Cities in Flight (81 page)

When aristocratic factionalism has been suppressed, the king and the aristocracy become allies against the rising power of the bourgeoisie, who soon become ripe for revolution; as do the Okies after the "collapse of the germanium standard" in 3900.
⁴
The gathering of the mayors aboard Buda-Pesht [ECH, 370-381] and the March on Earth that follows, even though it results in apparent defeat in the Battle of Earth} can be regarded as the 1789, and the passage of the anti-Okie bill in 3976 as the 1815, of Earthman history.

At this point, so far as the galaxy proper is concerned, the story of the Earthmanist Culture comes to a sudden end, for the Earthman domains are invaded and conquered by a non-human "culture," the Web of Hercules [TTOT, 471]. Since this is so, we are unable to test our evaluation of the 3900-3976 period against later events. Even so, and even though Mayor Amalfi, the principal hero and leading cultural morphologist of CITIES IN FLIGHT, believes that the Okies have been completely defeated [ECH, 421-422], I can see no reason to believe that the restoration of the Ancien Regime in 3976 would have been any more permanent than it was in 1815.

4. The Triumph of Time over Space

Following the Battle of Earth, New York moves from the galaxy proper to the Greater Magellanic Cloud. The military and political events that ensue upon its arrival there are perhaps, and the philosophy of Stochasticism is certainly, consistent with the beginning of the Period of Contending States. Here the beginning is all that we can know anything about, for once again history is cut short-this time by the "totally universal physical cataclysm" of the year 4104 [TTOT, 471].

The fourth volume of CITIES IN FLIGHT in its U.S. edition bears the title The Triumph of Time. Since the principal theme here is not especially Spenglerian, my purpose is simply to note that this title, and indeed the story itself, could have been inspired, whether or not it was, by a passage on Spengler's final page:

Time triumphs over Space, and it is Time whose inexorable movement embeds the ephemeral incident of the Culture, on this planet, in the incident of Man-a form wherein the incident life flows on for a time, while behind it all the streaming horizons of geological and stellar histories pile up in the light-world of our eyes. [II, 507]

0
An earlier version of this analysis appeared in Riverside Quarterly, and that version is Copyright (c) 1968 by Leland Sapiro. Our thanks to him and to the author for permission to include this revised version in this volume.

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
Forgetfulness, alas, did indeed play a role. The volumes were written roughly in the order III, I, IV, II over a period of 15 years (during which I was also writing other books), and inconsistencies crept in despite my best intentions to keep them out. For this edition, I have corrected a large number of those pointed out to me by Dr. Mullen, where I agreed that they were inconsistencies. Where I didn't, I let them stand-along with Dr. Mullen's objections to them.-J. B

3
A wholly valid argument. Nevertheless I have not changed the text, because—"particularly in Vol. I-I was trying to make the point that when two Civilizations come in conflict with one another, the issue is resolved long in advance of formal military victory by each side becoming more like the other. The point would have seemed trivial to Spengler, who points out that all Civilizations are alike in their essential features to begin with; but in our century the process is highly visible once one's attention has been called to it, an opportunity I couldn't (and can't) resist.- J. B.

4
After this point, cleaning up the inconsistencies in the chronology involved advancing all the dates, and so I have altered Dr. Mullen's subsequent dates-which followed the original Chronology to reflect the changes.-J. B.

5
The Issue at Hand (Chicago: Advent, 1964), p. 60n.

6
Spengler uses the phrases "centralized bureaucracy-state" in connection with the Egyptian third political epoch [1, Table iii. but I hardly think that Blish's Bureaucratic State is intended to be an aristocratic state.

-RDM