We Live Life Merely At Its Edge: It Is But A Battlefield Where The Struggle For Life Is Fought. It Is

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

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

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

Hoh Rainforest Mid-January, Olympic National Park, Washington

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