The close of a cycle is not announced by a single dramatic event. It is a prolonged process of exhaustion and of the progressive inability of the existing forms to generate higher meaning. The man who lives inside that process must decide whether he will be exhausted with the forms or whether he will remain distinct from them. The decision is the practical content of the final days of this phase.
Remaining what one is means the continued exercise of the permanent measure under conditions that grow more hostile to it. It means the refusal to allow the exhaustion of the age to become an excuse for the lowering of the standard. It means the acceptance that the outer supports for a higher life will continue to diminish and that the inner supports must therefore become more rigorous.
Many will interpret the close of the cycle as a reason for resignation or for a final desperate activism. Both responses are forms of dissolution. Resignation abandons the type. Activism of the futile kind exhausts it in actions that cannot alter the direction of the larger process. The differentiated individual does neither. He continues the work of formation and of discrimination. He remains available for whatever the next phase may require of a higher type of man.
The close of the cycle is therefore not an ending for the man who has prepared himself. It is a transition whose character he cannot fully determine but whose pressures he is equipped to meet. The equipment is the set of capacities formed across the previous days: detachment, clarity, the long view, independence from results, the permanent measure. These capacities do not guarantee comfort. They guarantee that something essential will not be lost with the forms that are ending.