-接上回

But “Time” is no abstract phrase, but a name for the actuality of?

Irreversibility不可逆轉(zhuǎn)性. Here there is only forward, never back. Long,?

long ago the country bore the country town and nourished it with her best blood.?

-

Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably貪婪地 and?

incessantly不斷地 demanding and devouring吞食 fresh streams of men,?

till it wearies疲倦的 and dies in the midst of an almost?

uninhabited waste of country.

-

Once the full sinful beauty of this last marvel of all history

has captured a victim, it never lets him go. Primitive folk can loose

themselves from the soil and wander, but the intellectual nomad never.

-

Home is for him any one of these giant cities, but even?

the nearest village is alien territory. He would sooner?

die upon the pavement than go “back” to the land.

-

They take the City with them into the mountains or on the sea.?

They have lost the country within themselves and will?

never regain it outside.

Tension without cosmic pulsation脈動 to animate使有生機 it is the?

transition to nothingness. But Civilization is nothing but tension.?

The head, in all the outstanding men of the Civilizations,

is dominated exclusively by an expression of extreme tension.

Intelligence is the replacement of unconscious living by?

exercise in thought,masterly, but bloodless and jejune淺薄的/貧瘠的.

p637

★★★contest 競賽

“Unless Woman repudiates否認(rèn) her womanliness女興氣質(zhì), her duty to her

husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself,

she cannot emancipate姐放 herself.”

-

The primary woman, the peasant woman,is mother. The whole?

vocation天職/使命 towards which she has yearned向往 from

childhood is included in that one word.

-

But now emerges the Ibsen woman,the comrade, the heroine英雌 of?

a whole megalopolitan大都會 literature from Northern drama to?

Parisian巴黎的 novel. Instead of children, she has soul conflicts; marriage

is a craft工藝 art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.”?

-

★★★★★

At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for

centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man

vanishes. It crumbles弄碎 from the summit峰值, first the world cities, then the

provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has

incontinently不能自制地 poured into the towns, merely to bolster支撐 them up?

awhile一會兒. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive,?

but robbed of its strongest and most promising有希望的 elements.?

★This residue殘渣 is the Fellah阿拉伯農(nóng)民 type.

The Imperiu絕對桶治權(quán)m enjoyed the completest完全的 peace; it was rich and?

highly developed; it was well organized; and it possessed in its emperors.

And yet the population dwindled逐漸變少, quickly and wholesale大規(guī)模的.

If we turn to our own civilization, we find that the old families of the?

French noblesse貴族階 were not, in the great majority of cases,?

eradicated根除/摧毀 in the Revolution, but have died out since 1815,

and their ★sterility不毛/不結(jié)果實 has spread to the bourgeoisie and,?

since 1870, to the peasantry which that very Revolution almost re-created.?

★★★

Consequently we find everywhere in these Civilizations that the provincial cities?

at an early stage, and the giant cities in turn at the end of the evolution,?

stand empty, harboring in their stone masses a small population of

fellaheen who shelter避難 in them as the men of the Stone Age sheltered?

in caves and pile dwellings居所.

This, then, is the conclusion of the city’s history; growing from

primitive barter物物交換 center to Culture city and at last to world city,?

it sacrifices first the blood and soul of its creators to the needs?

of its majestic壯麗的 evolution, and then the last flower of that growth to the?

spirit of Civilization — and so,doomed, moves on to final self-destruction.