Paleontology

 

An unforeseen shower, one autumn day, drove me into the Museum of Natural History for a while. I was to remain there, as a matter of fact, for an hour, two hours, perhaps three. It has been months since this accidental visit, and yet I am not about to forget those empty sockets that stare at you more insistently than eyes, that rummage sale of skulls, that automatic sneer on every level of zoology.

Nowhere is one better served with respect to the past. Here the possible seems inconceivable or cracked. One gets the impression that the flesh was eclipsed upon its advent, that in fact it never existed at all, that it could not have been fastened to bones so stately, so imbued with themselves. The flesh appears as an imposture, a fraud, a disguise which masks nothing. Was this all it was? And if it is worth no more, how does it manage to inspire me with repulsion or with terror? I have always felt a predilection for those who were obsessed by its nullity, those who made a great case for its insignificance: Baudelaire, Swift, Buddha. . . . The flesh, so obvious, is yet an anomaly. The more we consider it, the more aghast we turn away, and, by dint of such weighing, we tend toward the mineral—we grow petrified. In order to endure the sight or the idea, we require much more than courage: we require cynicism. We are deceived as to its nature if we call it, with one Church Father, “nocturnal.” That would be paying it too much honor. The flesh is neither strange nor shadowy, but perishable to the point of indecency, to the point of madness. It is not only the seat of disease, it is itself a disease, incurable nothingness, a fiction which has degenerated into a calamity. The vision I have of it is the vision of a gravedigger infected with metaphysics. Doubtless I am wrong to keep thinking about it; one cannot live and lay much stress on it: A colossus would perish in the attempt. I feel it as it is not permitted to feel it; it takes advantage of the fact, it obliges me to confer upon it a disproportionate status and monopolizes me to such an extent that my mind is no more than viscera. Next to the solidity, the seriousness, of the skeleton, it seems absurdly provisional and frivolous. It flatters, it gratifies the addict of precariousness I am. That is why I am so comfortable in this museum where everything encourages the euphoria of a universe swept clean of the flesh, the jubilation of an after-life.

At the entrance, man standing. All the other animals slumped over, borne down, sagging, even the giraffe, despite its neck, even the iguanodon, grotesque in its effort to pull itself upright. Closer to us, that orangutan, that gorilla, that chimpanzee—easy to see that they have struggled in vain to be erect. Their efforts having failed, they stay where they are, unhappy, arrested halfway, thwarted in their pursuit of verticality. Hunchbacks, in short. We should be like them still, no doubt about it, without the luck we had to take one decisive step forward. Ever since, we labor tooth and nail to eliminate every trace of our low extraction; whence that provocative expression so peculiar to man. Beside him, his posture, and the airs he assumes, even the dinosaurs seem timid. Since his real reverses are only beginning, he will have time to settle down. Everything suggests that, returning to his initial phase, he will rejoin this chimpanzee, this gorilla, this orangutan, that he will resemble them once again, and that it will be increasingly uncomfortable for him to fidget in his vertical posture. Perhaps, indeed, yielding to fatigue, he will be even more bowed than his former companions. Having reached the threshold of senility, he will “re-ape” himself, for one fails to see what would be better for him to do.

.   .   .

Much more than the skeleton, it is the flesh, I mean the carrion flesh, which disturbs and alarms us—and which alleviates us as well. The Buddhist monks gladly frequented charnel houses: where corner desire more surely and emancipate oneself from it? The horrible being a path of liberation, in every period of fervor and inwardness, our remains have enjoyed great favor. In the Middle Ages, a man made a regimen of salvation, he believed energetically: the corpse was in fashion. Faith was vigorous then, invincible; it cherished the livid and the fetid; it knew the profits to be derived from corruption and gruesomeness. Today, an edulcorated religion adheres only to “nice” hallucinations, to Evolution and to Progress. It is not such a religion which might afford us the modern equivalent of the danse macabre.

“Let a man who aspires to nirvana act so that nothing is dear to him,” we read in a Buddhist text. It is enough to consider these specters, to meditate on the fate of the flesh which adhered to them, in order to understand the urgency of detachment. There is no ascesis in the double rumination on the flesh and on the skeleton, on the dreadful decrepitude of the one and the futile permanence of the other. It is a good exercise to sever ourselves now and then from our face, from our skin, to lay aside this deceptive sheathe, then to discard—if only for a moment—that layer of grease which keeps us from discerning what is fundamental in ourselves. Once the exercise is over, we are freer and more alone, almost invulnerable.

In order to vanquish attachments and the disadvantages which derive from them, we should have to contemplate the ultimate nudity of a human being, force our eyes to pierce his entrails and all the rest, wallow in the horror of his secretions, in his physiology of an imminent corpse. This vision would not be morbid but methodical, a controlled obsession, particularly salutary in ordeals. The skeleton incites us to serenity; the cadaver, to renunciation. In the sermon on futility which both of them preach to us, happiness is identified with the destruction of our bonds. To have scanted no detail of such a teaching and even so to come to terms with simulacra!

Blessed was that age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged. Their imbalance was not assigned a negative coefficient, as is the case for us. They would sacrifice ten, twenty years, a whole life, for a foreboding, for a flash of the absolute. The word “depth” has a meaning only in connection with epochs when the monk was considered as the noblest human exemplar. No one will gainsay the fact that he is in the process of disappearing. For centuries, he has done no more than survive himself. To whom would he address himself, in a universe which calls him a “parasite”? In Tibet, the last country where monks still mattered, they have been ruled out. Yet it was a rare consolation to think that thousands and thousands of hermits could be meditating there, today, on the themes of the prajñāparamita. Even if it had only odious aspects, monasticism would still be worth more than any other ideal. Now more than ever, we should build monasteries . . . for those who believe in everything and for those who believe in nothing. Where to escape? There no longer exists a single place where we can professionally execrate this world.

.   .   .

In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.

One sign of enlightenment is to have the obsession of the aggregate, the ever-increasing feeling of being just the place where certain elements come together, welded for the moment. Conceived as a substantial and irreducible datum, the “self” dumbfounds more than its reassures: How to admit that anything that seemed to hold so fast should let go, should stop? How to be parted from what subsists “by itself,” from what is? We can discard an illusion, no matter how inveterate; but what to do when we are faced with the consistent, with the durable? If there is only what exists, if being spreads everywhere, how do we break away from it without falling to pieces? Let us postulate a universal fallacy out of precaution or therapeutic concern. The fear there is nothing is followed by the fear there is something. We are far more comfortable bidding farewell to nonbeing than to being. Not that this world doesn’t exist, but its reality is no such thing. Everything seems to exist and nothing exists.

Every concerted pursuit, even that of nirvana, if we are not free to abandon it, is a shackle as much as any other. The knowledge we convert into an idol is corrupted into an unknowing, as the Vedic wisdom already preached: “They are in the depths of darkness, those who give themselves up to ignorance; those who delight in knowledge are in a darkness deeper still.” To think without being any the wiser, or rather not to think at all but to remain there and to devour the silence—that is where perspicacity should lead. No pleasure is comparable to that of knowing we don’t think. It will be objected, Isn’t knowing we don’t think still thinking? No doubt, but the wretchedness of thought is surmounted for the time that, instead of leaping from idea to idea, we remain deliberately within just one, one which rejects all the rest and which dissolves itself as soon as it takes for its content its own absence. This interference with the normal mechanism of the mind is fruitful only if we can renew it at will. It must cure us of the subjection to knowledge, of the superstition of system. The deliverance which seduces, which beclouds us is not deliverance. We must act so that nothing is ours, beginning with desire, that generator of dread. When everything makes us tremble, the one recourse is to realize that if fear—being a sensation, the sensation par excellence—is real, the world which causes it is reduced to a transitory assemblage of unreal elements. In short, our fear is intense in proportion as we give credence to the self and to the world, and that our fear must inevitably diminish when we discover the imposture of the former and of the latter. Only our triumph over things is real, only our realization of unreality, which our acumen constructs every day, every hour. To be delivered is to rejoice in this unreality, to seek it out each moment.

.   .   .

Seen from outside, each being is an accident, a lie (except in love, but love is located outside of knowledge, outside the truth). Perhaps we should regard ourselves from outside, somewhat as we regard other people, and try to have nothing further in common with ourselves: If, toward myself, I were to behave as a stranger, I should see myself die with utter unconcern; my death would be “mine” no more than my life. One and the other, insofar as they belong to me and I assume them, represent ordeals beyond my powers. When, on the contrary, I convince myself that they lack intrinsic existence and that they are of no concern to me—what a relief! Why then, knowing that in the last resort everything is unreal, still be carried away for such trifles? I am carried away, granted, but I am not involved, which is to say that I take no real interest. This disinterest I cultivate I achieve only when I trade in my old self for a new one, the self of a disabused vision which triumphs here, amid these ghosts, where everything enfeebles me, where the one I was seems to me so remote, so incomprehensible. The evidence on which I used to turn my back now is discernible in all its clarity. The advantage I derive from this is that I no longer feel any obligation with regard to my flesh, to any flesh. A far better context in which to savor the eighteen varieties of void set forth in the Mahayanist texts, so scrupulous in cataloguing the several types of deficiency! For here, instantly, I am in an acute state of unreality.

.   .   .

It is scarcely credible to what degree fear adheres to the flesh; it is glued to it, inseparable, almost indistinct from it. These skeletons—happy skeletons!—feel no such thing. Fear is the one fraternal link which joins us to the animals, though they know it only in its natural—its healthy—form, so to speak. They know nothing of that other fear, the one which arises without motive, which we can reduce, depending on our whim, either to a metaphysical process or to a lunatic chemistry and which, daily, at an unpredictable moment, attacks us, overwhelms us. In order to hold it in check, we would require the cooperation of all the erstwhile gods. It reveals itself at the nadir of our daily failure, at the very moment when we would be quite ready to disappear if a mere nothing did not keep us from it; this nothing is the secret of our verticality. To remain erect, standing, implies a dignity, a discipline that has been laboriously inculcated in us and that still saves us at the last minute, in that spasm when we grasp what may be abnormal in the career of the flesh, threatened, boycotted by the sum of elements which define it. The flesh has betrayed matter; the discomfort it feels, it endures, is its punishment. In a general way, the animate appears quite guilty with regard to the inert; life is a state of guilt, a state all the more serious in that no one is really conscious of it. But a crime coextensive with the individual, which weighs upon him without his knowledge, which is the price he must pay for his promotion to a separate existence, for the infraction committed against the undivided creation. This crime is no less real for being unconscious and is crucial to the prostration of every creature.

As I circulate among the carcasses, I try to conceive of the burden of fear they must have borne, and when I stop in front of the three apes I cannot fail to attribute the evolutionary hitch they have suffered to an analogous burden which, weighing upon them, has given them that obsequious and flustered expression. And even these reptiles—isn’t it under a like load that they have had to grovel so shamefully and to concoct their venom in the dust of the earth, if only to be revenged for their ignominy? Whatever is alive, the most repellent animal or insect, shudders with fear—does nothing but. Whatever is alive, by the simple fact of living, deserves commiseration. And I think of all those I have known, all those who are no more, long since sprawling in their coffins, forever exempt from flesh—and from fear. And I feel relieved of the weight of their death.

Anxiety is consciousness of fear, a fear to the second degree, a fear reflecting upon itself. It consists of the impossibility of communing with the all, of assimilating ourselves with it, of losing ourselves in it. It breaks the current which passes from the world to us, from us to the world, and favors our reflections only to frustrate their growth, ceaselessly disintoxicating the mind. Now there is no speculation of any scope which does not proceed from rapture, from a loss of control, from a faculty to lose and hence to renew the self. Inspiration in reverse, anxiety calls us to heel at the slightest impulse, the slightest divagation. This surveillance is deadly to thought, suddenly paralyzed, trapped in a calamitous circle, doomed never to escape itself except by fits and starts, by stealth. Hence it is true that if our apprehensions make us seek deliverance, yet it is they which keep us from achieving it. Though he dreads the future to the point of making it the sole object of his preoccupations, the anxious man is a prisoner of the past; he is, in fact, the only man who really has a past. His tribulations, of which he is the slave, move him forward only to yank him back. He comes thereby to regret the raw, anonymous fear from which everything starts, the fear that is beginning, origin, principle of everything alive. Terrible as it is, such fear is nonetheless endurable, since whatever lives resigns itself to it. It lacerates and ravages the living—it does not annihilate them. Such is not the case with this refined fear, this “recent” fear posterior to the appearance of the self, in which the diffuse, omnipresent danger is never materialized, a reflexive fear which, for lack of other nourishment, devours itself.

.   .   .

If I have not returned to the museum, I have been there in spirit almost every day, thereby deriving considerable advantage: what could be more settling than to brood over this ultimate simplification of beings? A moment comes when the imagination clears and you see yourself as you will be: a sermon—no, a seizure of modesty. On the proper use of the skeleton. . . . We should help ourselves to it in difficult moments, especially since we have it right under our hand.

I have no need of Holbein nor of Baldung Grien; with respect to the macabre, I rely on my own resources. If I see the necessity for it, or if I am overcome by a craving, there is no one I cannot strip of his carnal envelope. Why envy or fear those bones which bear such and such a name, that skull which has no love for me? Why, too, love someone or love myself, why suffer in any case, when I know the image I must invoke in order to alleviate these miseries? The sharpened consciousness of what lies in wait for the flesh ought to destroy both love and hate. Actually it manages only to attenuate and, in rare moments, to subdue them. Otherwise it would be only too easy: represent death and be happy . . . , and the macabre, gratifying our most secret desires, would be all profit.I suspect that I would never have returned—in flesh or in spirit—so often to those premises if, evidently, they hadn’t flattered my incapacity for illusion. Here, where man is nothing, you realize how unsuited the doctrines of deliverance are to understand him, to interpret his past and to decipher his future. This is because deliverance has a content only for each of us, individually, and not for the mob, which is unable to grasp the relation between the idea of emptiness and the sensation of freedom. It is hard to see how humanity might be saved en bloc; engulfed in the false, committed to an inferior truth, it will always confuse substance with semblance. Granting, against all appearances, that it is following an ascending path, humanity cannot acquire, at its zenith, the level of insight of even the most obtuse Hindu sanyāsi. In everyday existence, it is impossible to say if this world is real or unreal. What we can do, what we do do, is to keep shifting from one thesis to the other, all too happy to evade a choice which would settle none of our immediate difficulties.

Awakening is independent of intellectual capacities: a genius can be a dunce, spiritually speaking. Moreover, knowledge as such gets one no further. An illiterate can possess “the eye of understanding” and thereby find himself above and beyond any scholar. To discern that what you are is not you, that what you have is not yours, to be no longer the accomplice of anything, even of your own life—that is to see clearly, that is to get down to the zero root of everything. The wider you open yourself to vacuity, the more deeply you steep yourself in it, the further you remove yourself from the fatality of being—yourself, of being man, of being alive. If everything is null and void, this triple fatality will be so too. Thereby, the magic of the tragic is exorcised. Is the failing hero worth as little as the hero who finally triumphs? Nothing more glamorous than a splendid ending, if this world is real; if it is not, it is pure foolishness to go into ecstasies over any denouement whatever. To deign to have a “destiny,” to be blinded or only tempted by “the extraordinary,” proves that we remain opaque to any higher truth, that we are far from possessing “the eye” in question. To situate someone is to determine his degree of awakening, the progress he has made in the perception of the false and the illusory in others, in himself. No communion is conceivable with the man who deceives himself as to what he is. As the interval separating us from our actions widens, we see the subjects of dialogue and the number of our kind diminish. Such solitude does not engender bitterness, for it does not derive from our talents, but from our renunciations. Yet it must be added that it does not in the least exclude the danger of spiritual pride, which certainly exists as long as we nurse the sacrifices we have consented to and the illusions we have rejected. How vanquish ourselves unbeknownst, when detachment demands an insistent sounding of consciousness? Thus, what makes it possible threatens it at the same time. In the order of internal values, any superiority which does not become impersonal turns to perdition. If only one could wrest oneself from the world without realizing the fact! One should be able to forget that detachment is a virtue: otherwise, instead of delivering, it envenoms. To attribute to God our successes of any sort, to believe that nothing emanates from ourselves, that everything is given—that, according to Ignatius Loyola, is the one effective means of struggling with pride. The recommendation is valid for the thunderbolt states in which the intervention of grace seems de rigueur, but not for detachment, an undermining labor, long and painful, of which the self is the victim: how fail to pride yourself on that?

Our spiritual level may be raised, yet we do not thereby change qualitatively; we remain prisoners of our limits: the impossibility of uprooting spiritual pride is one consequence of it—the most unfortunate one. “No creature,” Saint Thomas observes, “can attain a higher degree of nature without ceasing to exist.” Yet if man interests us, it is precisely for having sought to surmount his nature. He has not managed to do so, and his inordinate efforts were not to fail in adulterating, in denaturing him. This is why we do not question ourselves in his regard without torment, without passion. No doubt it is also more decent to commiserate with him than with oneself (as Pascal so well understood). In the long run, this passion becomes so tiring that we think of nothing but means of escaping it. Neither the fatality of being oneself nor that of being alive can be compared with that of being man; once that fatality spurs me on, I reconstruct—in order to escape it—my promenade among those bones which, these days, have so often been helpful to me; I recognize them, I cling to them: confirming me in my belief in vacuity, they grant me a glimpse of the day when I shall no longer have to endure the obsession of the human, of all shackles the most terrible. From that we must free ourselves at all costs, if we would be free at all; but to be really free, one more step must be taken: to be free of liberty itself, to reduce it to the level of a prejudice or a pretext in order not to have to idolize it any longer. . . . Only then will we begin to learn how to act without desire. For this the meditation on the horrible prepares us: to circle around the flesh and its decrepitude is to be initiated into the art of dissociating desire and act—an operation fatal to enterprising minds, indispensable to contemplative ones. So long as we desire, we live in subjection, we are given over to the world; once we cease to desire, we accumulate the privileges of an object and of a god: we no longer depend on anyone. That desire cannot be extirpated is all too true; yet what peace, merely to imagine being exempt from it! A peace so unwonted that a perverse pleasure creeps into it: would not so suspect a sensation come down to nature’s revenge upon the man who has made himself guilty of aspiring to a state so unnatural?

Outside of nirvana in life—a rare exploit, a virtually inaccessible extremity—the suppression of desire is a chimera; we do not suppress desire, we suspend it, and this suspension, very strangely, is accompanied by a sense of power, by a new, an unknown, certainty. The vogue of monasticism in past centuries is doubtless explained by this dilation succeeding the ebb of appetites. It takes strength to struggle against desire; this strength increases when desire withdraws; desire halted, fear halts as well. For anxiety, on its part, to conclude any such truce, we must go further; we must confront a much more rarefied space, we must approach an abstract joy, an exaltation granted alike to being and to the absence of being.

It is said in the Katha Upanishad apropos of Atman that it is “joyous and without joy.” That is a state to which we accede as well by the affirmation as by the negation of a supreme principle, as much by the detour of Vedanta as by that of Mahayana. Different as they may be, the two paths meet in the final experience, in the glide outside appearances. What is essential is less to know in whose name one seeks liberation than how far one can advance on the path to it. Whether one is dissolved into the absolute or into the void, in either case it is a neutral joy one achieves: a joy without any determination, as denuded as the anxiety of which it seeks to be the remedy, and of which it is merely the outcome, the positive conclusion. Between them, the symmetry is patent; they may each be said to be “constructed” on the same model; they dispense with any external stimulant, they are self-sufficient, they correspond and communicate in depth. For just as concrete joy is only a vanquished fear, neutral joy is only a transfigured anxiety. And it is from their affinities, from their permeability, that the possibility derives of mounting from one to the other, and the danger of falling back, of a regression to an earlier state supposedly transcended. Which suggests to what degree all spiritual progress is threatened at its base. For the unfulfilled seeker after deliverance, for the beginner in nirvana, nothing is easier, nothing more frequent than to retreat toward his old terrors. But when, at long intervals, he manages to hold fast, he makes his own the exhortation of the Dhammapada, “Shine for yourself, as your own light,” and, during the time he adopts and follows it, he understands, from within, those who conform to it always.

The New Gods by E. M. Cioran; 

translated from the French by Richard Howard.

Hitler As Victim - On Wyndham Lewis

 

HE SLAPDASH SERIES OF NEWSPAPER articles in which Lewis conveyed his impressions of Berlin immediately after the first great Nazi victories in the Reichstag in September 1930, and which were published as Hitler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), are as notorious as they are unread: the following brief account of this work, whatever its general usefulness, will indeed lead us to some unexpected conclusions.

With his satirist’s feeling about cities, Lewis could hardly omit an initial tableau of Berlin (“Chicago, only more so if anything, but minus Bootleg, and with that great difference—that politics account for much of the street violence” [18]). The political point made here is that Nazi street violence is essentially a reaction to Communist violence and provocation; yet the inevitable narrative point is rather different: “But elegant and usually eyeglassed young women will receive [the tourist], with an expensive politeness, and he will buy one of these a drink, and thus become at home…. Then these bland Junos-gone-wrong, bare-shouldered and braceleted (as statuesque as feminine show-girl guardees) after a drink or two, will whisper to the outlandish sightseer that they are men. …” (24). With this characteristic and obsessive motif out of the way, we come to the political analysis proper, which I will resume as a series of theses:

1. “Adolf Hitler is just a very typical german ‘man of the people’. … As even his very appearance suggests, there is nothing whatever eccentric about him. He is not only satisfied with, but enthusiastically embraces, his typicalness. So you get in him, cut out in the massive and simple lines of a peasant art, the core of the teutonic character. And his ‘doctrine’ is essentially just a set of rather primitive laws, promulgated in the interest of that particular stock or type, in order to satisfy its especial requirements and ambitions, and to ensure its vigorous survival, intact and true to its racial traditions” (31-32). This is very different from the hero-worshipping tones with which Pound salutes Mussolini’s “genius”; it also conveys the stance of Lewis’ articles. He means to convey the spirit, to the British public, of a phenomenon culturally alien to it; he intends to translate and to explain the Nazi movement as a matter of some historical significance, but not necessarily to endorse it. “It is as an exponent—not as critic nor yet as advocate—of German National-socialism or Hitlerism, that I come forward” (4). It seems to me that this didactic stance is essential in grasping the symbolic value Hitler (and Germany) had for Lewis: not only are they doubly oppressed—by Marxist provocation and by the Versailles Treaty—but this oppression is formally inscribed within his text as the misunderstanding and miscomprehension of the British reader, against which Lewis must write.

2. The Nazi conception of race is a welcome antidote to the Marxian conception of class: “The Class-doctrine—as opposed to the Race-doctrine—demands a clean slate. Everything must be wiped off slick. A sort of colourless, featureless, automaton—temporally two-dimensional—is what is required by the really fanatical Marxist autocrat. Nothing but a mind without backgrounds, without any spiritual depth, a flat mirror for propaganda, a parrot-soul to give back the catchwords, an ego without reflection, in a word a sort of Peter Pan Machine—the adult Child—will be tolerated” (84).

3. Hitler’s program is exemplary as a defense of Europe, at a time when Europe’s intellectuals are at work undermining its legitimacy through their “exotic sense” (a “sentimentalizing with regard to the Non-White World” [121]). In effect, the Hitlerist has this message for the ruling classes of other European countries: “When, respected sir, and gracious lady, are you going—oh short-sighted, much indulging, sentimentally-renegade person that you are!—when may we hope that you will turn for a change to more practical interests? How about giving your White Consciousness a try for a little—it is really not so dull as you may suppose! A ‘White Australia’—that may be impracticable. But at least there is nothing impracticable about a ‘White Europe’. And today Europe is not so big as it was. It is ‘a little peninsula at the Western extremity of Asia’. It is quite small. Why not all of us draw together, and put out White Civilization in a state of defense? And let us start by mutually cancelling all these monstrous debts that are crushing the life out of us economically” (121).

4. The Nazi program recapitulates many of Lewis’ most deeply felt polemic themes: “A ‘Sex-war’, an ‘Age-war’, a ‘Colour-line-war’, are all equally promoted by Big Business to cheapen labour and to enslave men more and more. I do not like the present Capitalist system” (97). Hitlerism not only repudiates the call to hatred and division of Marxian class war, and the pernicious “trahison des clercs” of the “exotic sense,” it also gives the welcome example of a transformation of Western “youth cults” into a genuine political movement (97).

5. “Race” essentially stands for the affirmation of the specificity of the national situation: this is the sense in which Lewis deals with Nazi antisemitism. The latter is, according to him, a German national characteristic, however unlovely, and must be understood as such. But here Lewis has a counter-sermon for the Germans themselves, as they try to explain themselves to other nations: “The Hitlerite must understand that, when he is talking to an Englishman or an American about the ‘Jew’ (as he is prone to do), he is apt to be talking about that gentleman’s wife! Or anyhow Chacun son Jew! is a good old english saying. So if the Hitlerite desires to win the ear of England he must lower his voice and coo (rather than shout) Juda verrecke! if he must give expression to such a fiery intolerant notion. Therefore—a pinch of malice certainly, but no ‘antisemitism’ for the love of Mike!” (42).

6. Hitlerian economics are those of the German peasant, essentially an anticapitalist attack on banks, loan-capital, and the War Debt. Hitler is a “Credit Crank.” The Nazi opposition to Communism (“which has taken the mechanical ways of Megalopolis into the villages”) “attacks the substitution, by the Communist, of the notion of quantity for that of quality…. Upon some points, of course, the Communist and the Nationalsocialist are in considerable agreement. Ultimately, the reason why their two doctrines could never fuse is this: the Marxist, or Communist, is a fanatically dehumanizing doctrine. Its injunctions are very rigidly erected against the continuance of ‘the person’. In the place of ‘the person’ the Communist would put the thing—quantity in place of quality, as it is stated above. … So, even if Hitlerism, in its pure ‘germanism’, might retain too much personality, of a second-rate order, nevertheless Hitlerism seems preferable to Communism, which would have none at all, if it had its way. Personality is the only thing that matters in the world” (182-183). Thus, “the Weltanschauung of the Hitlerist or his near-relation (the egregious ‘Credit-Crank’) is laughing and gay compared to that of his opponent, the Communist. … On principle—for his is a deliberately ‘catastrophic’ philosophy (the word is Marx’s)—the Communist views everything in the darkest colours…. The Hitlerist dream is full of an imminent classical serenity—leisure and abundance. It is, with them, Misery-spot against Golden Age!” (183-184).

Most discussions of this book (which is generally passed over in embarrassed silence) have centered on the false problem of whether, on the strength of this “misguided” assessment of Hitler before he came to power, Lewis is to be thought of as a fascist or fascist sympathizer. The reader is generally reminded that Lewis changed his mind, and on the eve of World War II wrote an anti-Nazi counter-blast, The Hitler Cult and How It Will End (1939). But Lewis’ opinion of Hitler is by no means the most significant feature of the earlier work.

What is essential from our point of view is that Hitler is informed by all the ideological positions which will remain constant to the very end of Lewis’ life: those fundamental themes do not change, even if his view of Hitler did. Among them, and far more central than his attitude towards Hitler as a historical figure, is his attitude towards fascism as a historical force. Here, but to the end of his career, fascism remains for Lewis the great political expression of revolutionary opposition to the status quo. This fundamentally historical vision of fascism—this structural place of “fascism” in Lewis’ libidinal apparatus—is not altered by his later (and impeccable) anti-Nazi convictions, and is in fact recapitulated in Monstre gai, published only two years before Lewis’ death in 1957:

Hyperides represented the most recent political phenomenon—hated or disliked by everybody. Here was the Fascist, the arch-critic of contemporary society. On earth this newcomer proposed to supplant the enfeebled Tradition, of whatever variety, no longer able to defend itself. So this enfeebled Power of Tradition, and its deadly enemy, the Marxist Power, joined forces to destroy this violent Middleman (a borrower from both the new and the old).

(MG, 220)

Coming in the midst of the Cold War, and after the utter annihilation of Nazism as a presence on the world political scene, this retrospective evaluation of World War II may seem anachronistic, and the reader may be tempted to see it as a tired survival of thoughts that were alive for Lewis in the 20’s and 30’s. Yet the fact that fascism continued to stand as the political (and libidinal) embodiment of Lewis’ chronic negativity, his oppositionalism, his stance as the Enemy, long after the defeat of institutional fascism itself, may, I think, be better grasped from a somewhat different perspective. The figural value of fascism as a reaction is determined by the more central position of Communism, against which the anticapitalist posture of protofascism (of which Lewis approved) must always be understood. We have touched on a number of reasons why Communism could not, for Lewis, be a satisfactory solution. The ultimate one now proves to be his feeling—paradoxical after all that has been said—that Communism was a historical inevitability, and thus, in a sense, the final and most irrevocable form of the Zeitgeist, that against which the oppositional mind must somehow always take a stand.

In this sense, and in the spirit of the present study, which has been an immanent analysis of Lewis’ works, disengaging the self-critique always structurally implicit in them, we may allow his own truth-in-jest to have the final word:

I know that at some future date I shall have my niche in the Bolshevist Pantheon, as a great enemy of the Middle-class Idea … I say: “I shall be among the bolshie prophets!” My “bourgeois-bohemians” in Tarr—and oh, my Apes of God!—will provide ‘selected passages’ for the schoolchildren of the future communist state,—of that I am convinced—to show how repulsive unbridled individualism can be.

Fables Ofaggression ...

Frideric Jameson 

Contemporary Men Hermits Around The World

 

Historical hermits have often reflected a religious motive, as have modern counterparts. Here are six religious men hermits, followed by non-religious.

Benedictine monk and hermit Dunstan Morrissey (1923–2009) founded Sky Farm Hermitage in 1977, in Sonoma, California. Sky Farm served as his dwelling, adding several cottages for retreatants over the years. After his death, two hermits have managed Sky Farm and continue to offer retreats.

Richard Withers (b. 1955) is a canonical hermit living modestly in a poor Philadelphia neighborhood. He adheres to a religious schedule but also engages in social and charitable work in his neighborhood.

Priest and hermit Charles Brandt (1923–2020) resided within old–growth forest on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in Canada. Once an ornithologist, Trappist monk, and active book conservator, Brandt remained an avid photographer and naturalist, offering meditation retreats at his cabin. He is author of Meditations From The Wilderness: A Collection of Profound Writing on Nature as the Source of Inspiration (1997).

Daniel Bourguet (b. 1946) is a French Protestant hermit of the Reform sect, a former pastor and university professor, author of over two dozen books on Christian topics, none particular to eremitism. When studying as a youth, Bourguet felt a desire for solitude, discovering that his superiors approved of his aspiration. He spent time at a Trappist monastery and Dominican community before undertaking solitude at his own hermitage in a wooded area of Cevennes, southern France.

Bourguet lives in a single–room log cabin completely off grid, including the absence of media, yet like a starets, visitors seeking his counsel are numerous and regular. Bourguet has served as prior of the Order of Watchers, a virtual network of spiritually–minded hermits.

Maxime Qavtaradze (b. 1954) can be counted a modern stylite. The Georgian Orthodox priest lived alone atop Katskhi pillar, in a cottage adjacent to a chapel, 130 feet high (forty meters), from 1993 to 2015. Maxime would lift by pulley supplies prepared by fellow monks, though he descended the pillar twice a week. The pillar and chapel date from the tenth century; accessing the top of the pillar was forbidden by Patriarch Ilia II to preserve the site.

Norman Davies is a Jewish contemplative living in Malaga (Spain) as a hermit. He describes his daily life as “the practice of a dedicated and intentional prayerful lifestyle akin to solitary monasticism or eremitism. This is decided rarety in Jewish history and in twenty–first century Jewish practice it is virtually non–existent.” Davies, a former music teacher in the UK, cites Philo of Alexandria and the Essenes as ancient models, acknowledging the influence of his pre–conversion life as a Carmelite monk.

Motives among solitaries may converge around creativity, as Anthony Storr noted in his book Solitude: A Return to the Self. Two examples of creative hermits are Valerio Ricetti (1898–1952) and Manfred Gnädinger (1936-2002).

Ricetti, an Italian immigrant to Australia, arrived as an adolescent. He found work on steamboats. One day chancing upon a series of caves he decided to dwell in one. Over time he enhanced the caves via galleries into adjoining rock to create finished masonry passages and rooms, adding a water well, ample gardens, and wall iconography. Ricetti lived like a hermit. Injured one day, he was discovered by a passer–by, taken to hospital, and his dwelling–place revealed. Visitors praised his creation and he discovered the Italian community around Griffith, New South Wales, where he lived. Ricetti was interned with other Italians during World War II, put on road maintenance crews, where he shared his building skills, and returned to dwell in his cave after the war. In 1952, beset by mental illness, Ricetti returned to Italy, where he died shortly afterwards. The cave is today called “Hermit’s Cave,” maintained on the provincial registry for historic architecture.

Born in Germany, Manfred Gnädinger settled in Camelle on the coast of Galicia (Spain) in his twenties. He took up residence in a seaside hut, sculpting rock and driftwood in Gaudi–like configurations, dubbing the coast that displayed his works his museum. Man, as he was called, tall, long-bearded, and gaunt, lived a simple hermit life, with a small garden and neither electricity nor running water. He sculpted scores of figures and filled hundreds of notebooks with thousands of artistic sketches. Thirty years later, a horrific oil spill from the off–shore British tanker ship Prestige destroyed all of his work, bringing down all the sculptures and coating the beach and shoreline past his hut in thick black oil. Man was distraught. He died a month later. His “museum” has since been partially recovered by the village and preserved in commemoration of the hermit–artist.

If not creativity or overt belief, other contemporary hermit men are motivated by a personal response to the world.

Scottish–born Jake Williams has been a sailor, musician, handyman, and hermit. Williams lives in the Scottish Highlands, in the middle of a forest, where he contrives everything from tools to gardens using found objects recovered during expeditions to distant urban areas. He is the subject of the 2011 documentary film Two Years at Sea and continued media attention.

Sometimes the lure of escape overcomes the potential hermit, as in the example of Masafumi Nagasaki (b. 1936), who once worked in a factory in Osaka, Japan, dreaming of living on a deserted island. One day in 1989 he left civilization behind to live alone on the deserted Japanese island of Sotobanari (Okinawa Prefecture). He lived without electricity, water (except rainfall), animal food—or clothing, given that no one ever visited the deserted island.

Nagasaki is the subject of several news reports and films, wherein he would insist he wanted to live out his life on the island. But in 2018, a passing boater noticed him and notified authorities. Nagasaki was involuntarily removed from the island, placed in public housing, and refused permission to return to the island.

Italian–born Pietro Lentini sought to escape years of dissipation, becom-ing a hermit in the Umbrian region of the Apennines, on Mt. Aspra, in Valnerina. He found a ruined dwelling, furbished it—acquaintances later helping in the task— and lives there in silence and solitude, lacking running water and electricity, now with a solar-charged mobile phone gifted to him for emergencies. Occasionally Lentini descends to the town for provisions. He pursues a makeshift Christianity of his own crafting and frequently plays a worn flute. Lentini is seventy years old.

Since 1965, Chilean–born Faustino Barrientos lives alone on the shores of Lake O’Higgins in Patagonia, southernmost Chile. His dwelling is the remnant of a boat cabin. He lives from herds, livestock, and supplies from a boat that passes every ten days. He has no electricity, but uses battery–powered short wave and ham radios. Barrientos visits the nearest town every few years, riding by horse the twenty–five miles over mountains to exchange his animals for food and batteries. The inhabitants think he is crazy. He expresses no spiritual or other motive for his hermit lifestyle.

In 2001, Canadian researcher Robert Kull journeyed to a tiny deserted island in southern Chile to begin a year–long experiment in solitude wilderness. Kull had recently earned degrees in biology and psychology, and was scheduled to pursue a fellowship in behavioral studies in British Columbia, specifically interested in the effects of deep wilderness solitude. He convinced his doctoral faculty to accept his project, assembled food, clothes, supplies, and tools, and embarked. While pursuing observations and notes, Kull developed a routine of meditation; in his last months on the island, he quit reading and writing to concentrate on meditation, listening, stillness, and observation. Kull attributes the gradual realization that the self and all of nature is sufficient and sacred to the simplification undergone by the self–sufficiency and solitude he was able to experience. Kull recounts his year in his book Solitude: Seeking Wisdom In Extremes (2008).

Neil Ansell lived alone in Penlan Cottage in the rural isolation of Wales for five years, without car, phone, clock, or fossil fuel. In 2011, Ansell published a book on his solitude years, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills, imminently observant while self–effacing about his routines and the wild creatures that shared his forest. Ansell observed birds, grew food, and foraged. The silence outside reflected a growing silence within. Interior monologue quieted to a whisper, then fading away entirely. While he had not practiced meditation beforehand, Ansell notes that he came to under-stand the Buddhist concept of no–mind. The self becomes as much a part of the landscape as a stone. Ansell’s five years were cut short by a virus he contracted, perhaps carried by bats or mice.

David Glasheen (b. 1943) enjoyed an elite and privileged life as a mil-lionaire stock broker in Australia until the 1987 stock market crash wiped out his wealth. Glasheen decided to quit society, eventually moving to deserted Restoration Island, where he learned to fish, cook, and survive with a poor solar–powered internet connection and an annual boat trip to buy supplies. He was frequently visited by journalists and old acquaintances; his wife divorced him as soon as he fell into poverty. Seventy–seven year old Glasheen has published a memoir titled Millionaire Castaway celebrating over twenty years of solitary life.

Since 1989, Mauro Morandi (b. 1939) has lived alone on the Italian island of Budelli, near Sardinia, a national park. Morandi has assembled solar panels, collects rainwater, makes furniture out of driftwood, and takes photographs of the island, enough to fill a book. Morandi gives occasional interviews, displaying a confident and relaxed perspective on solitude and self–sufficiency. A gentle skeptic, he nevertheless keeps up with family, acquaintances, and the world via mobile phone and social media. Pressured by national park authorities, Morandi quit the island April 2021.

Many other men have pursued a hermit life, in a variety of places around the world: British–born Brendon Grimshaw (1925–2012) moved to an island of Seychelles, East Africa. Pedro Luca (b. 1937) has lived in a cave in Argentina for the last forty years. New Zealander Tom Neale (1902–1977) spent sixteen years alone on a South Pacific island, more a survivalist than hermit. “Pete” has lived in a cave off the Kaikoura coast of New Zealand for over thirty years.

Russia counts many hermits beside the media–famous Agafia Lykova. For reasons suggesting a criminal past, “Viktor” moved to Siberia sixteen years ago to live in solitude, while Nikolai Gromov (b. 1947) presents the strange case of having left to the Siberian taiga in fear and remorse that he had slain his wife in a pique of drunkenness. Twenty–four years later, Gromov returned to his old dwelling. His wife had not been killed after all, but had died in an accident during Gromov’s self–exile. Gromov remains alone with the burden of his history.

Some apparent or aspiring hermits reveal pathological motives. Carlos Sanchez Ortiz, a young medical doctor, disappeared from his home in Spain, to be found twenty years later in a Tuscany forest in Italy. Mushroom pickers who crossed his path passed information on to a European missing persons organization. His family was contacted, describing then twenty–six year old Carlos as severely depressed. They prepared to visit him, if only for a short meeting, but the forest hermit had disappeared again.

A similar motive may have impelled Filipino Mang Emigdio. He took off suddenly, abandoning wife and children, when a typhoon destroyed their home in 1987. Emigdio was found living in a mountain cave, refusing to leave, his pitying family and villagers helping him eke out a solitary life with regular visits.

Wilderness solitude is not equated to survivalism by hermits. The case of Chris McCandless (1968–1992) remains perplexing and elusive. McCandless may have grown up suffering childhood trauma, but its effect was, typically, unnoticeable to others. He expressed an enthusiasm for nature, outdoors, and wilderness when young, also demonstrating a strong empathy for homeless people with whom he sometimes mingled in Washington, D.C., offering them food, clothing, and comfort, in the shadow of the comfort-able suburban home where he grew up with his parents. Over the years, his favorite reading was Tolstoy and Thoreau.

Upon college graduation, McCandless announced to family and friends a planned road trip. He had just given away his savings of $24,000 to charity, and disappeared, traversing the United States to end up in Alaskan wilderness. McCandless was intent upon plunging into wilderness survival, though he carried no food or gear, nor had acquired survival skills, only an expanded idealism. At first he attended to an evocative journal paralleling Thoreau’s, but the late entries change tone. His successes had waned in just four months. He foresaw a fast–approaching fate.

As McCandless biographer Jon Krakauer notes, McCandless had a copy of Louis L’Amour’s memoir Education of a Wandering Man, a page quoting from Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Wise Men in Their Bad Hours”:

Death’s a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made

Something more equal to the centuries

Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.

On the other side of the page, which was blank, McCandless penned a brief farewell: “I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all!” McCandless died from starvation or food poisoning, at the age of twenty–four.

The case of Christopher Knight (b. 1965) is described in Michael Finkel’s 2017 book The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit. Knight spent twenty–seven years in a wooded camp in Maine close to tourist and visitor cabins, from which Knight stole food and provisions with great deftness. The biographer’s dogged interviews and identification of details reveal Knight to be a classic recluse (versus hermit). Knight was eventually caught, publicly rued his thievery, and has slipped into obscurity.

The Book of hermits: the history of hermits from antiquity to the present / Robert Rodriguez

Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger History of a Love

 Introduction

AT THE END of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt writes about the internal devastation wrought by the power of totalitarianism, “the iron band of terror” that succeeds in creating an atmosphere of desolation around and within each person. One might have the impression, she writes, “as though a means had been found in which the desert had set itself in motion, setting loose a sandstorm that blew over all the inhabited areas of the earth.”1

My book is about this sandstorm, and its effect on people who, with élan and self-awareness, wished to renew the world.

In the fall of 1924, Hannah Arendt, a young woman from Königsberg, came to Marburg on the Lahn with a group of like-minded friends. She was following a rumor that one could learn to think with a young philosopher at the university there. She was a student hungry for knowledge; he was a rebel among philosophers. She was eighteen years old and a free spirit; he was thirty-five and married. What connected them was the passion of love and the fascination for philosophical thought.

Both entered into a precarious love that was at the same time the beginning of an adventurous path of thought that would push them apart and bring them together time and again. With the publication of Being and Time in 1927 Heidegger rose to world fame. He owed this flight of thinking in part to her love. At the same time Arendt turned to Zionism, wanting to fight against murderous anti-Semitism. The seizing of power by the National Socialists ripped both from their paths. She and her friends were forced to flee. He awaited a national awakening and a leading role as educator for himself in National Socialism. Heidegger’s “mission” destroyed their love as well as the friendship of many of his teachers, colleagues, and students.

The lovers became enemies. Still, meeting seventeen years later, the old feelings of connectedness surfaced. A friendship of twenty years began, a friendship broken time and again by crises.

Those who came after have had their problems with this history. Not a few contemporaries considered it a scandal. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger! How could a Jewish woman find herself with a Nazi in spe? With the abyss that lay between them, how could she seek this connection again after the war, as was clearly the case?

Those who remain as voyeurs cannot understand that in this relationship two themes intersect constantly: love and thought. Along all the meanderings of the story and its characters, the theme that appears is love in all its shadings: eros and agape, faithfulness and betrayal, passion and banality, reconciliation, forgetting, remembering. Amor Mundi, “Love of the World,” also appears, clearly not a sentimental issue. From Arendt comes the question of how a new beginning may be made after the self-destruction of Europe through war and genocide. With this, however, the question of thinking itself becomes a theme. At the beginning of their relationship stood the following questions: What is the purpose of philosophical thought? Can a well-understood existential philosophy be transferred to the world of human action?

Heidegger failed in his aspiration to be the educator of the nation. When this failure became clear to him, he withdrew deep into philosophy.

Hannah Arendt, violently pushed by her enemies in 1933 into the same question, had a radically different response: thinking must reach into the world and engage human beings and their experiences, ruptures, and catastrophes more profoundly.

Above all, Arendt and Heidegger were painfully aware that they were witnesses to a break with tradition that could not be healed. In their different ways, they were both on the path to a new beginning, a “thinking without banisters,” without support in the tradition. One of the richest philosophical discourses of the twentieth century emerged from this political antagonism, a discourse between a thinking of the political world (Arendt) and a philosophical discourse on Gelassenheit or letting-be (Heidegger). It is a confrontation that defined the last century and continues today in its endless variations.

The double relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, as lovers and thinkers, will be told against the backdrop of the last century, its fissures, catastrophes, and personal dramas. The more entwined the history of the century becomes with Arendt and Heidegger, the more characters enter the stage. Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger: a young doctor and psychiatrist from the northern German provinces and a young philosopher from the southern Bavarian province link up to radically remake philosophy and with it their universities. Their friendship began as they both followed the same thought: philosophy was no longer adequate to the existential questions of the present. They rebelled against the inherited structures of university philosophy. They would be the emissaries of a new way of thinking, existential philosophy. Their friendship collapsed in1933 as Jaspers condemned the new leaders and antisemitism. He was driven from the university by these events. Toward the end of the war, he was afraid for his life and that of his wife’s. After the war he emerged as a harsh critic of Heidegger—at the same time he appealed to their old connection. Friendship, however, was not possible.

For Hannah Arendt, her doctoral supervisor, Karl Jaspers, was the trusted person she could turn to after 1945 as she encountered a Germany she barely recognized. Jaspers was ever present as the third party to her new relationship to Heidegger. Heidegger suffered under the loss of friendship with Jaspers. Arendt was never able to effect a reconciliation between the two.

Heinrich Blücher, Arendt’s second husband, appears; his encouragement of her work was invaluable. Jasper’s wife, Gertrud, also emerges. This is the woman who Jaspers thanks for his “humanity” and whose contribution to their discussions in the Jaspers’ house can only be surmised. Finally, Elfride Heidegger enters, a woman who embarked on her marriage full of hope as an emancipated woman; she was fascinated with National Socialism early and never escaped from this legacy. Throughout her life she fought against Heidegger’s connection to his Jewish students; his insistence on a life with eros made her bitter.

The students appear: Karl Löwith, the talented early critic of his teacher Heidegger; Elisabeth Blochmann, the excellent student with a calling in pedagogy; Hans Jonas, who as Zionist and Jewish scholar studied with Heidegger; Herbert Marcuse, who was fascinated by Heidegger before turning to another fascination, Marxism; the highly intelligent Günther Anders, Arendt’s first husband.

What seems to those who come after to have been a clearly delineated world (the teacher as perpetrator, colleagues and students as victims) was at the time a shared world in which the traditions of communists and messianics, Jews and Christians, Zionists, nationalists and racists all interacted with, clashed against, and influenced one another simultaneously. Between the lines we also find the discussion of just how violent the separation of “German” from “Jewish” thinking in the intellectual history of Germany was.

And as though that were not enough for our protagonists, they also lived on two different continents for forty years. Hannah Arendt found a new circle of thinking in the United States, and, with her friends, she made a new home for herself there. She involved herself in the debates surrounding the founding of the state of Israel and worked on establishing a new foundation for political thought. Her friends Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, Waldemar Gurian, Hermann Bloch, Dwight MacDonald, and many others, brought the American world closer to her and debated with her the future of Europe.

Martin Heidegger saw in America the embodiment of the age of doomed technology. Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, wanted to bring the “American perspective” into European thought. Her lifelong disputes also stemmed from this, namely, how the political will of a people could find expression in a form other than that of the European nation-state. In this respect one can rightly speak of a “transatlantic relationship.”

Where do the protagonists stand at the end? Unmasked, damaged, rehabilitated? If the book has been successful at counteracting these images, then it has accomplished its goal.

Note

1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1951), 478.

(...)

Heidegger now wanted to practically implement what he and Jaspers had been discussing, namely, the transformation of the university into an institution that produces intellectual leadership. Plato’s idea of the academy resonated in the background. Hannah Arendt would take up this idea in her plan for a book on politics. Of course, such an elite concept required the right students. They should be highly intelligent, but not studying out of purely theoretical interest. Heidegger and others accused the Jewish intelligentsia of just this, being too one-sided, living only in their heads, neglecting the other side of life: embodiment, work. Against this, the new students were to be exhorted to lead an authentic life, to engage in physical as well as intellectual exercise. Heidegger had already diagnosed the alienation between the two poles of human existence as a sign of self-alienation in the age of the masses. Already in the 1920s, there were reports of the campfire romanticism at the Todtnauberg cabin where visitors told ancient myths, sang songs, and played sports.

Academic teaching was to be completely transformed. Many complaints about the faculty in the 1920s—especially in letters between friends—often culminated in the derisive cry that the majority of colleagues did not belong in a university deserving of its name. Competitive thoughts and feelings of social inferiority may well have been at play here, but so was the conviction that too many compromises had been made in academic teaching. True thinking, however, as Heidegger had learned under difficult and trying circumstances, did not admit compromises. Those born after the Second World War were the first to understand that while lack of compromise can be fruitful and inclusive, under different circumstances, it can also be devastating and destructive. However, in the time after the First World War, another idea held sway, namely, that the renunciation of radicalness leads to mediocrity. It remains a mystery as to why so many people of that time consciously accepted the view that uncompromising thinking, in circumstances where it seeks to make an impact, may become violent, indeed, must become violent. Was it the First World War that made the dimension of violence in thinking so acceptable? An entire generation in different camps (socialism, communism, messianism, Zionism, national ideology) enthusiastically welcomed radical thinking. They believed that only those who pushed thought to its most extreme consequences could accomplish something in this world of decay. The danger of this uncompromising thinking escaped Heidegger, as well. He was certainly not alone in this.

But what astonishes us even more, from today’s point of view, is that the philosopher Heidegger must have really believed that he could leap from thinking to action, without first crossing over the transitional space where the two seemed to directly oppose each other.

In Being and Time, Heidegger foreclosed the possibility of thinking this transitional space; there he thoroughly demonstrated that authentic Dasein exists in the rejection of everything having to do with the “they,” of everything having to do with the evental-historical with-world (Mit-Welt), with the public domain, culture, and technology. From the background of this exclusion of the everyday world, a world defined as distracting, emerges this naïveté—a naïveté that seems so monstrous to us today—out of which Heidegger saw the euphoria of National Socialism materialize as a convincing concept. Hannah Arendt would later write a parable about this: Heidegger, the fox, fell into the trap that he himself set.

Heidegger hoped that the new way of thinking that he was working on would lead to a new kind of academy, a new form of thinking, teaching, and educating at the University of Freiburg. He believed that the opportunity to accomplish his project would present itself in one way or another. Did he hope that the National Socialists would come into power? He certainly did not wish for the banal orgies of violence that began after 1933. However, early on he saw in the “movement,” and apparently also in its militarization, the auspicious alternative to the everydayness of the 1920s, to the boring monotony of democratic procedures and practices. He saw a possibility, a forum, for the renewal of the nation’s spiritual potential. He must have believed that there was a task left unaccomplished by the ancients, a task that was now possible to fulfill with National Socialism. Not that he thought the task would be fulfilled by the National Socialist movement itself. In his view, the latter needed to be educated. The task was up to him; he had taken it upon himself long ago. He wanted only to be called.6Heidegger shared the epochal illusion of the emergence of National Socialism with many others, from Gottfried Benn to Carl Schmitt to Arnolt Bronnen, and others. National Socialism became the bearer of hope; many people saw in it an alternative to the chaos of the mass age, to being at the mercy of technology, to the self-forgetting loss of German culture, and the decline of the national state. The return to the “German essence” was the promise that hid the violence and terror, the modern means of technological domination and the formation of the totalitarian system.

Antonia Grunenberg

The Poundian Gists' and Maxims

Into what he variously described as 'gists', maxims, axioms and aphorisms, Pound encapsulated the essence of his critical thought or intuition, commonsense or wisdom in a memorably epigrammatic way. The Dantesque clarity, concision and concreteness he aspired to-and often succeeded in achieving- in his poetry, he also succeeds in achieving in his pithy comments and conclusions which are comparable with the best of their kind by Dr Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Eliot and Leavis. Unbounded confidence in him-self, in his judgement and perception, and in his 'high and final EZthority', enabled him to pinpoint, with extraordinary incisiveness and simplicity, the various facets of the art of poetry - especially of modem poetry - as well as of the practice and profession of literary criticism. These dicta bring out, no less than does his most 'personal' poetry, the way Pound's mind and intelligence, and his critical perception and intuition work, enabling him to see 'fitfully and by starts' what other critics have to toil, dissect and analyse long to explore.

Apart from those we have already come across in the course of this book. here are some salient examples of the Poundian dicta on poetry, criticism, culture, art, religion:

1. Without constant experiment literature dies.
2. There is gongorism in critical writings as well as in bad poetry.
3. Parody is the best criticism - it sifts the durable from the apparent.
4. Lope de Vega is not a man, he is a literature.
5. Aristotle was so good at his job that he anchored human thought for 2000 years.
6. You could call Orage a damn fool and respect him.
7. Virgil is a second-rate, Tennysonianized version of Homer.
8. No one will ever gauge or measure English poetry until they knew how much of it, how full a gamut of its qualities, is already THERE ON THE PAGE OF CHAUCER.
9. Try to find a poem of Byron or Poe without seven serious defects.
10. It is hard to drop an enthusiasm.
11. Glory is a damned inedible substance.
12. Dogma is bluff based on ignorance.
13. Belief is a cramp, a paralysis, an atrophy of the mind in certain positions.
14. The essence of religion is the present tense.
15. The syllogism, time and again, loses grip on reality.
16. By genius I mean an inevitable swiftness and right-mindedness in a given field.
17. There is no democracy in the arts.
18. [To his mother] No periodical is ever much good. I hope you don't think I read the periodicals I appear in.
19. The quintessence of style is that it should be swift and mordant.
20. Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism.
21. No one knows enough, soon enough.
22. A writer dies when he ceases to have, and exercise, omnivorous curiosity.
23. The trained never think.
24. It is very often easy to do for another what one couldn't possibly do for one's self.
25. The UNprintable part of my writing is what deals with ANYthing of importance.
26. One's preparation for a real job is possibly never what one does when one thinks one is preparing.
27. Tenny rate, stagnation comes from inside; and not from the circumst.
28. Ownership is often a damned nuisance, and anchor.
29. Xtianity is a poor substitute for truth.
30. One definition of beauty: aptness to purpose.
31. He [Christ] is not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted upon him. As well blame me for all the bunk in vers libre.
32. Je revere plutot le bon sens que l'originalite.
33. Only a small part of any epoch or decade survives.
34. NO GOOD WORK EVER KNOCKED OUT ANY 0THER GOOD WORK.
35. Truth is not untrue'd by reason of our failing to fix it on paper.
36. The miracle of Homer is that great poesie is everywhere latent and that literary finish is up to Henry James.
37. A narrative is all right so long as the narrator sticks to words as simple as dog, horse, and sunset.
38. Music is excellent discipline for the writer of the prose.
39. Knowledge is to know man. Mr Alexander Pope rubs it a bit too smooth. If you translate him, the proper study for man is anthropology, you get nearer the source of error.
40. Only in basicly pagan Italy has Christianity escaped becoming a nuisance.
41. A REAL book is one whose words grow ever more luminous as one's experience increases or as one is led or edged over into considering them with greater attention.
42. The cult of beauty is the hygiene, it is the sun, air and the sea and the rain and the lake bathing. The cult of ugliness, Villon, Baudelaire, Corbiere, Beardsley are diagnosis. Flaubert is diagnosis. Satire is surgery, insertions, amputations.
43. 'Good writing' is perfect control.
44. All criticism should be professedly personal criticism.
45. Poetry, the lordliest of arts.
46. The function of criticism is to efface itself when it has established its dissociations. Let it stand that from 1912 onward for a decade and more I was instrumental in forcing into print, and secondarily in commenting on, certain work now recognized as valid by all competent readers.
47. The sonnet was not a great poetic invention. The sonnet occurred automatically when some chap got stuck in the effort to make a canzone. His 'genius' consisted in the recognition of the fact that he had come to the end of his subject matter.
48. For most translation one would merely say, take it away and start again.
49. All criticism is an attempt to define the classic.
50. A sound poetic training is nothing more than the science of being discontented.
51. When a civilization is vivid it preserves and fosters all sorts of artists - painters, poets, sculptors, musicians, architects.
When a civilization is dull and anemic it preserves a rabble of priests, sterile instructors, and repeaters of things second-hand.
52. Beauty is a brief gasp between one cliche and another.
53. An idea is only an imperfect induction from fact.
54. Civilisation is individual.
55. It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.
56. The infinite gulf between what you read and enjoy and what you set up as a model.
57. Italian concept of poetry: something oppressive and to be revered.
58. The more a man goes over a real writer the more he knows that no reader ever read anything the first time he saw it.
59. The Bible should be read after the reader is literate.
60. The basis of a state is its economic justice.

From Ezra Pound as Critic G. Singh