“The circle of destiny rolls towards the end; the birth of the city stretches after itself and death. Beginning and ending, the peasant house and the block of houses interact as soul and inetelegion as blood and stone. It is no coincidence, however, that the word "time" means the fact of irreversibility. There is only “forward” here, no “backward”. The peasantry once gave birth to a market, a provincial town, and fed them with its purest blood. Now the giant city is insatiable sucking the juices of the countryside, demanding ever new flows of people and swallowing them, until the villagers run out and die in a barely deserted wasteland. He who is once fascinated by the sinful beauty of this last miracle of history is no longer liberated from it. Primitive peoples were able to break away from the earth and travel wherever the eyes lead. Spirit nomads can no longer do that. The longing for the big city, for good, is stronger than any other desire. <…> Even disgust with that beauty, exhaustion from that glow of a thousand colors, that taedium vitae that eventually catches something does not release them. They carry the city to their mountains and to the sea. They have lost the village and no longer find it elsewhere.
What makes a man in a world city disabled to live in any dibrotic medium other than this is the withdrawal of the cosmic clock from its existence, and the tensions of wakefulness are becoming increasingly dangerous. It should not be forgotten that in the microcosms the animal element, waking, contributes to the plant being, but not the other way around. Tact and tension, blood and spirit, destiny and causation interact as a flowering village with a petrified city, as what is to itself, to another who depends on it. Tension without the cosmic clock that spiritualizes it is a transition to nothingness. And civilization is nothing but tension. The faces of all civilized people who have reached a certain social status are seen only as an expression of the greatest tension. <…> These faces in every culture are its “type of last people”.
Intelligence is the transformation of an unconscious life experience into an education to think, it is something bodily, dry. The intelligent faces of all races are similar. It is the race itself that retreats in them. The less the necessity of life and the self-evident are felt, the more the habit of “finding out” everything becomes established, the more often the fear of waking is prayed for by causal motivation. This is the basis for the identification of knowledge and proof and the change of religious myth by causal-scientific theory. <…>
Only one specific form of recreation known to the world city is known for intellectual tension: relaxation, "distraction". The real game, the joy of life, the fun, the ecstasy come from cosmic tact and are now really no longer understood. But changing intense practical intellectual activity with its opposition, deliberate stupidity, changing spiritual tension with physical tension of sports, these - sensory "pleasures" and spiritual "excitement" of play and competition, changing the pure logic of daily work with conscious drinking mysticism - all repeated in the worlds of all civilizations . Cinema, expressionism, theosophy, boxing fights, Negro dancing, poker and running races can all be found in Rome, and any connoisseur should include Indian, Chinese and Arab world cities in their research. <… >
And now, from the fact that being is losing its roots more and more, and the vigil is becoming more and more tense, there is a phenomenon that has long since matured and now suddenly emerges in the light of history to put an end to human infertility. It is not something that can be understood on the basis of everyday causality, say, physiologically, what modern science has obviously tried to do. There is an absolutely metaphysical turn to death here. The last man in the world's cities no longer wants to live - not as an individual, but as a type, like a crowd: in this whole being, the fear of death fades. What overwhelms the real peasant as a great and inexplicable fear, the idea that the relative will die and the surname will disappear, now loses its meaning. <…> their body would grow in flesh and blood. Here he has taken root as the grandson of his ancestors and as the ancestor of future grandchildren. My house, my property: this here does not mean the accidental coexistence of body and farm for several years, but the long-term inner union of eternal land and eternal blood; only through this, only from the transition to sedentary life in the mystical sense of the great epoch of history, fertilization, birth, and death acquire a metaphysical charm that is symbolically reflected in the customs and religion of all peoples who have grown up with the earth. ”
