There is a very specific feeling I experience from time to time. And I find myself always using the same word to describe it: “upsetting”
I think it might be something like the 18th century usage of “sublime”.
The last two lines of the Robert Hass poem “Bookbuying in the Tenderloin” has this same feeling:
The sky glowers. My God, it is a test,
this riding out the dying of the West.
Yes, Civilizations and Cultures suffer entropy like anything else.
Their spurts of progress churned on by rebellion, the arrival of new territory to freely re-define, or both.
The notion of The West will soon seem quaint to those living off-planet.
“Quaint” or illustrative!