1 «A fashion is exhausted in the everyday, a style is exhausted over centuries»1; but could it be that the attempt to control inspiration, to be superhuman, leads us to exhaust styles in the everyday?
«Curiosity and petulance»: is this because the miracle is innate?: «this is the best of all possible worlds»2?
2 Everything is translucent: nothing “classic” on its own ceases to be part of the rest; even what changes seems invariable because of this translucence that makes up each “thing.”
3 Just as there is a spectrum of light, visible to the human eye only within a certain range, there is a spectrum of translucence and a range of that spectrum that is visible to us.
4 The problem of resurrection, of being wrong about whether something was lost forever or not, whether that tree is dead or will grow green again, or whether this or that relationship will last or is over for good, may have something to do with not wanting to be proved wrong.
Being wrong is not in itself a bad thing; it is the nature of everything symbolic. And it is the repression of the symbolic that often makes us ill: that brilliant, spontaneous human capacity to do things that «point conformally to all the rest»3.
5 In this respect, Jünger:
“On self-criticism: the author reading a text of his own that he has forgotten: «If someone else had written it, it would be good».”
6 One of the taboos imposed on understanding is that of getting past names. This has to do with the difficulties we encounter in being wrong: at that point we wonder whether the bonsai will grow green again or not; we doubt it because being wrong, like the universe, «is a house that loses nothing», that is, because every loss is a relative loss; and therefore in this respect we have to «preserve the bench and not the square»4.
7 Death makes the relative absolute. Is the absolute a «human, all too human» error of perspective?
There is something absolute in the relative, «in a house where nothing is lost»; we see it from a mortal perspective, though of course that is not a «problem» for the universe as a whole. Nor are the experts sure whether our world is not just one among others; that pushes the power to believe in something to an extreme level of translucency.
References
- Ernst Jünger — La Tijera, Af. 1
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Goethe — Conversaciones con Eckermann
- Ernst Jünger — Máximas y mínimas a El Trabajador
- Ernst Jünger — Pasados los setenta, Diario V (1991 -1996)
On self-criticism: the author reading a text of his own that he has forgotten: «If someone else had written it, it would be good»