2 prefaces, to the 1918 and 1922 editions, and 16 introductory chapters, a work that took a decade from its mature professor’s 1911 taking on the inquiry, makes The Decline of the West, the most important and ambitious historical undertaking of which this reader is aware. This is to include the incomplete Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant.

The scope and the subject is “a philosophy of history,” [1] the title having been decided upon in 1912 and serving along with the cataclysmic events of 1914-19, to have properly focused the work. As it certainly, also validated the work.

“The West-European American Culture,” seen by Spengler as reaching fulfillment in 1912, was the focus of his work, specifically in attempting to predict the probable development of this future, of this place and time in which we now occupy. Spengler identifies his age as beginning with the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon in about 1800 and likely to end in about 2000, as this modern society had certainly coalesced and was in decline by the first decade of the 1900s.

I have begun listening to Decline of the West, with 7 listens of the first 3.5 hours, in order to acquire an ear for the voice of the author. I do this as I complete Shrouds of Arуas, in preparation for writing Norns of Arуas. Norns is the place for Spengler’s great work, for he is explicitly in the business of discovering weave patterns in the loom of Fate, of developing a metaphysical and mechanical understanding of DESTINY. He admits to being the first to attempt this, with, I think Herodotus having prefigured him but that old author having been well impugned by less able men.

It will be my tough task and great honor to attempt to summarize the life work of a man my superior in mind. The unabridged audio is approximately 72 hours, with the 25 section recordings ranging from 2 to 4 hours.

This introduction is to be included in Shrouds of Arуas as an Epilogue, and as prologue to the concluding volume, as a prefiguring of my projected last inquiry into the history of Arуan Culture. It is noteworthy that my webmaster has had to remove Arуan from the search list on the website, along with the C-word and the N-word. In such a bizarre age we live in, a serious student of history may not even write of, speak of, or read of the peoples that conquered most of the earth, and who had one shared root term for themselves, the Arуans, most likely meaning “war-bands.” [2]

Certain I must be that the final volume will not see print in my lifetime, I intend to publish my 25 summations and impressions as open content on jameslafond.com. My actual use of Spengler’s work is as a tool to completing my own, cruder, ham-fisted attempt to do some justice to the body of of cultural history left to us by chance, cataclysm, conspiracy, omission, fire, sword, faith and happenstance.

-James LaFond, San Jose, California, Monday, January 29, 2024, a generation after the age that Spengler declared would end in about 2000, ended in the month of September of the following year.

…

Notes

-1. Spengler certainly uses the modern notion of “history” as the record of the past, rather than the notion of “inquiry” into the past, that word being the root entire of History, with the ancients adding an accent mark to denote the “h” sound. In that he was engaging in a shared notion, a notion he argues to correct by developing a method of path finding for developing a precognitive tool for understanding future social actualities.

-2. Iranian, also, possibly, according to Robert Sephor, Arуan is a hold over term from an ecologically displaced Atlantic Civilization.