Tension, when it has become intellectual, knows no form of recreation but that which is specific to the world-city--namely, _détente_, relaxation, distraction. Genuine play, _joie de vivre_, pleasure, inebriation, are products of the cosmic beat and as such no longer comprehensible in their essence. But the relief of hard, intensive brain-work by its opposite--conscious and practised fooling--of intellectual tension by the bodily tension of sport, of bodily tension by the sensual straining after “pleasure” and the spiritual straining after the “excitements” of betting and competitions, of the pure logic of the day’s work by a consciously enjoyed mysticism--all this is common to the world-cities of all the Civilizations. Cinema, Expressionism, Theosophy, boxing contests, nigger dances, poker, and racing--one can find it all in Rome. Indeed, the connoisseur might extend his researches to the Indian, Chinese, and Arabian world-cities as well. To name but one example, if one reads the Kama-sutram one understands how it was that Buddhism _also_ appealed to men’s tastes, and then the bullfighting scenes in the Palace of Cnossus will be looked at with quite different eyes. A cult, no doubt, underlay them, but there was a savour over it all, as over Rome’s fashionable Isis-cult in the neighbourhood of the Circus Maximus. And then, when Being is sufficiently uprooted and Waking-Being sufficiently strained, there suddenly emerges into the bright light of history a phenomenon that has long been preparing itself underground and now steps forward to make an end of the drama--the _sterility of civilized man_. This is not something that can be grasped as a plain matter of Causality (as modern science naturally enough has tried to grasp it); it is to be understood as an essentially _metaphysical_ turn towards death. The last man of the world-city no longer _wants_ to live--he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death. That which strikes the true peasant with a deep and inexplicable fear, the notion that the family and the name may be extinguished, has now lost its meaning. The continuance of the blood-relation in the visible world is no longer a duty of the blood, and the destiny of being the last of the line is no longer felt as a doom. Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence. Let the reader try to merge himself in the soul of the peasant. He has sat on his glebe from primeval times,[151] or has fastened his clutch in it, to adhere to it with his blood. He is rooted in it as the descendant of his forbears and as the forbear of future descendants. _His_ house, _his_ property, means, here, not the temporary connexion of person and thing for a brief span of years, but an enduring and