and gloomy, and generally what is adverse. 'When we say "thought-provoking," we usually have in mind immediately something injurious, that is, negative. Accordingly, a statement that speaks of a thought-provoking time, and even of what is most thought-provoking in it, is from the start tuned in a negative key. It has in view only the adverse and somber traits of the age. It sticks exclusively to those phenomena that are good for nothing and promote every form of nothingness-the nihilistic phenomena. And it necessarily assumes that at the core of those phenomena there is a lack-according to our proposition, lack of thought.
This tune is familiar to us all ad nauseam from the standard appraisals of the present age. A generation ago it was "The Decline of the West." Today we speak of "loss of center." People everywhere trace and record the decay, the destruction, the imminent annihilation of the world. We are surrounded by a special breed of reportorial novels that do nothing but wallow in such deterioration and depression. On the one hand, that sort of literature is much easier to produce than to say something that is essential and truly thought out; but on the other hand it is already getting tiresome. The world, men find, is not just out of joint but tumbling away into the nothingness of absurdity. Nietzsche, who from his supreme peak saw far ahead of it all, as early as the eighteen-eighties had for it the simple, because thoughtful, words: "The wasteland grows." It means, the devastation is growing wider. Devastation is more than destruction. Devastation is more unearthly than destruction. Destruction only sweeps aside all that has grown up or been built up so far; but devastation blocks all future growth and prevents all building. Devastation is more unearthly than mere destruction. Mere destruction sweeps aside all things including even nothingness, while devastation on the contrary establishes and spreads everything that blocks