Julius Evola

 Evola’s political, philosophical and historical teachings were motivated by his traditionalism as a manifestation of what he termed the “revolt against the modern world”. While adhering to the cyclic conception of history Evola added to this the concept of a duality of civilisations categorised as traditional and modern. Evola saw the end cycle of Western civilisation, the beginning of which he ascribed to the Late Medieval period, as the start of the super-cycle of the modern. All those civilisations that had come and gone before were still within the context of the traditional. Evola wrote of the cycles of decline:

“Recently in contrast to the notion of progress and the idea that history has been represented by more or less continuous upward evolution of collective humanity, the idea of a plurality of the forms of civilisation and of a relative incommunicality between them has been confirmed. According to this second and new vision of history, history breaks down into epochs and disconnected cycles. … A civilisation springs up, gradually reaches a culminating point, and falls into darkness and, more often than not, disappears. A cycle has ended….” 118Evola considered this revived cyclic approach to history as “a healthy reaction to the superstition of history as progress”, which was a product of Western materialism. He offered this added dualist dimension however, and cautioned that Spenglerian cyclicism did not offer the entire story. In addition to “a plurality of civilisations”, an historical “duality” should be recognised. “Modern civilisation stands on one side and on the other the entirety of all the civilisations that have preceded it.” For the Western civilisation he put the end of the traditional phase and the beginning of the modern super-cycle as the “late Middle Ages”, when the point of rapture with tradition was complete. Since that time, “modern civilisation” has completely cut itself off from the past. “For the great majority of moderns, that means any possibility of understanding the traditional world has been completely lost”.119In 1938 Evola wrote a synopsis on the traditional approach to history, where he defined traditional and modern civilisations:

“On the one hand there are the traditional cultures… The axis of these cultures and the summit of their hierarchical order consist of metaphysical, supra-individual powers and actions, which serve to inform and justify all that which is merely human, temporal, subject to becoming and to ‘history’. On the other hand there is ‘modern culture’, which is actually anti-tradition and which exhausts itself in a construction of purely human and earthly conditions and in the total development of these, in pursuit of a life entirely detached from the ‘higher world’”.120

While Evola joined the debate over the meaning of “race” in Fascist Italy, when racial zoology suddenly gained momentum as official policy with the publication of the “Manifesto of Race” in 1938, ironically the same year he wrote in a German (that is, “Nazi”) publication an article explaining the traditionalist approach to the question of why civilisations decay. He contended that the “degeneration” of civilisation is not caused by race-crossings, which Hitlerism regards as axiomatic, but rather through the spiritual corruption of the culture-hierarchy from the top down.121Evola begins by repudiating the modernist idea of “progress”, stating that man is not ascending (evolution) but descending from a primordial higher state. One does not go from lower to higher forms. Hence, as we have seen, the widespread belief – or memory - across times, places, and cultures, in the “fall” of man from a mythic “Golden Age”, ascribed to the arrogance of man in defying the Godhead.

“Anyone who has come to reject the rationalist myth of ‘progress’ and the interpretation of history as an unbroken positive development of mankind will find himself gradually drawn towards the world-view that was common to all the great traditional cultures, and which had at its centre the memory of a process of degeneration, slow obscuration, or collapse of a higher preceding world. As we penetrate deeper into this new (and old) interpretation, we encounter various problems, foremost among which is the question of the secret of degeneration”.122Of the theories that have been considered Evola, writing for the Germans, alludes to the classic work of Comte Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of the Human Races, pioneering the doctrine that civilisations collapse through race-mixing. Evola quickly disposes of this by giving a passing nod to the theory, proceeding with a consideration of “a higher order of things” than blood admixture. Evola in reality does more than “expand” de Gobineau’s race-theory with “a few observations”; he disposes of it by pointing out that race-impurity does not explain the unremarkable state of present day Nordic states that have retained their race-purity:

“We can thank the Comte de Gobineau for the best and best-known summary of this problem, and also for a masterly criticism of the main hypotheses about it. His solution on the basis of racial thought and racial purity also has much truth in it, but it needs to be expanded by a few observations concerning a higher order of things. For there have been many cases in which a culture has collapsed even when its race has remained pure, as is especially clear in certain groups that have suffered slow, inexorable extinction despite remaining as racially isolated as if they were islands. An example quite close at hand is the case of the Swedes and the Dutch. These people are in the same racial condition today as they were two centuries ago, but there is little to be found now of the heroic disposition and the racial awareness that they once possessed. Other great cultures seem merely to have remained standing in the condition of mummies: they have long been inwardly dead, so that it takes only the slightest push to knock them down. This was the case, for example, with ancient Peru, that giant solar empire which was annihilated by a few adventurers drawn from the worst rabble of Europe”.123On the other hand there are cultures that Evola refers to as being outwardly motivated by modernism, yet retaining their inner traditional substance. Japan remains the prime example of such a state. One might also say that of Israel. There are also certain Buddhist states in South-east Asia that have materially prospered through the adaptation of modern techniques but have maintained a traditional nexus, as has India, despite these cultures having gone through the full cycles of rise and fall. A remnant lives, and might yet re-enter history in symbiosis with a post-Western civilisation.

Evola sees history unfolding within the great cosmic ages or yugas over vast expanses of time, and all the civilisations known to modern man as only decaying remnants of a long lost primordial civilisation. Hence, the history we know today is that of the fall of man over cycles of decline, interrupted by civilisations that have sought to maintain the cosmos connexion, but still subject to cyclic decay. Hence there are cycles of rise and fall within a great cosmic cycle; wheels within a great cosmic wheel. This outlook differs from the historical morphology of Spengler and others who work within more ordinary time-frames, yet both have broad features in common.

Evola sees “the whole of history as degeneration”, repudiating the notion of both historical and biological evolution, and the chimera of “progress”. Rather, the course of history is one of “involution”:

“From the standpoint of the latter, the whole of history is degeneration, because it shows the universal decline of earlier cultures of the traditional type, and the decisive and violent rise of a new universal civilization of the ‘modern’ type. A double question arises from this.”

“First, how was it ever possible for this to come to pass? There is a logical error underlying the whole doctrine of evolution: it is impossible that the higher can emerge from the lower, and the greater from the less. But doesn’t a similar difficulty face us in the solution of the doctrine of involution? How is it ever possible for the higher to fall? If we could make do with simple analogies, it would be easy to deal with this question. A healthy man can become sick; a virtuous one can turn to vice. There is a natural law that everyone takes for granted: that every living being starts with birth, growth, and strength, then come old age, weakening, and disintegration. And so forth. But this is just making statements, not explaining, even if we allow that such analogies actually relate to the question posed here.”

“Secondly, it is not only a matter of explaining the possibility of the degeneration of a particular cultural world, but also the possibility that the degeneration of one cultural cycle may pass to other peoples and take them down with it. For example, we have not only to explain how the ancient Western reality collapsed, but also have to show the reason why it was possible for ‘modern’ culture to conquer practically the whole world, and why it possessed the power to divert so many peoples from any other type of culture, and to hold sway even where states of a traditional kind seemed to be alive (one need only recall the Aryan East).”

“In this respect, it is not enough to say that we are dealing with a purely material and economic conquest. That view seems very superficial, for two reasons. In the first place, a land that is conquered on the material level also experiences, in the long run, influences of a higher kind corresponding to the cultural type of its conqueror. We can state, in fact, that European conquest almost everywhere sows the seeds of ‘Europeanization,’ i.e., the ‘modern’ rationalist, tradition-hostile, individualistic way of thinking. Secondly, the traditional conception of culture and the state is hierarchical, not dualistic. Its bearers could never subscribe, without severe reservations, to the principles of ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ and ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ For us, ‘Tradition’ is the victorious and creative presence in the world of that which is ‘not of this world,’ i.e., of the Spirit, understood as a power that is mightier than any merely human or material one”.124Although Evola was writing in 1938, this “modern world” is now a global hegemony, reaching every corner of the globe. The World War which came a year later resulted in the triumph of decadence over the remnants of tradition. Now we see the present “clash of civilisations”, as it has been called by American geopolitical theorists, where the remnants of a long fellaheen – historically passé - Islam trying to resist encroachments on what remains of their cultures. As we shall see near our conclusion, American policy-makers are overt in seeing America as having a world-mission in destroying all vestiges of tradition in the name of “progress”.

“This is a basic idea of the authentically traditional view of life, which does not permit us to speak with contempt of merely material conquests. On the contrary, the material conquest is the sign, if not of a spiritual victory, at least of a spiritual weakness or a kind of spiritual ‘retreat’ in the cultures that are conquered and lose their independence. Everywhere that the Spirit, regarded as the stronger power, was truly present, it never lacked for means - visible or otherwise - to enable all the opponent’s technical and material superiority to be resisted. But this has not happened. It must be concluded, then, that degeneracy was lurking behind the traditional facade of every people that the ‘modern’ world has been able to conquer. The West must then have been the culture in which a crisis that was already universal assumed its acutest form. There the degeneration amounted, so to speak, to a knockout blow, and as it took effect, it brought down with more or less ease other peoples in whom the involution had certainly not ‘progressed’ as far, but whose tradition had already lost its original power, so that these peoples were no longer able to protect themselves from an outside assault.”125The Late Western perspective of history is that of a line of evolution from primitive to modern, culminating in the “end of history” when the world adopts liberal-democracy and free trade. The traditional perspective sees history as the waxing and waning of civilisations, each self-contained, going through analogous life-cycles of rise and fall. The two outlooks are reflections of differences in perceptions of time; the “modern” linear, the traditional cyclic. Traditional societies are premised on maintaining a connexion with the divine. The modern outlook sees this as superstition, but “progress” has become as much a religion as any form of mysticism. The “modern” road to “utopia” is through universal happiness achieved by material prosperity, and man need look for no higher purpose, state apologists such as Fukuyama. The traditional society saw human purpose not as the achieving of an elusive “happiness” based on fads but the fulfilment of one’s cosmic duty (dharma) as an integral part of a holistic order.

Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by Kerry Bolton 

Today contempt for others, and open and ostentatious self-esteem, is very often necessary

“Pride separates us from society: our self-love gives us a rank apart, and one that is always contested: a self-esteem that makes itself too much felt is almost always punished by universal contempt”]. Mme. de Lambert, Avis d’une mère à sa fille, in her Oeuvres complètes quoted above (p. 633), p. 99, end. So it is naturally in society, that is the nature of this human institution, which, being designed to further the common good and pleasure, does not truly exist if the individual does not to a greater or a lesser degree combine [670] his esteem, his interests, his goals, thoughts, opinions, sentiments and emotions, inclinations, and actions with those of others, and if all the above is designed simply to further himself. The more of a himself there is in the individual, the less society truly exists. Thus, if egoism is complete, society exists only in name. Because when each individual has only himself as a goal, and pays no heed at all to the common good, and when no thought or action of his is designed to further the good or pleasure of others, each individual by himself forms a society apart, complete and utterly distinct, since his goal is wholly distinct; and thus the world reverts to what it was at the beginning, and before the origin of society, which is left dissolved in fact and in substance, and in its reason and essence. Consequently, egoism has always been the scourge of society, and the greater it is, the worse [671] the condition of society has been; and hence so much the worse in essence those institutions which particularly further egoism either directly or indirectly, as despotism does above all. (Under that regime France became the homeland of the most pestilential egoism, greatly mitigated by the revolution, notwithstanding the immense harm it caused, as all the philosophers have noted.) Egoism, that is to say, self-love, is inseparable from man, but by egoism is meant more particularly an ill-directed, ill-employed self-love, designed to further one’s own real advantages and not those which derive from heroism, from sacrifices, from virtues, from honor, from friendship, etc. When, therefore, this egoism reaches its peak, in intensity and in universality; and when, on account of both its intensity and, more especially, its universality, the mask has been lifted (which no longer serves to conceal it, because it is too vigorous, and because all are inspired by the same sentiment), the nature of social dealings (whether in relation to conversation [672] or generally in relation to life) changes almost entirely. Because, with each thinking only of himself (as much because that is his actual inclination as because no one any longer has a thought for the other, and the good of each is entrusted to himself alone), all respect is set aside, and one seizes the prey from the mouth and talons of another; the individuals in what is termed society are in a state of more or less open war with one another, and with all at once; the strongest in every respect wins; and surrendering anything whatsoever, whether through politeness or through virtue, honor, etc., is pointless, harmful, and crazy, because others will not thank you or give you anything in return, and your surrendering to them, and putting up less resistance to them, simply works to their advantage, and hence to your detriment. And so, to take an example from the passage by Mme. de Lambert quoted above, we see, in fact, that today contempt for others, and open and ostentatious self-esteem, is not only no longer as harmful as [673] it once was but is very often necessary, and someone who does not know how to make use of it wins nothing in the world as it is at present. Because others are not disposed to grant you anything spontaneously, on the strength of truth and merit, not even, by the same token, esteem, therefore you must win it as if by force, in open war, and in a spirit of hostility, showing that you are altogether persuaded of your own merit, in spite of anyone else, despising and trampling others underfoot, deriding them, profiting from their slightest shortcomings, casting these back in their faces, forgiving them nothing, striving, in short, to humble them and to render them inferior to you, either in conversation or otherwise, and by the most effective means available. So that today if you wish to earn the esteem of others by showing respect, by treating them courteously, by flattering their self-love, by disregarding their faults, etc., and, as far as you’re concerned, by behaving modestly and by maintaining a decorous silence, etc., precisely the opposite will occur. They will take advantage of you and of the respect you accord them to elevate themselves, and of your faint show of resistance to crush you. What you concede [674] to them they simply use to their own advantage, and to your detriment; what you do not appropriate or lay claim to, or the merit that you disguise, they deny you and seize, in order to view you as inferior, etc. Thus, in the way I have said, savage customs—or customs of that first age, when, since society did not exist, each was friend to himself alone, and enemy to all other beings, whether like or unlike himself, insofar as they opposed his slightest interest or desire, or insofar as he could enjoy things at their expense—do indeed come back into the world, customs that in the social state are barbarous, because destructive of society, and directly contrary to its essence, reason, and purpose. Hence it may be seen just how true it is that the present state of the world is really and truly barbarism, or as close to barbarism as anything ever was. Every so-called society that is dominated by individual egoism is barbarous, and barbarous with the utmost barbarism. (17 Feb. 1821.)

Leopardi - Zibaldone

Schopenhauer - On noise and sounds

 

§378

Kant wrote an essay on the living forces,a but I would like to write a dirge and a threnody on them, because their all too excessive use in knocking, hammering and ramming has been a daily pain to me my whole life through. Of course there are people, indeed quite a few who smile at this, because they are insensitive to sounds; but these are the same ones who are also insensitive to reasons, thoughts, poetry and works of art, in brief, to spiritual impressions of any kind, due to the tough and unyielding texture of their brain matter. On the other hand, in the biographies or other accounts of personal utterances of almost all great writers, for instance Kant, Goethe, Lichtenberg,1 Jean Paul, I find complaints about the anguish caused to thinking men by noise; indeed, if such information is missing in any one case, then it is merely because the context did not lead to it. I interpret the matter as follows: just as a large diamond cut into pieces is equal in value only to so many small ones, or an army shattered to pieces and dissolved into small units is no longer capable of anything, so too a great mind is no more capable than an ordinary one as soon as it is interrupted, disturbed, distracted and diverted, because its superiority is conditioned by concentrating all its powers on one point and object, as a concave mirror does all of its rays, and precisely this is prevented by the noisy interruption. This is why eminent minds have always abhorred every kind of disturbance, interruption and diversion, especially those of a 680 violent nature through noise, whereas others are not especially bothered by this. The most sensible and intelligent of all European nations has even called the rule ‘never interrupt’b its eleventh commandment. But noise is the most impertinent of all interruptions, since it breaks up and indeed breaks down even our own thoughts. But where there is nothing to interrupt, noise is of course not particularly sensed. – Occasionally I am tormented and bothered by a moderate and constant noise before I am clearly aware of it, in that I sense it merely as a constant hindrance to my thinking, like dragging a weight with my foot, until I realize what it is. –

But transitioning now from the genus to the species, I have to denounce as the most irresponsible and scandalous noise the truly infernal whip-cracking in the echoing streets of the cities, which robs life of all peace and all pensiveness. Nothing provides me with a clearer notion of the obtuseness and thoughtlessness of mankind than the condoning of this whip-cracking.2 This sudden, sharp, brain-numbing crack, which cuts to pieces all contemplation and murders every thought, has to be painfully felt by everyone who bears anything resembling a thought in his head; therefore each of those cracks must disturb hundreds in their mental activity, however inferior it may be in quality, but they chop through a thinker’s meditations as painfully and disastrously as the executioner’s blade severs the head from the body. No sound cuts through the brain as sharply as this damned whip-cracking; the very tip of the lash can be felt in the brain, affecting it like a mimosa when it is touched, and lasting just as long. With all due respect for most sacred utility, I still do not see why a fellow who hauls off a load of sand or manure should therefore be granted the privilege of nipping in the bud every successively emerging thought in the heads of ten thousand people (for a half hour along a city route). Hammer blows, dogs barking and the screaming of children are appalling, but only the crack of a whip is the real murderer of thoughts. It is designed to crush 681 every good and pensive moment that someone might have here and there, and as the most horrific of all sounds it would only be excusable if no other means were available to drive draft animals.3 But quite the contrary: this damned whip-cracking is not only unnecessary but even useless. For the intended psychic effect on horses is completely blunted and missing because they have become desensitized by the constant misuse of the whip; they do not quicken their pace in response, as can be seen especially in the case of coachmen looking for fares and whipping constantly even though driving at the slowest pace, and the slightest touch of the whip is more effective. But assuming that it would be unavoidably necessary to remind the horses of the presence of the whip by using this sound, then a sound a hundred times weaker would suffice, since it is well known that animals notice even the slightest, indeed scarcely noticeable signs, audible as well as visible, of which trained dogs and canaries provide the most amazing examples.4 Accordingly this situation turns out to be nothing but a case of pure impudence, indeed5 of insolent scorn on the part of society that works with its arms directed against those who work with their heads. That such an infamy is tolerated in cities is a crude barbarism and an injustice, all the more so as it would be very easy to prevent by a police-mandated knot at the tip of every whip cord. It cannot hurt for the proletarians to be reminded of the mental work of the class standing above them, for they have a boundless fear of all mental work. But now a fellow who rides through the narrow streets of a populous city with free post horses or on a free cart horse, or for that matter walking along beside the animals6 and incessantly cracking his fathoms-long whip with all his might, clearly deserves to stand down immediately in order to receive five earnestly delivered blows with a stick – all the philanthropists in the world, along with the legislatures that for good reasons abolish all corporal punishment will not persuade me otherwise. But we can often enough see something even more egregious than this, namely a coachman walking 682 the streets alone and without horses, yet incessantly cracking his whip; so habituated has this man become to whip-cracking, as a result of irresponsible coddling.7 With all this universal tenderness for the body and all its gratifications, is the thinking mind the only thing that never gets the least consideration, nor protection, let alone respect? Coachmen, porters, errand boys and so on are the beasts of burden of human society; they should by all means be treated humanely with justice, fairness, consideration and care, but they should not be allowed to obstruct the higher endeavours of the human race through impudent noise. I would like to know how many great and beautiful thoughts these whips have already cracked out of the world. If it were mine to command, then an indestructible association of ideasa would be created in the minds of coachmen between whip-cracking and getting a beating.8 – We would hope that the more intelligent and finely sensitive nations will make a start on this as well, and then by way of example the Germans could also be brought along.*,9 Meanwhile, Thomas Hood (Up the Rhine) says of them: ‘For a musical people, they are the most noisy I ever met with.’b But that they are so is not based on the fact that they are more inclined to noise-making than others, but on the insensitivity stemming from the obtuseness of those who have to hear it, who are not disturbed in any thinking or reading simply because they are not thinking, but merely smoking instead, which is their surrogate for thinking. The universal toleration of unnecessary noise, for instance of the extremely ill-mannered and vulgar slamming of doors, is nothing short of a sign of the general obtuseness and thought vacuum of their minds. In Germany it is positively as though the plan were for no one to come to their senses on account of noise, such as pointless drumming, for instance.10Finally now as regards the literature dealing with the subject treated in 683 this chapter, I have only one work to recommend, but it is a beautiful one, namely a poetic epistle in terza rima by the famous painter Bronzino, entitled On Noises.a For here the anguish one has to endure from the many kinds of noise of an Italian city is described in detail, with both humour and wit, in a tragic-comical style. This epistle can be found on page 258 of the second volume of Burlesque Works of Berni, Aretino and othersb apparently published in Utrecht in 1771.

a [Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte (Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces), 1747]

b [Schopenhauer’s English]

anexus idearum

b [Quoted in English]

aDe’ romori, a Messer Luca Martini

bOpere burlesche del Berni, Aretino ed altri

* According to a ‘Bulletin of the Munich Animal Protection Society’ of December 1858, in Nuremberg superfluous whipping and whip-cracking are most strictly forbidden.

Parerga and Paralipomena II

The Carthusian life has always been a vocation for the very few...

 A modern observer, accus­ tomed to privacy, needs no further persuasion of the attraction of the hermit life than a picture of a common cloister, refec­ tory and dormitory. A brief visit to the most celebrated of medieval hermitages—to the Chartreuse, to Camaldoli, the Carceri above Assisi, each set in a position of great natural beauty and quiet, surrounded by woods and streams and mountaintops—reveals some of the positive attractions of the hermit's life. Not all the hermits lived in such places; surprisingly enough, the monks of the Chartreuse and Camaldoli set up houses in the middle of towns such as Pisa and Bologna, but their natural habitat, and the country which inspired their founders, lay in the hills and woods. It was the solitude and peace that first attracted the hermits to these places. If they had thought of natural beauty as an alluring or distracting thing, no doubt they would have rejected it. In this guise it presumably appeared to Milton, when he counted the leaves of Vallombrosa:

Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
In Vallombrosa, where th’Etrurian shades
High overarch’t imbowr—

and likened them to an army of devils. Yet if the founders of the Chartreuse, Camaldoli and Vallombrosa rejected the idea that the natural beauty of their new homes could be a tempta­tion, they were in each case positively attracted by a dramatic piece of scenery nonetheless. The Italian sites are on hilltops, by an elementary symbolism felt to be—not nearer to heaven, a concept cruder than any they entertained—but above the habitations of men, as it were on Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb. More important, they were inspired by the feats of the fathers of the desert, whose manner of life in sober fact, not without some embellishment in the Lives, was often a heroic struggle against natural forces unnaturally made as tough as man could devise.

The Carthusian life has always been a vocation for the very few. From the first, there were some who felt a superficial call, tasted the rigors and fled. From approximately 1180 to 1186  St. Hugh was prior of the first English Carthusian house, at Witham in Somerset, and his biographer records how one of his monks, called Alexander, fled from Witham after a bitter complaint.

Wretch, you have deluded us...and have brought us to this wild and lonely place, taking us away from our pleasant dwellings and a civilised way of life. You have forced us to lurk amongst beasts and thorns, as if there were not places of monastic retirement in the world.

The whole land is full of communities of monks, and the mutual support provided by the communal life pro­ vides us with a sufficiently good example of religious perfection. Here, alone and without companionship, we become torpid and dull through boredom, seeing no one for days at a time whose example can inspire us, and having only the walls which shut us in to look at.
Your apparently unanswerable arguments shall not con­ vince us, since what you have to say is always in oppo­ sition to our sound and excellent judgement. The yoke of this new law which you tell us must be borne, as if all Christians everywhere would be damned except the Carthusians [a doctrine of which Hugh was conspicu­ously innocent] and the way of salvation open to very few, is almost unendurable in this world. Since we know better, we must not and cannot endure this unprofitable and narrow way of life any longer. We are going to seek something saner, and absolutely refuse to stay for a fur­ ther period.”9

Most of the traffic described in the Life was in the other direction, though Witham, like the Carthusian Order itself, was always of modest size, reflecting its call for the few What is noticeable is that it flourished when other orders were lan­ guishing; in England especially it enjoyed an Indian summer in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when its most famous house, the London Charterhouse, brought silence to the very edge of the city, and the priory of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, the one English house whose remains can still be inspected, was also founded.10

Alexander became a Cluniae monk, and later in life begged to be allowed to return; but Hugh refused.

from the book The Age of the Cloister The Story of Monastic Life in the Middle Ages by Christopher Brooke

The existential problem

In the 1960s and 1970s, an endearing actor, Peter Falk, played a detective named “Columbo” on a television show of the same name. The drama was unique in its genre because it revealed the identity of the murderer in the opening segment. The mystery was how Columbo was going to amass enough evidence to arrest the murderers, who were uncommonly clever and calculating. Happily, Columbo always nailed his target.

If you have read the first parts of this book attentively, you already know that I conclude that human life has meaning. The mystery is how I am going to argue for that conclusion. Although I am not as imaginative a scriptwriter as those who orchestrated Peter Falk‘s television triumphs, I will begin at the logical point: a historical example of a psychological crisis that triggered the quest for meaning.

Enter Leo Tolstoy, the embodiment of existential crisis. The great Russian novelist, the master wordsmith of War and Peace, Anna Kareriirta, and much more, was seemingly blessed. He had a good family, uncommon intelligence, stunning professional success, material well-being, good health, and most of any reasonable catalog of meaningfulness. Yet he was, around the age of fifty, tormented by the thought and psychological experience that life was meaningless. Tolstoy was plagued by the four horsemen of self-doubt: awareness of human mortality, lack of control of the things he most valued, absence of ultimate justifications for his actions, and an acute sense that his life might in the end add up to nothing. Tolstoy was threatened by his inevitable death, the fragility of the things and people he valued, and the apparent lack of foundational justification for his actions. Finitude, contingency, and arbitrariness haunted him.

Sooner or later there would come diseases and death (they had come already) to my dear ones and to me, and there would he nothing left hut stench and worms. All my affairs . . . would sooner or later he forgotten, and I myself should not exist. . . . How could a man fail to see that and live. . . . A person could live only so long as he was drunk; but the moment he sobered up, he could not help seeing that all that was only a deception, and a stupid deception at that!‘

Tolstoy saw no way out of this human predicament. He entertained four possibilities. First, if we remain ignorant of the Facts, then the meaninglessness of human life would not affect our enjoyment of our existence. But ignorance was not an option for Tolstoy or any other educated or intelligent person.

Once we are aware of the facts we cannot retreat to the safety of ignorance no matter how hard we try. Second, we might find consolation in enhancing our power and privilege. By focusing narrowly on personal and professional successes, through immersion in material pleasure, and by reveling in our relative advantages over others, we might avoid the pain of meaninglessness. 

But the road of invidious social comparison is only a diversion from the inevitable truth. We are all born to suffer, die, and be forgotten. Power and privi- lege do not alter the facts; they only divert our gaze. Third, suicide is always an option. Although Tolstoy sometimes called this the choice of “strength and energy,” it is difficult to see this as a solution. Suicide evades the problem of a life by ending it. It does not, typically, create meaning as much as it capitulates to the felt absence of meaning. Fourth, the choice of endurance or “weakness”: continuing to push on, hoping against hope that the meaning of life would make a surprise appearance in the future.

Tolstoy solved his distress by appreciating the lives of simple, uneducated people. Peasants, wanderers, monks, and social dissenters were his models. They had dificult, beast-of-burden lives, yet their religious faith gave them a “consciousness of life” that connected them to meaning. Only religious faith, not reason, can make life meaningful. Tolstoy vowed to link his being with spiritual conviction and action. He espoused humility, vegetarianism, and the value of manual labor, while rejecting luxuries, violence, coercion, and material accumulation. He also advanced the ideal of chastity, while recognizing that the nature and circumstances of people would not permit widespread compliance. Love of fellow humaii beings was a more important value than the ambition, vanity, and lust for individual success or the insulating consolations of an honorable family life. Sentimentalizing the life of peasants and glorifying faith in God permitted Tolstoy to celebrate personal immortality and a grand design, and to reinstate foundational justification for human action.

Critics see Tolstoy as evading the tragedy of life through flight to an imaginary: transcendental afterlife. Putting that issue aside, Tolstoy’s crisis is significant. First, his life illustrates vividly that a meaningful life does not automatically result from the fulfillment of typical human desires. More is required. Second, his solution to the problem of the meaning of life demands a “consciousness of life” or a “faith” that cannot be rationally supported all the way down. Third, his life denionstrates a trinity of the deepest human aspirations: the yearning for a final culmination, a connection to enduring value, and a rational and just universe (“Tolstoy’s trinity”). Fourth, Tolstoy accepts the theistic assumption: Either God exists as the creator of meaning embedded in the universe or there is only chaos and meaninglessness.

Tolstoy concluded that the meaning of life is to discover a way to live such that the question of life’s meaning no longer arises. Find a hetter way to live and the ultimate questions wither away. Tolstoy was incorrect. He did not take his own counsel about ignorance seriously enough: Once we are conscious of the questions, we cannot suppress them, we cannot forget forever. The only solution is to find a way that permits us to ask the ultimate questions, struggle with tentative solutions, yet continue to live energetically. The path of denial through continually distracting engagement dehumanizes us.

The question, “What is the meaning of life?” is about the cosmos and about ourselves. To find out about the cosmos we must distinguish the world from ourselves. The answer to the question deeply influences how we should live. Therefore, the question itself arises from the human condition, from psychological curiosity, often from crisis. The question is riot merely an abstraction fueling intellectual reflection.

One answer, The Religious Solution, is that a Supreme Being or Nature builds a human teleology, or overriding purpose, into the cosmos. If so, the further question is whether an external purpose that supposedly applies to everyone should issue any persuasive existential imperatives for me. Is the individual submerged by universal demands?

Another answer somberly resigns us to Cosmic Meaninglessness: The cos- mos is inherently meaningless and, thus, human life is meaningless regardless of our best efforts to delude ourselves with frantic activity arid joyful amusements.

A third answer advises The Creation of Contingent Meaning: The cosmos is inherently meaningless, but the meaning of human life is the search for and construction of meaning itself. If so, the further question is whether all meaning is equal or, if riot equal, how does meaning relate to value.

From: Belliotti, Raymond A., Happiness is overrated

The News: Mind Control Through “Cognitive Dissonance”

When professionals broadcast one absurdity after another, they begin to see the effects are actually strengthening their own position of authority. It’s a revelation. It’s also a continuation of the tradition of the Trickster archetype. For example, with just a few minor adjustments, Brian Williams can be seen as the sly Reynard the Fox

(The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

From the viewpoint of elite television news, controlling the minds of its audience depends on what’s politely called “cognitive dissonance”:

As the anchor recites a news story, the viewer sees an obvious hole through which he could drive a truck.

The story makes no sense, yet it’s being presented as bland fact. The trusted anchor clearly has no problem with it.

What’s the viewer to do? He experiences a contradiction, a “dissonance.”

For example, this year’s flu vaccine. The US government has admitted the vaccine is geared to a flu virus that isn’t circulating in the population. Therefore, even by conventional standards, the vaccine is useless. But the kicker is, the CDC says people should take the vaccine anyway.

The anchor relays all this information—and never seriously questions the situation, never torpedoes the government for recommending the vaccine.

The average viewer feels a tug, a pulse of discomfort, a push-pull. The vaccine story is idiocy (side one), but the trusted anchor accepts it (side two).

Dissonance.

The top chiefs of news—and top propaganda operatives—anticipate cognitive dissonance. In a real sense, they want it to happen. They make it happen. Over and over.

Why?

Because it throws the viewer into a tailspin. And in that mental state, in his effort to resolve the contradiction, he will normally choose to…give in. Surrender. Believe in the anchor. It’s the easier path.

The viewer will even doubt his own perception. “I see no good reason for Building 7 to collapse, but the news doesn’t bring that up, so…it must be me.”

This is the power of the news. It presents absurdities and then moves right along, as if nothing has happened.

For the viewer, it’s the equivalent of: “Don’t you see that pile-up of smashed cars on the freeway, and the smoke? No? Oh well, it must be me. I guess I was wrong. There isn’t any pile-up.”

The introduction of contradiction, dissonance, and absurdity parading as ordinary reality is an intentional feature of brainwashing.

On the nightly news, the anchor reports that US government debt has risen by another three trillion dollars. He then cuts to a statement from a Federal Reserve spokesman: the new debt level isn’t a problem; in fact, it’s sound monetary policy; it strengthens the economy.

The viewer, caught up in this absurdity, tries to make sense of it, then gives up and passively accepts it. Brainwashing.

Smoothly transitioning from this story, the anchor relays information from the CDC: vaccination rates must achieve 90% in the population, in order to protect people from dangerous viruses. The viewer thinks, “Well, my daughter is already vaccinated, so if she comes into contact with a child who isn’t vaccinated, why would that be a problem for her? Why does 90% of the population have to be vaccinated to keep her safe? She’s already vaccinated.”

The viewer wrestles with this absurdity for a moment, then gives in and accepts what the CDC and the anchor are saying. More passivity. More brainwashing.

The anchor moves right along to the next story: “The US is experiencing one of the coldest winters in history, further evidence of the effects of global warming, according to scientists at the United Nations.”

The viewer shakes his head, tries to deal with this dissonance, surrenders, and accepts what he is hearing. Deeper passivity is the result. Deeper brainwashing.

On and on it goes, day after day, month after month, year after year, on the news.

Contradiction, absurdity, dissonance; acceptance, surrender, passivity.

The same general formula is used in interrogations and formal mind control. It adds up to disorientation of the target.

Most disoriented people opt for the lowest – common-denominator solution: give in; accept the power of the person of authority.

When it comes to the news, that person is the anchor, the narrator, the presenter of reality.

He sows the ground with seeds of dissonance. That is how he gains compliance from the viewer.

If the news anchor experiences moments of conscience and self-doubt, he can tell himself he is doing the work of a journalist: he’s presenting information obtained from reliable sources. If these sources are spouting contradictions and absurdities, so be it. “Nothing better is available.”

Among the many supporters of conventional news is the education system. Most teachers never learn logic, and they don’t teach it. The result? Their students never gain the ability or the courage to reject the news and its dissonances.

What little these students gain from 12 or 16 years of schooling they eventually sacrifice on the altar of consensus reality—as broadcast every night on the screen before them.

In the face of absurdities that never add up or make sense, they surrender their minds.

If you gain enough distance from the news and watch it every night and pick it apart and see every dissonance, you realize the news is utterly Surreal. However, it is sold as utterly Normal. That is its trump card—the ability to sell itself as the ultimate in Normalcy.

That is its greatest achievement: overcoming its deepest contradiction.

Vexman

Original article can be read here

Could I, I thought, be the last coward on earth? How terrifying!

 Maybe our colonel knew why they were shooting, maybe the Germans knew, but I, so help me, hadn't the vaguest idea. As far back as I could search my memory, I hadn't done a thing to the Germans, I'd always treated them friendly and polite. I knew the Germans pretty well, I'd even gone to school in their country when I was little, near Hanover. I'd spoken their language. A bunch of loudmouthed little halfwits, that's what they were, with pale, furtive eyes like wolves; we'd go out to the woods together after school to feel the girls up, or we'd fire popguns or pistols you could buy for four marks. And we drank sugary beer together. But from that to shooting at us right in the middle of the road, without so much as a word of introduction, was a long way, a very long way. If you asked me, they were going too far.

This war, in fact, made no sense at all. It couldn't go on.

Had something weird got into these people? Something I didn't feel at all? I suppose I hadn't noticed it ...

Anyway, my feelings toward them hadn't changed. In spite of everything. I'd have liked to understand their brutality, but what I wanted still more, enormously, with all my heart, was to get out of there, because suddenly the whole business looked to me like a great big mistake.

"In a mess like this," I said to myself, "there's nothing to be done, all you can do is clear out ..."

Over our heads, two millimeters, maybe one millimeter from our temples, those long tempting lines of steel, that bullets make when they're out to kill you, were whistling through the hot summer air.

I'd never felt so useless as I did amid all those bullets in the sunlight. A vast and universal mockery.

I was only twenty at the time. Deserted farms in the distance, empty wide-open churches, as if the peasants had gone out for the day to attend a fair at the other end of the county, leaving everything they owned with us for safekeeping, their countryside, their carts with the shafts pointing in the air, their fields, their barnyards, the road, the trees, even the cows, a chained dog, the works. Leaving us free to do as we pleased while they were gone. Nice of them, in a way. "Still," I said to myself, "if they hadn't gone somewhere else, if there were still somebody here, I'm sure we wouldn't be behaving so badly! So disgustingly! We wouldn't dare in front of them!" But there wasn't a soul to watch us! Nobody but us, like newlyweds that start messing around when all the people have gone home. And another thought I had (behind a tree) was that I wished Déroulède[6]? the one I'd heard so much about?had been there to describe his reactions when a ball tore open his guts. Those Germans squatting on the road, shooting so obstinately, were rotten shots, but they seemed to have ammunition to burn, whole warehouses full, it looked to me. Nobody could say this war was over! I have to hand it to the colonel, his bravery was remarkable. He roamed around in the middle of the road, up and down and back and forth in the midst of the bullets as calmly as if he'd been waiting for a friend on a station platform, except just a tiny bit impatient.

One thing I'd better tell you right away, I'd never been able to stomach the country, I'd always found it dreary, those endless fields of mud, those houses where nobody's ever home, those roads that don't go anywhere. And if to all that you add a war, it's completely unbearable. A sudden wind had come up on both sides of the road, the clattering leaves of the poplars mingled with the sharp crackling sounds aimed at us from down the road. Those unknown soldiers missed us every time, but they spun a thousand deaths around us, so close they seemed to clothe us. I was afraid to move.

That colonel, I could see, was a monster. Now I knew it for sure, he was worse than a dog, he couldn't conceive of his own death. At the same time I realized that there must be plenty of brave men like him in our army, and just as many no doubt in the army facing us. How many, I wondered. One or two million, say several millions in all? The thought turned my fear to panic. With such people this infernal lunacy could go on for ever... . Why would they stop? Never had the world seemed so implacably doomed.

Could I, I thought, be the last coward on earth? How terrifying! ... All alone with two million stark raving heroic madmen, armed to the eyeballs? With and without helmets, without horses, on motorcycles, bellowing, in cars, screeching, shooting, plotting, flying, kneeling, digging, taking cover, bounding over trails, root-toot-tooting, shut up on earth as if it were a loony bin, ready to demolish everything on it, Germany, France, whole continents, everything that breathes, destroy destroy, madder than mad dogs, worshiping their madness (which dogs don't), a hundred, a thousand times madder than a thousand dogs, and a lot more vicious! A pretty mess we were in! No doubt about it, this crusade I'd let myself in for was the apocalypse!

You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex. How, when I left the Place Clichy, could I have imagined such horror? Who could have suspected, before getting really into the war, all the ingredients that go to make up the rotten, heroic, good-for-nothing soul of man? And there I was, caught up in a mass flight into collective murder, into the fiery furnace ... Something had come up from the depths, and this is what happened.

The colonel was still as cool as a cucumber, I watched him as he stood on the embankment, taking little messages sent by the general, reading them without haste as the bullets flew all around him, and tearing them into little pieces. Did none of those messages include an order to put an immediate stop to this abomination? Did no top brass tell him there had been a misunderstanding? A horrible mistake? A misdeal? That some-body'd got it all wrong, that the plan had been for maneuvers, a sham battle, not a massacre! Not at all! "Keep it up, colonel! You're doing fine!" That's what General des Entrayes,[7] the head of our division and commander over us all, must have written in those notes that were being brought every five minutes by a courier, who looked greener and more shitless each time. I could have palled up with that boy, we'd have been scared together. But we had no time to fraternize. So there was no mistake? So there was no law against people shooting at people they couldn't even see! It was one of the things you could do without anybody reading you the riot act. In fact, it was recognized and probably encouraged by upstanding citizens, like the draft, or marriage, or hunting! ... No two ways about it. I was suddenly on the most intimate terms with war. I'd lost my virginity. You've got to be pretty much alone with her as I was then to get a good look at her, the slut, full face and profile. A war had been switched on between us and the other side, and now it was burning! Like the current between the two carbons of an arc lamp! And this lamp was in no hurry to go out! It would get us all, the colonel and everyone else, he looked pretty spiffy now. but he wouldn't roast up any bigger than me when the current from the other side got him between the shoulders. There are different ways of being condemned to death. Oh! What wouldn't I have given to be in jail instead of here! What a fool I'd been! If only I had had a little foresight and stolen something or other when it would have been so easy and there was still time. I never think of anything. You come out of jail alive, out of a war you don't! The rest is blarney. If only I'd had time, but I didn't. There was nothing left to steal. How pleasant it would be in a cozy little jailhouse, I said to myself, where the bullets couldn't get in. Where they never got in! I knew of one that was ready and waiting, all sunny and warm! I saw it in my dreams, the jailhouse of Saint-Germain to be exact, right near the forest. I knew it well, I'd often passed that way. How a man changes! I was a child in those days, and that jail frightened me. Because I didn't know what men are like. Never again will I believe what they say or what they think. Men are the thing to be afraid of, always, men and nothing else.

How much longer would this madness have to go on before these monsters dropped with exhaustion? How long could a convulsion like this last? Months? Years? How many?

Maybe till everyone's dead? All these lunatics? Every last one of them? And seeing events were taking such a desperate turn, I decided to stake everything on one throw, to make one last try, to see if I couldn't stop the war, just me, all by myself! At least in this one spot where I happened to be.

The colonel was only two steps away from me, pacing. I'd talk to him. Something I'd never done. This was a time for daring. The way things stood, there was practically nothing to lose. "What is it?" he'd ask me, startled, I imagined, at my bold interruption. Then I'd explain the situation as I saw it, and we'd see what he thought. The essential is to talk things over. Two heads are better than one.

I was about to take that decisive step when, at that very moment, who should arrive on the double but a dismounted cavalryman (as we said in those days), exhausted, shaky in the joints, holding his helmet upside-down in one hand like Belisarius,[8] trembling, all covered with mud, his face even greener than the courier I mentioned before. He stammered and gulped. You'd have thought he was struggling to climb out of a tomb, and it made him sick to his stomach. Could it be that this spook didn't like bullets any more than I did? That he saw them coming like me?

"What is it?" Disturbed, the colonel stopped him short; the glance he flung at that ghost was of steel.

It made our colonel very angry to see that wretched cavalryman so incorrectly clad and shitting in his pants with fright. The colonel had no use for fear, that was a sure thing. And especially that helmet held in hand like a bowler was really too much in a combat regiment like ours that was just getting into the war. It was as if this dismounted cavalryman had seen the war and taken his hat off in greeting.

Under the colonel's withering look the wobbly messenger snapped to attention, pressing his little finger to the seam of his trousers as the occasion demanded. And so he stood on the embankment, stiff as a board, swaying, the sweat running down his chin strap; his jaws were trembling so hard that little abortive cries kept coming out of him, like a puppy dreaming. You couldn't make out whether he wanted to speak to us or whether he was crying.

Our Germans squatting at the end of the road had just changed instruments. Now they were having their fun with a machine gun, sputtering like handfuls of matches, and all around us flew swarms of angry bullets, as hostile as wasps.

The man finally managed to articulate a few words:

"Colonel, sir, Sergeant Barousse has been killed."

"So what?"

"He was on his way to meet the bread wagon on the Etrapes road, sir."

"So what?"

"He was blown up by a shell!"

"So what, dammit!"

"That's what, colonel, sir."

"Is that all?"

"Yes, sir, that's all, colonel, sir."

"What about the bread?" the colonel asked.

That was the end of the dialogue, because, I remember distinctly, he barely had time to say

"What about the bread?" That was all. After that there was nothing but flame and noise. The kind of noise you wouldn't have thought possible. Our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth were so full of that noise I thought it was all over and I'd turned into noise and flame myself. After a while the flame went away, the noise stayed in my head, and my arms and legs trembled as if somebody were shaking me from behind. My limbs seemed to be leaving me, but then in the end they stayed on. The smoke stung my eyes for a long time, and the prickly smell of powder and sulfur hung on, strong enough to kill all the fleas and bedbugs in the whole world.

I thought of Sergeant Barousse, who had just gone up in smoke like the man told us. That was good news. Great, I thought to myself. That makes one less stinker in the regiment! He wanted to have me court-martialed for a can of meat. "It's an ill wind," I said to myself. In that respect, you can't deny it, the war seemed to serve a purpose now and then! I knew of three or four more in the regiment, real scum, that I'd have gladly helped to make the acquaintance of a shell, like Barousse.

As for the colonel, I didn't wish him any hard luck. But he was dead too. At first I didn't see him. The blast had carried him up the embankment and laid him down on his side, right in the arms of the dismounted cavalryman, the courier, who was finished too. They were embracing each other for the moment and for all eternity, but the cavalryman's head was gone, all he had was an opening at the top of the neck, with blood in it bubbling and glugging like jam in a kettle. The colonel's belly was wide open, and he was making a nasty face about it. It must have hurt when it happened. Tough shit for him! If he'd beat it when the shooting started, it wouldn't have happened.

All that tangled meat was bleeding profusely.

Shells were still bursting to the right and left of the scene.

I'd had enough, I was glad to have such a good pretext for making myself scarce. I even hummed a tune, and reeled like when you've been rowing a long way and your legs are wobbly. "Just one shell!" I said to myself. "Amazing how quick just one shell can clean things up. Could you believe it?" I kept saying to myself. "Could you believe it!" There was nobody left at the end of the road. The Germans were gone. But that little episode had taught me a quick lesson, to keep to the cover of the trees. I was in a hurry to get back to our command post, to see if anyone else in our regiment had been killed on reconnaissance. There must be some good dodges, I said to myself, for getting taken prisoner ... Here and there in the fields a few puffs of smoke still clung to the ground.

"Maybe they're all dead," I thought. "Seeing they refuse to understand anything whatsoever, the best solution would be for them all to get killed instantly ... The war would be over, and we'd go home ... Maybe we'd march across the Place Clichy in triumph ... Just one or two survivors ... In my dream ... Strapping good fellows marching behind the general, all the rest would be dead like the colonel ... Like Barousse ... like Vanaille (another bastard) ... etc. They'd shower us with decorations and flowers, we'd march through the Arc de Triomphe, We'd go to a restaurant, they'd serve us free of charge, we'd never pay for anything anymore, never as long as we lived! We're heroes! we'd say when they brought the bill ... Defenders of the Patrie! That would do it! ... We'd pay with little French flags! ... The lady at the cash desk would refuse to take money from heroes, she'd even give us some, with kisses thrown in, as we filed out. Life would be worth living."

As I was running, I noticed my arm was bleeding, just a little though, a far from satisfactory wound, a scratch. I'd have to start all over.

It was raining again, the fields of Flanders oozed with dirty water. For a long time I didn't meet a soul, only the wind and a little later the sun. From time to time, I couldn't tell from where, a bullet would come flying merrily through the air and sunshine, looking for me, intent on killing me, there in the wilderness. Why? Never again, not if I lived another hundred years, would I go walking in the country. A solemn oath.

(...)

From time to time one of us disappeared. That meant the case against him was ready and the court-martial would sentence him to a disciplinary battalion, to the front, or, if he was very lucky, to the Insane Asylum in Clamart.

More dubious warriors kept arriving, from every branch of service, some very young, some almost old, some terrified, some ranting and swaggering. Their wives and parents came to see them, and their children too, staring wide-eyed, on Thursdays. They all wept buckets in the visiting room, especially in the evening. All the helplessness of a world at war wept when the visits were over and the women and children left, dragging their feet in the bleak gas-lit corridor. A herd of sniveling riffraff, that's what they were; disgusting.

To Lola it was still an adventure, coming to see me in that prison, as you might have called it. We two didn't cry. Where would we have got our tears from?

"Is it true that you've gone mad, Ferdinand?" she asked me one Thursday.

"It's true," I admitted.

"But they'll treat you here?"

"There's no treatment for fear, Lola."

"Is it as bad as all that?"

"It's worse, Lola. My fear is so bad that if I die a natural death later on, I especially don't want to be cremated. I want them to leave me in the ground, quietly rotting in the graveyard, ready to come back to life ... Maybe ... how do we know? But if they burned me to ashes, Lola, don't you see, it would be over, really over ... A skeleton, after all, is still something like a man ... It's more likely to come back to life than ashes ... Reduced to ashes, you're finished! ... What do you think? ... Naturally the war ..."

"Oh, Ferdinand! Then you're an absolute coward! You're as loathsome as a rat ..."

"Yes, an absolute coward, Lola, I reject the war and everything in it ... I don't deplore it ... I don't resign myself to it ... I don't weep about it ... I just plain reject it and all its fighting men. I don't want anything to do with them or it. Even if there were nine hundred and ninety-five million of them and I were all alone, they'd still be wrong and I'd be right. Because I'm the one who knows what I want: I don't want to die."

"But it's not possible to reject the war, Ferdinand! Only crazy people and cowards reject the war when their country is in danger ..."

"If that's the case, hurrah for the crazy people! Look, Lola, do you remember a single name, for instance, of any of the soldiers killed in the Hundred Years War? ... Did you ever try to find out who any of them were? ... No! ... You see? You never tried ... As far as you're concerned they're as anonymous, as indifferent, as the last atom of that paperweight, as your morning bowel movement ... Get it into your head, Lola, that they died for nothing!

For absolutely nothing, the idiots! I say it and I'll say it again! I've proved it! The one thing that counts is life! In ten thousand years, I'll bet you, this war, remarkable as it may seem to us at present, will be utterly forgotten ... Maybe here and there in the world a handful of scholars will argue about its causes or the dates of the principal hecatombs that made it famous ... Up until now those are the only things about men that other men have thought worth remembering after a few centuries, a few years, or even a few hours ... I don't believe in the future, Lola ..."

When she heard me flaunting my shameful state like that, she lost all sympathy for me ... Once and for all she put me down as contemptible, and decided to leave me without further ado. It was too much. When I left her that evening at the hospital gate, she didn't kiss me. Evidently the thought that a condemned man might have no vocation for death was too much for her.

From: Journey to the End of the Night

by

LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE