My Big Fat Summer Reading List

Sun Jun 2 04:41:25 CDT 2013

Why don't you try /The Adventurous Heart /(second version, 1938) by 
Ernst Jünger?

Here's a sample (in the original the aphorism is called "Das Entsetzen"):

*"Terror - Berlin *

There is a type of thin, broad sheet metal that is often used in small 
theaters to simulate thunder. I imagine a great many of these metal 
sheets, yet still thinner and more capable of a racket, stacked up like 
the pages of a book, one on top of another at regular intervals, not 
pressed together but kept apart by some unwieldy mechanism.

I lift you up onto the topmost sheet of this mighty pack of cards, and 
as the weight of your body touches it, it rips with a crack in two. You 
fall, and you land on the second sheet, which shatters also, with an 
even greater bang. Your plunge strikes the third, fourth, fifth sheet 
and so on, and with the acceleration of the fall the impacts chase each 
other closer and closer, like a drumbeat rising in rhythm and power. 
Ever more furious grows the plummet and its vortex, transforming into a 
mighty, rolling thunder that ultimately bursts the limits of consciousness.

Thus it is that terror ravishes man --- terror, which is something 
altogether different from dread, fear, or anxiety. It is sooner related 
to the horror realized on the face of the Gorgon, with its hair on end 
and mouth opened in a scream, whereas dread more senses than sees the 
uncanny and for just that reason is shackled by it the more strongly. 
Anxiety lies yet distant from the limits and can maintain a dialogue 
with hope, while fright . . . yes, a fright is what is felt when the 
first sheet rips. In a deadly plunge, the screaming drumbeats and the 
glowing red lights then intensify, no longer in warning but as an 
appalling confirmation, all the way down to the terrifying.

Do you have any idea what goes on in this space that we will perhaps 
someday plunge through, the space that extends between the recognition 
of the downfall and the downfall itself?"

And here comes a review:

*"The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios, by Ernst Jünger (Telos 
Press Publishing)
**Review by Gary Lachman

*In 1947, Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, wrote a fan letter to 
the German writer Ernst Jünger. Hofmann had been reading Jünger for 
years, but the book that really did it for him was /The Adventurous 
Heart/ (1938). "Everywhere in his prose," Hofmann wrote about this 
subtle but powerful work, "the miracle of creation became evident... No 
other writer has thus opened my eyes." Hofmann soon returned the favor, 
opening Jünger's eyes to the effects of LSD and psilocybin, during the 
celebrated trips the two took together in the 1950s, '60s, and 70s, and 
which Hofmann relates in /LSD: My Problem Child/ (1979).

Jünger himself was no stranger to drugs; in novels like /Heliopolis/ 
(1949) and in a later work, /Approaches/ (1970) -- neither of which have 
English translations -- Jünger turned his sharp inner eye to the twists 
of consciousness occasioned by psychoactive substances. But his first 
trip with Hofmann, in 1951, holds an important but little known place in 
the history of drug literature: it came three years in advance of Aldous 
Huxley's more celebrated tryst with mescaline, recounted in /The Doors 
of Perception/ (1954).

The language barrier no doubt keeps Jünger's precedence in the dark, and 
one hopes that this first English translation of the book that gave 
Hofmann's world "a new, translucent splendour," will lead to more of 
Jünger being made available to English readers. One other link with 
Hofmann should be mentioned: both men lived into their 100s. Jünger died 
in 1998 at the age of 102; Hofmann in 2008, also at 102.

/The Adventurous Heart/ is a collection of short essays, thoughts, 
stories, dreams, philosophical musings, and other unclassifiable 
writings on a number of experiences: nature, death, travel, sex, drugs, 
antique shops, museums, practically anything that caught Jünger's ever 
inquisitive eye. It provides, as Jünger says, "small models of another 
way of seeing things." This "other way" is what Jünger calls 
"stereoscopy," the ability to see things in a dual aspect, perceiving 
their surface and depth simultaneously. Or recognizing them as phenomena 
and symbol at the same time: "its action," Jünger says, "consists in 
grasping things with our inner claws."

Although Jünger was a decorated war hero, and his first, most well-known 
work, /Storm of Steel/ (1920), depicts the Dionysian chaos of battle, in 
his later years, Jünger sought adventure in less questionable ways. 
Danger was always an attractant, but here it lies not in the wastelands 
of WWI but in the sometimes disturbing "knowledge of hidden things." 
Jünger's "stereoscopy" revealed to him the "secret correspondences 
existing between things," and his reflections, written in an elegant, 
often lapidary style, trigger in the attentive reader a similar effect. 
Hence Hofmann's high (no pun intended) praise. "When we comprehend one 
secret," Jünger tells us, "many others also draw near."

There are indeed many secrets here, too many to do justice to in a short 
review. Who knew so much is contained in the color red? Or in the 
activities of beetles -- Jünger was a keen entomologist. Or in a tiger 
lily, whose "narcotic stamens" awaken associations with an "Indian 
conjurer's tent"? Read this book slowly, while walking, preferably in a 
rugged landscape, or a foreign city -- Jünger didn't use the term, but 
he was a master psychogeographer - dipping in every now and then. The 
"secret harmony of things," I guarantee, will be revealed to you, and 
you will find, no doubt, that your heart is adventurous too."

http://www.realitysandwich.com/rs_review_2

Finally, a sample from an interview with the translator:

*Maxwell Woods*: How do you see Jünger's thought fitting into our 
current social, political, literary, and academic landscapes? How do you 
perceive the renewed task of translating Jünger both affecting and being 
affected by this current location?
*Thomas Friese*: I'm glad you put the question in a current 
context---because there are two Jüngers that can be spoken of, even if 
the second grew out of the first, its developmental prerequisite. The 
second, the mature author, is the "current" Jünger, the man who 
gradually evolved into an anarch, starting more or less with this book, 
after leaving behind early experiments in the world of action and 
politics. I find the first interesting only to the degree that it helps 
explain the second. Let's not forget: his first phase covered from 22 to 
about 42 years of age, 9 works or so---the second from 42 to 102, with 
47 or 48 works! By the way, only 11 of these 59 works have ever been 
translated into English---not the case for French, Italian, or Spanish, 
which are more or less complete. Odd, no?
Sticking with the current, relevant Jünger, let me give you two answers.
First, his thought only fits into the current landscape in the sense 
that an ecological niche can have its place and even thrive within a 
broader landscape fundamentally unfavorable to it. At its deepest level, 
Jünger's thought is anarchic, intended for other anarchs and aspiring 
anarchs---and so its fit with society is secondary, as is its 
contribution to "improving" society. It naturally reckons with the outer 
world, with society, which it seeks to understand and adapt its survival 
strategy to accordingly, without compromising its essence---this is 
pragmatism, like watching a weather report to know how to dress. But 
social acceptance or veneration is more or less irrelevant to it.
On the other hand, this does not mean that an anarch like Jünger, while 
pursuing his own goals, has nothing to contribute to society. On the 
contrary, the radically independent thought of anarchs often brings the 
most fundamental changes to society, precisely because they lie outside 
of it, uninfluenced by it. Moreover, the anarch follows what Jünger 
calls the "fundamental law," the dictates of one's own conscience, and 
these may require him to contribute, even at his own risk. Jünger's 
publication of/On the Marble Cliffs/and/The Peace/pre-- and during World 
War II are two good examples.
But although there is much in his thought that academia could engage 
with and society benefit from, its main audience is the individual; it 
seeks not to improve the world in general, which Jünger saw as a vanity, 
but to help the individual discover and develop himself---and thereby 
gain a position to help others do the same for themselves.
As such---to come back to your question---while his thought may 
sometimes coincide with certain social, political, literary and academic 
streams, it is an organic whole that cannot be identified with any of 
these, though attempts are still made, on the left and right. Clearly 
even the mature Jünger was no liberal, but neither was he a conservative 
in a political sense; he was conservative by nature but apolitical. He 
was not an academic, though as intellectual as its highest 
representatives. And even as a writer, he cannot be placed 
satisfactorily into any literary stream or school.
This makes him a difficult case---and so critics make it easier for 
themselves and stick to the first few years, whose pattern was more 
conventional. As Jünger says, whenever anarchs interact with society, 
there will always be at least some friction, albeit usually perceived 
more by the anarch than the society. Earlier you mentioned 
Nietzsche---his relationship with academia demonstrated this conflict, 
though he was not yet an anarch in Jünger's sense. For Jünger too, the 
situation can at best improve only marginally---but that is not 
critical, important is only that his thought reaches a few more latent 
anarchs out there.
(By the way, since I have used the word so often, I should also caution 
your readers not to mistake Jünger's anarch for an anarchist; the 
fundamental differences even define the anarch---a full exposition of 
the anarch can be found in/Eumeswil/, for any interested readers.)
Regarding the second answer. Beyond the address to the anarchic 
individual, there is much yet to be discovered in Jünger's writing to 
help our society understand its present and future. His prophetic 
insights into the atrocities of World War II in/On the Marble Cliffs/are 
well known. But his later works contain so much that is only now 
materializing in the real world, and yet remains unknown to readers. For 
example, the remarkable insights into technology and morality, the 
internet, and intellectual property in/The Glass Bees/, or into the 
geo-political configurations of the future in/Eumeswil/, or the 
relationship of death and culture in/Aladdin's Problem/, to touch on a few.
http://www.ernst-juenger.org/2012/12/interview-with-translator-of.html

You cannot travel in the outer world? Become a psychonaut!

On 01.06.2013 12:40, alice wellintown wrote:
> This summer I can't travel. I like to read about the places I go, but 
> this year, as the Bee Gees say, "I'm goin nowhere." We'll, 
> maybe that means I'm stayin alive. The blind fury is sharpening her 
> shears, but the ceremony of innocence is waving not drowning. So, I've 
> a short stack that needs fattening and battening in the fields of 
> words. Toss me a bone to suck the marrow from you sheep you pigs you 
> dogs not dead. 

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