Cities in Flight

(Footnotes)

1 . The volume-page references in this essay are to the translation of Spengler by Charles Francis Atkinson (two volumes: New York: Knopf, 1926, 1928). Spengler completed this work in late 1922.

2 . The Issue at Hand (Chicago: Advent, 1964), p. 6on.

3 . Spengler uses the phrases ‘centralized bureaucracy—state” in connection with the Egyptian third political epoch [I, Table iii], but I hardly think that Blish’s Bureaucratic State is intended to be an aristocratic state.

4 . This table is based primarily on the three tables that appear at the end of Spengler’s first volume: “Cultural Epochs” and “Political Epochs” (organized as in this table) and “Spiritual Epochs” (organized as spring, summer, autumn, winter). Making the table turned out to be very difficult for me, partly because of the necessity for squaring the two organizations, partly because Spengler does not tabulate the political epochs for the Arabian Culture, partly because the dates in the three tables are not wholly consistent with each other or with those in the text, which is not wholly self-consistent, but primarily because of the need to select and interpret in such a way that a much abbreviated amalgamation would make sense to me, and hopefully to the reader.

5 . The title The Triumph of Time came from Swinburne, but as Dr. Mullen infers, and the text of the last volume shows, I would never have hit upon it without Spengler’s peroration. When my English publishers, for practical reasons of their own, asked me for another title, A Clash of Cymbals sprang instantly to mind as a perfect three-way ideogrammatic pun, and indeed a number of reviewers in England turned Cymbals” into “Symbols”.—J.B.

–R D M