VERY LITTLE WRITTEN since the end of the last European war has left so nearly unforgettable an impression as The End of the Modern World, a searing and prophetic work written in 1950 by a soft-spoken little man in a black suit in search of orientation "within the tangled situation which still marks our age." Born in Verona of Italian parents, raised in Germany amidst the relics of a vanished world, Romano Guardini became one of that select company of universalists who, despite the compartmentalization of scholarship characteristic of our scattered age, sustained a commitment to the whole life of the mind. First published in this country in 1956 by Sheed and Ward, it was ...