My Big Fat Summer Reading List

[Joseph Tracy]

Ok, sounds real interesting. Looking on interlibrary loan. 

On Jun 2, 2013, at 5:41 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:

> 
> 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. 
>