The tragic curve.

I was considering a little earlier a rather fascinating curve whose connotations are quite various. The asymmetrical parabola, the one which looks like this—

Re: Spengler's plant form for all cultures (youth, growth, maturity, old age, or bud, bloom, wilt, decay). But the above curve is the form line of all cultures. An epoch always seems to reach its zenith at a point past the middle of its orbit in time. The fall is always more rapid than the rise. And isn't that the curve of tragedy; I should think it a sound aesthetic principle that the growth of a character should take longer to accomplish than his disaster.

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What is this curve? It is the fundamental path of any projectile, of a ball, a stone, an arrow (Nietzsche's arrow of longing) or of an artillery shell.

—Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)