Where Motion Is Experienced Time Is Unveiled.In Such A Mental Action We Can Stop And Dwell On Something.

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

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 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

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

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.

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

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