starry impressions (3,700 years old):

the starlight we see has travelled across vast spaces; it has an absolute speed of186,000 miles per second, therefore this journey takes time.  Light from the closest star, Proxima Centauri, has travelled 4 years before it strikes earth.  The star Polaris is 680 light years distant; its light takes 680 years to travel to Earth.  Most of the stars we see with the naked eye at night are within a few hundred light years, a handful are as far away as 2,000 light years.  The oldest starlight (as of 2014) observed was 6,000 light years away.  The light from it began travelling in 4,000 BC.

 

an image:

images are not simply graphical objects or artefacts but reflections of the Cultural Soul.  While Spengler also on occasion refers to pictorial images, the term for him has a much broader meaning; they are “likenesses” and “the only language of spiritual intercourse that man has discovered to this day.”  In this specific case he means that the concept of starlight as being thousands of years old, is a reflection of the Faustian Soul and NOT part of a scientific experiment or knowledge.

 

absolute limit: * see EndNote<A>

The observable universe is a spherical region of the universe comprising all matter that can be observed from Earth at the present time, as electromagnetic radiation from these objects has had time to reach the Solar System since the beginning of the cosmological expansion.  The word observable in this sense does not refer to “detection” be it by eye, telescope or radio/x-ray telescopes.  It refers to the physical limit created by the speed of light itself; because no signals can travel faster than light, any object farther away from us than light could travel in the age of the universe (estimated as of 2015 around 13.8 billion years cannot be detected (the signals could not have reached us yet). 

 

symbols:

symbols constitute Spengler’s Makrokosmos, which includes everything in history & nature, all that is made by Culture/Civilization; they bridge the “here” (our proper living space) & the “there”, the extended.  Macrocosm is the sum of all symbols relating to 1 man.  Symbols, actualized, exist in the extended (Space), are BECOME & rigid. 

 

Northern races: * see EndNote<B>

reference to the Germanic peoples, who migrated out of southern Scandinavia & northern Germany to the lands between the Elbe & Oder after 1000 BC.  The first wave moved westward and southward, moving into southern Germany up to the Roman provinces of Gaul and Cisalpine Gaul by 100 BC, where they were stopped by Gaius Marius and Julius Caesar.  This western group was described by the Roman historian Tacitus (AD 56–117) and Julius Caesar (100–44 BC).

 

sailing the seas:

see above page 330 (Vikings)