One of our neighbors in Canada, where we live for part of the year, is thinking of buying the cottage next door, the homestead of an old man who isn’t in good health and who hasn’t been to that house in a long time. In 2005, when we were new to the neighborhood, I helped him and some men he had hired to shingle his roof, knowing that I’d learn from the job and that I’d have to do the same for my own house soon.
Up there, you have to “butter” the shingles on the inside with tar, or else the winds off the bay will lift them off. Even so, they wear out quickly, as they have done with this house. Water has gotten inside.
When I asked my neighbor whether he was going to fix the house, he told me it had become impossible. “There are ants inside,” he said. “The anthills reach from the floor to the level of a sofa, more than two feet high. Everything has rotted out. There’s nothing left to work with.”
It’s got to be cleared away. So also for the property behind it, gone wild with an invasive and pernicious strain of hogweed. That too has to be cleared.
I suppose it is the same with other inventions of man, including cultures. Here is how the ants infest. First, you cannot do what needs to be done to keep things in good order, though you try. Second, you no longer bother to try, though you still know what might be done, had you the strength and the will. Third, you no longer even know what might be done; not only have cultural habits fallen into disuse, but the knowledge they were based upon has gone. Fourth, you fall into a taste for the falling and the fallen; you cannot rebuild, but you no longer want to, though your conscience is uneasy about it.
Finally, you celebrate the corruption. You revel in the rot; you coat what is left of your floors with honey, to help the ants to increase and multiply, and fill your house and subdue it.
I say that the West is in that condition, at the end of the end. Of course, I know very well that there are stirrings of life and health even in the darkest times. Theodoric had Boethius, the greatest scholar of his age, executed on a false charge of treason, but Boethius had planted seeds that would sprout up in a fine harvest long after Theodoric was gathered to his half-barbarian fathers. I am describing a general condition.
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