Found on President Aristotle
(JB here: It's a tremendous read -- all of it.)

It was Oswald Spengler who seems to have seen it first, TS Eliot who saw it most clearly: the death of Europe and European civilization. When Eliot wrote The Waste Land in 1922, he saw the life of a great culture, a great continent, sinking down into mud and dead branches.
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Eliot came in the role of the Old Testament prophet, a new Ezekiel who had seen his wife die (emotionally and mentally in Eliot's case), and had never shed a tear; a man face to face with a god whom he did not understand, and an avalanche of violence and desolation that swept away everything he loved. Only now was the aftermath--the arid waterless dessicated dryness of spirit, a heart as hard and dry as a burnt potsherd on a desert at high noon.

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The language was Dante's, the vision Bertrand Russell's--it was a vision that came to Russell on the streets of London, one he says he shared with Eliot. For Eliot and Russell had been joined together in the Bloomsbury circle--Russell had taken Eliot's wife as a prize, taken her within two weeks of her returning from her honeymoon with Eliot. Soon Russell offered the apparently unsuspecting Eliot space in his house for Eliot and his wife--the better to control his prey. Russell was then globally famous as a philosopher, had led the destruction of post-Kantian Idealist philosophy, and was laying the foundations for the analytical philosophy that would soon control the philosophy departments of most of the English-speaking world. For his part, Eliot had written a doctoral dissertation on Idealist philosophy at Harvard, but would never join the analytical movement: the philosopher who succeeded in putting himself in Eliot's wife's heart never succeeded in putting his philosophy into the heart of Eliot.

II The Game of Chess
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

Eliot's marriage had become a purgatorio; Eliot's wife became increasingly unstable and she would die in an insane asylum. The years after World War I were a time of melting marriages and widespread abortion, abortions both outside marriage and within: "The chemist said it would be alright," says a character in The Waste Land, "but I've never been the same." Nor has Europe.

JB here: Question: Does sin inevitably bring pain? Is there a moral universe with its own laws that inevitably punish those who break them? Or, do some people never suffer for their violation of the moral universe? We know T.S. Eliot suffered. Obviously Mrs. Eliot suffered. But what about Bertrand Russell? Did he suffer; experience guilt, feel any remorse or responsibility? PROBABLY NOT. After all he attempted to build a philosophy that would allow him to follow his passions, no matter how perverse. Yet, " it is appointed unto man once to die, then judgement." But possibly, on this planet, Bertrand Russell knew emptiness, but no necessarily suffering. He may well have simply left that to others.