Christian congruity.

I would suggest, for further reading beyond Spengler, in terms of rectifying the Grail Mythos and Modernity, that a reading of Ernst Junger’s The Forest Passage.

I detrained at Jack London Square in Oakland California this morning, I was reading a book titled the Angel and the Sorcerer, as I stood, vigilant after being approached and driving off two feral ebon bums with preternatural yeti glares, when a man of Holy Hue, but of Arуan form, a man from the Storied Subcontinent, asked me, at a shout from across the square, “Are you reading the Bible?”

“No,” I said, and he stamped his slippered feet with dashed hopes and declared, “Awe, fuck me!” turned around and walked the other way—so hungry many in this world are for finding a place in it for our most oft printed book.

Thanks, Rusty for getting me thinking.

-Emeryville, California, 3/4/2021