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The true leaders of the world are at home in their graves.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 23 November 1941

We live life merely at its edge: it is but a battlefield where the struggle for life is fought. It is a remote fort, hastily built in the dimension of the citadel into which we shall retreat in death.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 8 March 1942

When something is right—right in the highest sense—it must not be demonstrable, it must be debatable. We mortals must strive for it in configurations that are accessible but not absolutely attainable. This then leads to areas where imponderable rather than quantifiable concepts honor the master and produce the artistic urge. Here it is especially the service to, and with, the word that enthralls me—that subtlest of efforts that takes the word to the dividing line that separates it from the ineffable. This also contains a longing for the correct dimensions according to which the universe was created, and which the reader should see through the word as through a window.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 18 July 1943

The philosopher’s stone stands at the culmination of a series of distillations that lead with ever-greater purity toward an absolute, undiluted state. Whoever possesses the stone no longer needs chemical analysis. We can think of this relationship as traversing a series of gardens where each surpasses the one before it. In each succeeding one, the colors and forms become richer and more luminous. Abundance necessarily reaches its limits at the point when it can no longer be enhanced. Then qualitative changes appear, which both simplify and conceptualize. In this way, the colors gradually become brighter, then as translucent as gems as they lose their tint and ultimately transmute into colorless clarity. The forms increase into ever-higher and simpler relationships, recapitulating the forms of crystals, circles, and orbs, ultimately eliminating the tension between periphery and center. At the same time, the demarcated areas and differences merge as fruit and blossom, light and shadow are transformed into higher entities. We emerge from this abundance into its source as we enter the glass-walled treasury rooms.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 23 May 1943

The path to God in our age is inordinately long, as if man had lost his way in the endless expanses that are the product of his own ingenuity. Even the most modest advance is therefore a great achievement. God must be imagined anew. Given this condition, man is essentially capable only of negativity: He can purify the vessel that he embodies. That will suit him well, for new luster brings increased exhilaration. Yet even the greatest rule he can impose upon himself culminates in atheism, where no god dwells, a place more terrifying than if it had been abandoned by God. Then one day, years later, it may happen that God answers—it could be that He does so slowly, through the antennae of the spirit; or He may reveal Himself in a lightning bolt. We sent a signal to a heavenly body, and it turns out to be inhabited.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 7 May 1943

The mechanical habit of killing produces the same ravages in the facial features that mechanical sexuality does.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 18 December 1942

Freedom in the twentieth century sense cannot be restored, as many people still dream. It must rise up to new and freezing heights of the historical process and higher still: like an eagle soaring above the turrets that tower above the chaos. Even freedom must pass through the pain. It must be earned again.

I have a tendency to distance myself from people I love. It’s as if their images developed such power in me that their physical presence becomes intolerable. The man who murders his mistress chooses the opposite path: to possess her he extinguishes her likeness. Perhaps this is how immortals treat us.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 14 October 1942

The poet bestows with language what the priest does with wine.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 22 May 1942

We live life merely at its edge: it is but a battlefield where the struggle for life is fought. It is a remote fort, hastily built in the dimension of the citadel into which we shall retreat in death.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 8 March 1942

Conversations among men should be conducted like those among gods, among invulnerable beings. To duel with ideas is to use swords of the intellect that cut through matter without pain or effort. The deeper the cut, the purer the enjoyment. In such intellectual encounters, one must be indestructible.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 30 November 1941

The true leaders of the world are at home in their graves.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 23 November 1941

The return of the structures of the absolute state, but without aristocracy—meaning without objectivity—makes catastrophes of unimaginable dimensions possible.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 25 October 1941

Like atoms, words contain a nucleus around which they orbit, vibrating, and they cannot be touched without unleashing nameless powers.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 25 October 1941

kevin hense

Sword of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, Archduke of Austria and Duke of Burgundy (1459-1519)

“…Being itself is the source of contingency. Being is nothing other than a side effect of the transfinite, nontotalizable plurality of fields of sense. Being, thus, is not conceived in terms of something given in advance, it is not some metaphysical entity behind or beyond appearance. There is no underlying reality, because there is only a plurality of fields of sense. […] Being is manifold. However, this plurality is not quantifiable, but is rather a plurality of fields of sense, each which simulates an origin, hints at something that cannot be given to any particular field of sense.”

— Markus Gabriel, ‘Transcendental Ontology' 

“It is important to bear in mind that the ‘world,’ the 'domain of all domains,’ 'that which is unequal to itself,’ 'unprethinkable Being,’ 'the absolute,’ etc., are always already part of the cobweb of predicates. This means that inconsistency is not a state of affairs, a primordial nameless tohubohu in the beginning happily waiting to be ordered by the divine word. It rather co-originates with logical space as such.”

— Markus Gabriel, ‘The Mythological Being of Reflection’ 

Fortunate are those who misunderstand you, because whoever understands you shares your misery and despair

Hoh Rainforest Mid-January, Olympic National Park, Washington

Photo credit: Jim Hagen https://www.facebook.com/jim.hagen.756/

Henry Weston Keen (1899-1935) - Skull Crowned with Snakes and Flowers, 1930

illustration for John Webster's 'The Duchess of Malfi'

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Αύτά μέν ούν καθ' έαυτά λεγόμενα τά ρήματα ονόματα έστι και σημαίνει τι (ίστησι γάρ ό λέγων τήν διάνοιαν, και ό άκούσας ήρέμησεν): [Verbs themselves, spoken by themselves, are names and signify something (for the one speaking brings his thinking to a halt and the one listening pauses):] "Whoever says something brings the process of opining to a standstill." When we naturally go along living, then the world is here. We deal with it, we are preoccupied with it. If a word is then spoken, the process of opining is placed before something; in understanding the word I linger with that thing; in meaning something, I have come to a pause. He who listens pauses in understanding the word: ό άκούσας ήρέμησεν. In understanding the word, I pause with what it means. 

Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems

Where motion is experienced time is unveiled. In such a mental action we can stop and dwell on something. We may recall the passage in De interpretatione: ΐστησι ή διάνοια, thinking stands still with something. The mind, too, has the character of a moving thing. Even when we are not experiencing something moving in the sense of some entity presently at hand, nevertheless motion taken in the broadest sense, hence time, is unveiled for us in experiencing our own self.

Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems