Thursday, May 28, 2020
The Soul of the Peasant
Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), The Decline of the West, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson, Vol. II (London: George Allen Unwin Ltd., 1928), p. 104 (translator's footnote omitted):
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Let the reader try to merge himself in the soul of the peasant. He has sat on his glebe from primeval times, or has fastened his clutch in it, to adhere to it with his blood. He is rooted in it as the descendant of his forbears and as the forbear of future descendants. His house, his property, means, here, not the temporary connexion of person and thing for a brief span of years, but an enduring and inward union of eternal land and eternal blood. It is only from this mystical conviction of settlement that the great epochs of the cycle — procreation, birth, and death — derive that metaphysical element of wonder which condenses in the symbolism of custom and religion that all landbound people possess.
