Cultures Breathe, Then Fall Silent

Walk through the ruins of Carthage, or the temples of Angkor, and you feel it. The silence is not abandonment but conclusion. These stones do not ask us to remember. Rather, they remind us that what lives must also die.

Oswald Spengler, in The Decline of the West, argues that cultures are organisms. They unfold like plants: born from a seed, flowering in maturity, and decaying in old age. Rome dreamed of eternity; Europe once believed itself the summit of humanity. But no culture escapes this rhythm.

To think biologically about history is to step beyond mere causality. Greek tragedy was not an accident of politics but an inevitable flowering of the Hellenic soul. Gothic cathedrals did not arise from policy but from the northern Christian imagination straining upward, stone toward heaven.

History is not a chain of accidents. It is metabolism. A culture eats, digests, creates, decays. And it cannot live forever.