September 9, 2026

1 Exposure improves with time, through time. It has something to do with diversity. In the cosmopolis, works, in successive stages, are influenced from several perspectives.

What we experience is that the cost in time is paid with time, above all with the time we have before we die: it demands waiting: tomorrow we will have insights into the text we write today. Does this imply a lack of exposure to danger; if that exposure were greater, should we wait less?

The simultaneous is more encompassing than the successive. But without giving time its proper place, we are grossly timeless, that is: «we shoot sparrows with cannons.» This also leads us into error, into sin—to miss the mark: in time, intuition may be «too much»: Darwin belongs only to time.

2 HH: «…We die beyond their unceasing living,» that is: in that beyond within the unceasing. Time acts as the ceasing element, that is: time preserves—but it does so relatively, like us; it must treat what is fundamental in relative terms. Time, in dealing with us, also has to deal with fundamental things.

3 For all that can be criticized in the exoteric, we are constantly proceeding from the die-stamping of the figure.

4 The conception of reality is very deep, that is: it also corresponds to the dead, not only to the living. One could also say that the living must be seen as a law of reality.

5 HH: In words, mathematics is implicit; hence the philosopher has this experience: he re-formulates, repeats the question. Does this mean that words, compared with mathematics, are very specific?

If that were so, the writer’s mistake is to think he is formulating when what he is doing is reformulating. This does not mean there is greater value in distributed energy (mathematics) than in undistributed energy (words); this character of having no reserves is what brings mathematics close to facts.

That is: though with greater reserve, it is the same thing that makes a text effective, makes it have a price, makes it popular: being emptied out, having no reserves; this can be seen on every level, including in the popularity of indiscreet books.

Words save what they distribute; mathematics holds nothing back in exposure. Words are masks; mathematics is only mask. Content is a lot of form; form, little content. We are still confused about this; distinctions are lacking.

HH: The force of equations comes, if they are well achieved, from the fact that there are no reserves, in the full exposure of what is well achieved; as in a symbol, it is what it is—but at the same time it is accessible; words, by contrast, have much of their value implicit. Where is the implicit worth more than the explicit, and where the explicit? Words are not a «de-monstration»; mathematics by its nature is.

6 «The lack of leaps in narrative,» lack of abbreviation: just because one has time does not mean others do, though they «could» have it.

«The causal relation is missing in the philosophical text»: modules are collected. This passage by Jünger resembles those of Heraclitus and those of Jesus; we experience something that «is hard for us to pin down»—that is: are we missing that necessity?

Lack of depth?: Something similar happens on a first reading of Nietzsche: at the same time we notice that he asks things we had not asked ourselves, and that his answers come from a depth that is not usual.

7 Nietzsche’s question about Jesus is a good one: was he marked by a deeper hunger for love, did he demand love with the force of a deeper need?, was his will to power deeper than all the others?

It is hard not to see Jesus as the most unfortunate man in the world. But at the same time he «had good instincts»; does this require us to separate the most absolute misery — from instinctive decadence?, and is this not a typically human experience?: how could we recover if these two goods or evils were not separate?

Nihilism — Instincts. Is the abyss, as much as the dimensions of the universe, only a question of space? Then is tragic pathos, insofar as it is based on the abyssal, what demands that guilt be separated from cause? Is what drives the Faustian impulse great dimensions and nothing more?: hence its desire to conquer the East.

The indignant man is a blockhead; he thinks there is more than great dimensions in what drives our Faustian impulse. That our instincts, if given space, can grow and be thrilled by it is understandable, but he will find nothing more than that in that empty space between the stars.