Old age of our culture

We are in the old age of our culture. It’s in a dissolving, disintegrating period. . . . There is an awful saying of Spengler that I ran into in a book of his, “Jahre der Entscheidung” (“Years of Decision”), which are the years we live in now. He said, ‘As for America, it’s a congeries of dollar trappers, no past, no future.’ When I read that back in the thirties, I took it as an insult. But what is anybody interested in? . . . It’s a terrible lack of anything but economic concerns that we’re facing, and that is old age and death, and that is the end. That’s as I see it. I have nothing but negative judgments in respect to that.