The Book in 5 Points

1. A very nice and complete biography of Townes van Zandt. It succeeds in the primary function of a biography in that all of my questions about the subject have been answered. The book is well written and well structured
2. As I’ve gotten older my impression of TVZ has darkened considerably. I used to consider him (when I discovered him 30 years ago) as something akin to a tortured Old Testament prophet who was somehow clued into the unseen full picture of life. 20 years ago I discussed him with my guitar teacher of the time who described him as something like “a parasite who wrote some good songs”. I’m now much closer to that point of view than my original point of view. This book, and having reached the same age as TVZ when he died, largely cement that theory.
3. After reading the book I listened to his albums in order (the ones released during his lifetime) and my esteem dropped a bit more. Many, many of them were dramatically overproduced and hide all of the strengths of TVZ. Some of this songs remain powerful gems that resonate powerfully to this day. His recorded output is low for the length of his musical career.
4. I’d assumed that TVZ had a rough and tramautic childhood in some way to be write such dark and gloomy songs, but no! In fact his childhood seemed pretty awesome. Intact family, loving parents, close friends, upper middle class lifestyle, close extended family, no outside trauma at all – he checked all of the boxes for a happy life. But, I suppose a description of him as “a hedonist, first last and always” was true.
5. He had a huge ability to attract people who would enable his self destruction.

How I Discovered It

Part of my 2025 exploration of American folk music.

Who Should Read It?

Townes van Zandt fans – there is no general interest value to be had

Highlights

“I remember my dad telling stories about how the Depression had absolutely no effect on his family, except all of a sudden their neighbors were as poor as they were.”

Three months later, Townes asked his father if he could have a guitar for Christmas. As Townes later told the story, his father told him he could have a guitar if he learned to play “Fraulein,” a sentimental country hit of the time, as his first song.9 Townes readily agreed. He got the guitar for Christmas, and by New Year’s he had learned “Fraulein,” which he proudly played for his father and which he continued to play for the rest of his life.

Hank Williams and Lightnin’ Hopkins both made their first commercial recordings in 1946; in 1950, Woody Guthrie’s Dustbowl Ballads was rereleased to a growing new audience of young folk music enthusiasts, the same year that Leadbelly’s old chestnut “Goodnight, Irene,” recorded by the Weavers, was the most popular song of the year; in 1952, Harry Smith’s monumental Anthology of American Folk Music was released on the Folkways label and began to seep into the underground consciousness; Hank Williams died at the age of twenty-nine in the back seat of his baby-blue Cadillac on New Year’s Day 1953, and his rise to lasting fame was launched in earnest; and Sam Phillips was just starting to record blues, country, and the beginnings of rock’n’roll music at his little studio in Memphis, and was putting the records out on his fledgling Sun label.

On a “vocational interest” test in 1960, Townes’ highest rating was for “musician (performer),” followed by “real estate salesman.” Just below that was “artist,” and below that, “lawyer.

he didn’t pay any attention to the basic rule of a police state, which is, you obey the little rules, you shine your shoes, look nice, turn out well, hit all your appointments on time, and then you can break the big rules. Well, Townes was a scofflaw at every point. So consequently he was not too highly regarded by those in power.

Then he got into glue sniffing and so forth in his senior year. But always, Townes was a hedonist, first, last, and always…

Townes’ drinking and substance abuse, at first sporadic and experimental at Shattuck, soon became methodical and habitual, and the pattern of mood swings he had exhibited in his later teen years became steadily more pronounced.

This is how Van Zandt told the story of his most infamous youthful stunt to that writer: I lived on the fourth story of this apartment building, and at one point during one of these parties I went out and sat on the edge of the balcony and started leanin’ backwards. I decided I was gonna lean over and just see what it felt like all the way up to where you lost control and you were falling. I realized that to do it I’d have to fall. But I said, “Hell, I’m gonna do it anyway.” So I started leanin’ back really slow and really payin’ attention, and I fell. Fell over backwards and landed four stories down. Flat on my back. I remember the impact and exactly what it felt like and all the people screamin’. I had a bottle of wine and I stood up. Hadn’t spilled any wine. Felt no ill effects whatsoever. Meanwhile, all the people had jammed onto the elevator, an’ when the doors opened I was standin’ there and they knocked me over coming out—an’ it hurt more bein’ knocked over than fallin’ four stories.

Myrick recalls having a lot of parties at the apartment, most of them less crazed than the one that featured Townes going over the balcony. “He didn’t fall; he jumped,” Myrick says of the notorious occasion, “and it was the third floor. We were all blasted. I think it was just alcohol. And he was standing on the balcony, and he had his cowboy boots on, and he said ‘I wonder if I’d break my leg if I jumped.’ We just looked at him like he was nuts. And he did it. He sprained his ankle but he didn’t break anything. And the landing was not soft.”

Bob Myrick confirms that throughout this time, Townes continued to be immersed in his music. He was listening to Hoyt Axton and Dave Van Ronk records intensely, Myrick remembers, and a lot of Delta blues.

But they’d gotten wind that he was trying to drop out of school with the forged letter, and now we’re trying to pull Townes off the rug with glue stuck to his sideburns.… So perhaps that explains why they said, ‘You’re going to the hospital.’

The psychological report concluded with emphasis that Townes had an “obsessive-compulsive schizoid character with strong paranoid trends.” The official diagnosis was “Schizophrenic reaction, Schizo-affective type (Depression).”4 The treatment prescribed was cutting-edge at that time: a regimen of “shock therapies”—both insulin coma therapy and electroshock treatments—to be administered over the course of the next couple of months—nearly forty treatments between early April and early June 1964—during which time Townes was only to leave the confines of the hospital on occasional supervised weekend passes.

Insulin coma therapy, which had been introduced in the mid-1930s to treat schizophrenia, consists of injecting the patient with increasing amounts of insulin each morning in order to lower the blood sugar enough to bring about a coma. The procedure was performed in a special treatment room with specially trained nurses and attendants. “The comas were allowed to continue for about thirty minutes,” according to Dr. Jameson, “then [were] terminated by injecting fifty-percent glucose intravenously, followed by the administration of sugared orange juice and then breakfast. Acute episodes of schizophrenia did end quite satisfactorily with this treatment in most cases.”

“Obviously, the man wasn’t really schizophrenic, because he was able to do as much as he did,” Dr. Jameson says unequivocally. “Now we would call it ‘bipolar with psychotic features.’ Manic-depression—bipolar disorder—is basically a mood disorder, and it sometimes shows some psychotic features. If he was manic, and he probably was when he was psychotic, he couldn’t sleep, and just ordinary sleep deprivation can make a person psychotic.”

Manic-depressive illness is often complicated by the subject’s substance abuse, and Van Zandt clearly was abusing substances, primarily alcohol, prior to his diagnosis and treatment. In fact, it was recognized at the time and is even better understood today that a much greater percentage of individuals with bipolar disorder are diagnosed as alcoholics than in the general population, and Townes unquestionably was an alcoholic.6 It is important to note the relationship between the two distinct diseases. “The alcoholism could have started as his own misguided attempt to treat himself, because it would have made him feel better,” Dr. Jameson says. “Often we see patients for alcoholism and drug abuse where the underlying cause is that they’re manic-depressive. And they have to be treated for that before they can be treated for the other.”

And it seemed that the future was all that Townes was equipped to discuss. “He virtually had no memory of his childhood,” Fran says. She recalls that Townes’ mother, distraught by this unexpected after-effect of his treatment, would go through the family photo albums repeatedly with Townes, telling him stories to reinforce his memories and to help him rebuild them.

Others have speculated that Townes pretended to have lost these long-term memories to inculcate guilt in his father and gain sympathy from his mother.

the marriage was made official that night because of a new military draft law taking effect the next day. In 1963, President Kennedy had changed Selective Service regulations so that married men were placed one step lower in the order of call-up than single men, spawning a rush of so-called “Kennedy husbands.” Now, Lyndon Johnson’s new Executive Order number 11241 stated that “men married on or after August 26, 1965, with no children, are … considered the same as single men in Class 1-A with regard to order of call.…” Townes got in as one of the very last “Kennedy husbands,” and remained eligible for draft call-up only in the fourth order of call, after “all delinquents, volunteers, and single and newly married men [age 19 to 26, oldest first] in Class I-A were selected for induction.” Had the marriage taken place the next day, he would have been considered the same status as single men in Class I-A and would have been near the top of the list of young men headed for Vietnam.

While Bob Dylan’s writing was inspiring folk musicians everywhere, Townes’ inspiration was more direct. “Townes was right there,” Clark stresses, “and while you couldn’t be Townes or write like Townes, you could come from the same place artistically.”

Townes determined that he wanted to join the Army. He went to a recruiter to sign up, Fran recalls, “and one of the things they ask is, ‘Have you ever been in a mental hospital?’ And of course he had been. So he had to get a clearance from the doctors, and they wouldn’t give it to him. That is when they wrote this letter, which said that he was an acute schizophrenic and was only marginally adapting to life.17 I will never forget that sentence, because Townes looked at that and said, ‘I’m crazy.’ I said, ‘No, you’re not. It’s just making you 4-F.’ It was one of those kind of mixed blessings. We didn’t have to worry about his going to war, but at the same time there was some desire to keep him out of trouble,

“Tower Song” is a well-crafted love song, if somewhat pious in its assumptions and outlook. It is much more in the commercial folk tradition than “Waitin’ Around to Die,” yet still reveals a depth of thought unusual for that tradition. It very clearly shows the influence of Bob Dylan’s writing circa Another Side of Bob Dylan, and comparing it with the more blues-oriented “Waitin’ Around to Die” illustrates a dichotomy in Townes’ early songwriting that remained quite solid for some years: it is easy to separate Townes’ Dylan-influenced songs from his blues-influenced songs. The clearest sign that Townes’ songwriting is maturing comes later, when those two lines of descent merge and become something uniquely his own.

According to Newbury, though, the reason was simple: the street-smart New Yorker, Eggers, conned the eager young artist—who happened to have a strong hedonistic streak— with talk of “how we’re going to go out there and set the world on fire.”

Townes told an interviewer years later that when the album came out, “The underground station in Houston would play cuts off it from time to time because my mother would just constantly phone in a request. She would try to disguise her voice. ‘Could you please play that Townes Van Zandt song?’ ‘Yes, Mrs. Van Zandt, we’ll play it as soon as we can get to it.’

We went home and went to bed, and about two o’clock in the morning I woke up and … I had gone into labor. I didn’t want to wake [Townes] up, so I kept thinking, this will go away, this will go away.”

For two or three months after the baby was born, things held together. “Then the pressures came back,” according to Fran. It was at this point that Townes started dealing with the new pressures by turning to new substances. For the first time, he started shooting heroin.

“I would come home and he would have drugs in the house with the baby right there.

The hitchhiker turned out to be Townes Van Zandt, and the album was Van Zandt’s brand new release, Our Mother the Mountain. Ely listened to it, then listened to it some more with his friend Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and they decided that they too wanted to write and perform songs like that.

Later he played shows in Austin with his friend Cado Parrish Studdard and some other on-again, off-again musicians, calling the impromptu group the Delta Mama Boys, in honor of a thenfavorite illicit high, Robitussin DM cough syrup, which they called Delta Mama.

There is a relentless quality to the progression of the verses; nature is invoked but there seems to be a power growing that is outpacing nature, an apocalyptic power, all couched, as Townes prefers, in a language of dreams.

He could get up in a venue … with between a hundred and two hundred people, and he was without equal. If it got a little bigger than that, he’d tend to, in my opinion, kind of lose it.” And as the gigs did get bigger, White says, Townes grew more interested in working with supporting musicians.

Townes was really locked into that college circuit, and that’s where the big money was back then, better than the clubs.”

“Rake” addresses the duality, and the possibility of merging its two aspects, in a more fantastic context, personified here by the classic duality of the sun and the moon. The title character thrives in the night and curses the day, expressing the feeling of many sufferers of manic-depressive illness, except here the darkness is not depression, but life-infused mania, casting the rake into a vampire-like existence, while day “would beat me back down,” rendering him hardly able to stand. The rake’s selfawareness is sharp throughout. In the last verse, however, he gets a surprise when “my laughter turned ‘round, eyes blazing and said/ ‘My friend, we’re holding a wedding.’” Through some transmutation—like medication—the night and the day become bound together, and the sharp joys of the life of the night are turned into pain. “Now the dark air is like fire on my skin/And even the moonlight is blinding.” A more vivid rendering of the manic-depressive state is hard to come by in modern verse.

Van Zandt himself was exhausted after the sessions, and like always after a long stay in New York, he was glad to get back to Texas, where he returned to the bosom of his friends in Houston and took up again an unrestricted courtship of his heroin habit.

Townes realized he had left something at home that he now needed, Leslie Jo volunteered to go back and get it. As was her custom, and as was very common at the time, she set out hitchhiking. She was picked up by a man who took her onto a back road, stabbed her more than twenty times, then dumped her in a ditch. She was bleeding profusely, but still alive, and was able to crawl a considerable distance to a nearby house, where she started screaming for help as best she could. A woman came to the door, saw Leslie Jo dying before her eyes, and immediately went to call for an ambulance and the police. When she returned to the front door, Leslie Jo was dead.

he lived in an area called Pasadena, southeast of Houston, “down on the ship channel,” says Mickey White. “It’s a real industrial area; the petrochemical industry. ‘The air is greener in Pasadena.’

‘Two lonesome dudes on an ugly horse’ is about two guys looking to cop. The ugly horse, of course, is heroin.”

She recalls that J.T. often included an “imaginary father” in his games. “This imaginary father was incredible,” she says. “When J.T. would swing he would sit on the side of the swing and say he was saving room for his father to sit with him.”

Fran arrived at the hospital in the middle of the night, and they took her to Townes. “Immediately, I was scared really badly,” she recalls, “because they’d knocked his teeth out at the hospital. They told me he was DOA, and they knocked his teeth out trying to get the tubes out of him.

Bob Myrick visited Townes and was giving him a serious chewing out about the dangerous situation he was placing himself in. “Townes just looked at me with a real funny smirk and he said, ‘Well, it’s not my drug of choice.’

A seriousness of purpose had been coalescing among so-called “pop” artists and musicians that signaled the end of the innocence of the sixties. Significantly, many of these artists were reaching their thirtieth birthdays.

The subconscious must be writing songs all the time. I’ve heard a lot of songwriters express the same feeling, that that song came from elsewhere. It came through me.”

“I don’t really write my songs,” Dylan said, “I just write them down.”

Much like the folk music scene that had formed around the Lomaxes in Houston in the early sixties—a scene the young Guy Clark had absorbed studiously—a growing community of itinerant Texas musicians soon began to form in Nashville, with the Clarks as their nucleus.

As Earl Willis recollects, the purpose of Townes’ trips to the mountains was to dry out from his heroin habit as well as from alcohol. Willis says, “His way of kicking the habit was to go cold turkey, which he did a number of times. He’d go out in the mountains to clean up his act. He had a half interest in a horse out in Colorado, and he’d go and load that horse up with supplies and ride out into the mountains. He’d come back straight, then turn around and go back to Houston and start all over.”

Townes was pleased to be living a spartan existence in the barely furnished trailer—which they called Goat Hill—with some chickens to look after; the liquor store was around the corner, and the pharmacy sold syringes and codeine cough syrup.

Cindy recalls that the shooting of the film was interfering with their heroin shooting:

But these were like the Rhodes scholars of fan mail: eloquently written letters talking about Townes’ music in great detail; saying how he’d saved their life, by listening to one of his songs.”

Townes ended up getting in an armwrestling match for another pint that they had. And he won. Townes was a great arm wrestler…. He understood the leverage, and he was really good at it. He could go in with guys that were much bigger than him and beat them handily. In fact, it was the only thing he was good at gambling on, arm wrestling.”

They left the gathering and went to You Scream, I Scream, where Gradi figured Townes was likely to be found. She told Jeanene they had imported beer, ice cream, and folk music. “I can’t imagine a worse combination,” Jeanene says. “I was a punk rocker. I was hanging out at the Continental Club … I was a wild thing.

The kids are following behind, and whatever money he had left, he rolls down the window right as the cab is pulling out and says, ‘Here, take this home to your mama,’ and throws all the money out the window.”

By this time, there was a new development that Townes and Jeanene couldn’t ignore: Jeanene was pregnant, and she was determined to have the baby. At some point, Townes revealed to Jeanene that he was still a married man and that he didn’t know where his wife was.

Finally, in August, Townes checked himself into the Starlite Recovery Center Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Program—at Kerrville, of all places—where he underwent rehab until early October. Townes recalled later that this was his longest period of sobriety, the three months from August to October, 1982.14 But soon he was drinking again.

The song had come to Nelson through a fortuitous sequence of connections. Peggy Underwood was a good friend of Lana Nelson’s, Willie’s daughter, and Peggy suggested that it would be a great song for Willie to cover. Lana agreed, and played the song for her father during an evening recording session. Willie liked it so much he immediately learned it, then, late that night, woke Haggard up and had him come to the studio to record the song. The recording was done on the first take, and Haggard claimed it was the only song he’d ever recorded before he really knew it.

That same week, the doctors caring for Townes’ mother determined that her cancer was inoperable, and gave her roughly six months to live. Her eldest son married the nearly-nine-months-pregnant Jeanene Lanae Munsell a week later, on March 14, 1983, in a small outdoor ceremony,

Townes called Peggy Underwood, who took him to the Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Treatment Center at Brackenridge Hospital in Austin, where Townes voluntarily checked himself in on July 27. According to hospital records, Townes claimed that he had been in treatment eleven times previously.

Of Townes’ mental status, the Brackenridge doctor’s notes state that “He admits to hearing voices, mostly musical voices. He denies any suicidal ideations. Affect is blunted and mood is sad. Judgment and insight is impaired.” Townes initially expressed some confusion about where he was; his speech was “rambling,” and he walked with a “stumbling gait.” On his second morning in the hospital, he was “more alert,” and he told the doctor that “he will probably be staying for detox and does not want to stay for the program.” Townes requested and signed his own release that same day. He was discharged “AMA [against medical advice]/ Unimproved” on July 30, after only three days in the hospital.

Susanna Clark agrees. “Townes was funny,” she says. “Bob Dylan was a big fan of Townes. Every time Bob Dylan came to town, his people would call the house and say, ‘There’s a backstage pass ready for you at the Dylan concert.’”

Susanna also notes that Townes was inherently “not impressed” with Dylan’s stature, although he admired his writing. As she recalls, “Townes kind of made a joke. He said that when he ran into Bob Dylan on the street, Bob Dylan said, ‘Oh, I have all your records.’ And Townes said, ‘Apparently.’”

Bob observed that Townes joked about his new Nashville home, “saying that he had the perfect place to live; he was right by the airport and there were two liquor stores—he called them ‘LSs’—and a mental hospital all within walking distance.”

Bob Moore remembers Townes stopping in to see him in the midst of the tour. “He just looked worn out,” Moore says. By the time Townes returned to Nashville in July, he was exhausted. And he was drinking again, after nearly a year of sobriety.

First, though, Glass says, Townes “insisted on scouting the street to purchase a walking stick, as his leg was troubling him.” Townes began having attacks of gout around this time, not unusual in heavy drinkers; he was photographed carrying a walking stick in subsequent years. Glass arranged to meet Townes later in the day. “When I came back, he had already drunk the entire contents of the room’s mini bar—every small bottle of whatever. I had neglected to remove it; I was told he was no longer drinking. He blamed the need to do this on the fact that I had turned up in dark sunglasses at the airport and it had freaked him out.’’

Townes also became more and more prone to weeping on stage.

“The truth is the truth,” Gingles says, “and on more than one occasion, in front of me, over at their house, I heard Jeanene tell him, ‘I can’t wait ‘til the day you’re dead, because then you’re gonna be worth more to me than you ever was alive.”

By all accounts, Jeanene demanded that Townes leave the family home in Smyrna and find a place of his own.

Once the doctors realized “that they had a late-stage alcoholic on their hands,” according to Susanna, “they had him in a room that had a glass wall so that the nurses could keep an eye on him at all times. And apparently they were giving him such strong drugs to make the withdrawal seizures not come that he had to be on a respirator.”

The doctor told me that if we ever tried to dry Townes out it would more than likely kill him.”

Townes overdubbed his vocals and did not play guitar at all—an absence that is felt on the final recording more acutely than Donnelly must have imagined during the sessions, even though it was his only option, given Townes’ unsteady condition and declining instrumental skills.

J.T. believes that Townes’ great writing was done before his addictions got the better of him, that “alcoholism didn’t take effect until the last ten years of his life,” adding: “I’ve never seen someone more able to in the worst circumstances, in the worst stage of personal abuse, be able to … convince someone that they were not only not able to help him, but that they had lied to themselves as well, and that their life was a sham and that they should also start drinking heavily.”

“Harold just showed up when it was time to go on the road,” Jim Calvin says. “He would fly into Nashville and stay at Townes’ house for a day or two, make sure the truck was running good, and they’d take off. Or they’d meet up at some airport if they were going to Europe. Harold would be constantly trying to take care of business and keep Townes away from his bottle and stuff, or keep him from getting in too deep before a show, and that kind of business. It was definitely a love–hate thing by the time I met them. They’d test each other, but you could tell they were friends. They would have quit each other in disgust long ago if there wasn’t a whole lot more to it, I think.”

Harold would hide his vodka, and then make him drink Ensure before he could have his vodka, so he’d just guzzle the Ensure so he could get his vodka.”

Jeanene was firm in her determination to keep Townes away from the family when he was drinking.

Some of those involved in the Easley sessions had heard that Townes was in a wheelchair, but seeing his condition when Eggers wheeled him into the studio was a shock for everyone. He was pale and unshaven, gaunt,

An engineer on the sessions remembers Townes and the group working for three days, starting each day around noon, working for two or three hours, then taking a break while Townes had a nap, and returning to continue around six or seven o’clock. Townes and Eggers were at odds the entire time. “I was the mother superior with the stick,” said Eggers.

Early the next day—New Year’s Eve—Steve Shelley phoned Jeanene, who still controlled Townes’ business affairs, and told her they were cancelling the sessions. Townes hadn’t been told of the decision when Jeanene called him at his hotel to tell him, and while they were talking Harold Eggers came in and confirmed what Jeanene had said. She then spoke to Eggers and told him to get Townes back to Nashville and to a doctor, even if he had to drag him kicking and screaming.

He was taken in for x-rays. When the doctor emerged he told Jeanene that Townes had an impacted left femoral neck fracture—a common variety of hip fracture—and that he would need surgery right away. Jeanene was stunned. How could he have a broken hip for nearly two weeks and not know it?

But when she arrived with Will and Katie Belle later in the morning, Townes was suffering delirium tremens, sweating, convulsing, and hallucinating. Jeanene spoke to a doctor, who insisted that Townes be put into alcohol detoxification and rehabilitation, saying it was the only way to save him, but she believed that Townes was too weak for that now. Even though, just the day before, Townes had himself expressed the desire to enter detox, Jeanene had come to believe that detox would kill him. Plus, she said, she had promised Townes that she would take him home. She was insistent. The doctor was equally insistent in his response, advising her against removing a late-stage alcoholic from medical care so soon after a major operation, especially in his extremely fragile, unstable condition.

Telling the hospital staff that she was his wife, Jeanene signed Townes out of the hospital “AMA (Against Medical Advice).”10 They got Townes to the car, where Jeanene lifted the flask and helped Townes take a drink, “which went against everything I had been through with him all those years trying to keep him away from the bottle,” Jeanene later wrote. “It was too late for that and I had to put that dream behind me and just accept what was and love him as he was.”

When Jeanene soon realized that the only medication they had prescribed for Townes at the hospital was antibiotics—no pain medication—she called the doctor. Knowing that Townes had left the hospital against medical advice and that he would drink, the doctor would not prescribe pain medication, which would be dangerous mixed with alcohol;

And this one doctor comes in this room, and boy he was just real upset. He was mad. He said to Jeanene, ‘What the hell were you doing? What were you thinking when you took him out of this hospital?’ And this other doctor just grabbed him and jerked him out of the room. And he says, ‘Unfortunately, Mr. Van Zandt did not survive.’”

Back at home, Katie Belle explained to Royann that “Daddy had a fight with his heart.”

As she recalls, “The doctor came in, and I said, ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘He never should have left the hospital. It’s as simple as that.’ Think about it. He had all those drugs from the hospital still in him, then she’d given him vodka, then the nurse says to get him Tylenol P.M., and Jeanene told me that he took four of them. And damn, you know, he just laid back. Jeanene said that he had his hand on his chest and was just very peaceful. There wasn’t a peep out of him. He just laid back.”

The autopsy report states that “The patient died of a cardiac arrhythmia. The manner of death is natural.” In fact, “cardiac arrhythmia,” which is a disturbance or irregularity in the heartbeat, cannot reliably be diagnosed post-mortem—it is an effect, not a cause. The term is often used by medical examiners as a catch-all phrase when no cause of death is immediately evident. There was no “heart attack,” as such; the autopsy cites a “normal” heart, with no indication of significant coronary disease.

John Townes Van Zandt signed and executed his Last Will and Testament in October of 1988. No new will was prepared between then and the time of Townes and Jeanene’s divorce in 1994, but a codicil with three alterations was added. The first alteration was to a paragraph wherein J.T. and Will would share the inheritance of any of Townes’ assets in succession of Jeanene—the new version removed J.T. and left only Will in line for inheritance. The second alteration gave more details about the intended distribution of Townes’ song copyrights, specifying an intent that the Songwriters Guild of America administer the copyrights. The final amendment reads, in full: “It is my intention that Lara Fisher receive nothing under this my Last Will and Testament.”

On the other side of the coin, the bickering, ill will, and lawsuits surrounding Van Zandt after his death mark the final and most unfortunate similarity between Townes and his hero, Hank Williams.

It became a standing joke around Austin that the letters “BFI” (which stands for Browning-Ferris Industries), which adorned the front of every trash dumpster in town, actually stood for “Blaze Foley Inside.”

This could have been a seizure from alcohol withdrawal, indicating that Townes could not “sip” enough to get his blood alcohol level high enough.

By all accounts, Lara Fisher was Townes’ fourth child—his second oldest— unacknowledged except through the exclusionary gesture in the final version of his Last Will and Testament.

General Thoughts

Largely forgettable work by CS Lewis – I am largely in agreement with Lewis on these topics. Maybe this was a daring and edgy debate when it was written but the topic is well plowed ground at this point. The prose wonderful, and the most redeeming quality of the book

Highlights

But the authors are not yet finished. They add: ‘This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.’

The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and, secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.

He will have no notion that there are two ways of being immune to such an advertisement—that it falls equally flat on those who are above it and those who are below it, on the man of real sensibility and on the mere trousered ape who has never been able to conceive the Atlantic as anything more than so many million tons of cold salt water.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.

The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes.

St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it.11 Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.

This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’.

It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.

myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself—just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind.

The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.

In a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men: the new is merely propaganda.

It is to their credit that Gaius and Titius embrace the first alternative. Propaganda is their abomination: not because their own philosophy gives a ground for condemning it (or anything else) but because they are better than their principles. They probably have some vague notion (I will examine it in my next lecture) that valour and good faith and justice could be sufficiently commended to the pupil on what they would call ‘rational’ or ‘biological’ or ‘modern’ grounds, if it should ever become necessary.

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.

I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.

The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity,21 of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest—Magnanimity—Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

In reality we have not advanced one step. I will not insist on the point that Instinct is a name for we know not what (to say that migratory birds find their way by instinct is only to say that we do not know how migratory birds find their way), for I think it is here being used in a fairly definite sense, to mean an unreflective or spontaneous impulse widely felt by the members of a given species.

Finally, it is worth inquiry whether there is any instinct to care for posterity or preserve the species. I do not discover it in myself: and yet I am a man rather prone to think of remote futurity—a man who can read Mr. Olaf Stapledon with delight.

And all long-term exercises of power, especially in breeding, must mean the power of earlier generations over later ones. The latter point is not always sufficiently emphasized, because those who write on social matters have not yet learned to imitate the physicists by always including Time among the dimensions.

Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man.

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.

It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.

By the logic of their position they must just take their impulses as they come, from chance. And Chance here means Nature. It is from heredity, digestion, the weather, and the association of ideas, that the motives of the Conditioners will spring. Their extreme rationalism, by ‘seeing through’ all ‘rational’ motives, leaves them creatures of wholly irrational behaviour. If you will not obey the Tao, or else commit suicide, obedience to impulse (and therefore, in the long run, to mere ‘nature’) is the only course left open.

It is like the famous Irishman who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to warm his house with no fuel at all.

From My Notion Template. Goodreads link

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. This was an entertaining biography of an old time Tammany Hall politician. He goes into the why and how of the Tammany machines in great detail which consists largely of “know your voters and help them by any means necessary”. The Tammany ground game seems to have been very, very good.

How I Discovered It

I came across this in a litte free library, then found it later for $.99 on Kindle – that was good enough for me so I took the plunge and read it

Who Should Read It?

I found bit helpful in describing our current political situation. This book was a case of the past illuminating the present. Politics was a matter of helping friends and hurting enemies and nothing else, with a higher or lower degree of ceremony. The part about “Honest Graft” was illuminating as well.

Highlights

In 1870, through a strange combination of circumstances, he held the places of Assemblyman, Alderman, Police Magistrate and County Supervisor and drew three salaries at once—a record unexampled in New York politics.

Just let me explain by examples. My party’s in power in the city, and it’s goin’ to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to lay out a new park at a certain place. I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before. Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that’s honest graft.

I’ve told you how I got rich by honest graft. Now, let me tell you that most politicians who are accused of robbin’ the city get rich the same way. They didn’t steal a dollar from the city treasury. They just seen their opportunities and took them. That is why, when a reform administration comes in and spends a half million dollars in tryin’ to find the public robberies they talked about in the campaign, they don’t find them.

The books are always all right. The money in the city treasury is all right. Everything is all right. All they can show is that the Tammany heads of departments looked after their friends, within the law, and gave them what opportunities they could to make honest graft. Now, let me tell you that’s never goin’ to hurt Tammany with the people. Every good man looks after his friends, and any man who doesn’t isn’t likely to be popular. If I have a good thing to hand out in private life, I give it to a friend—Why shouldn’t I do the same in public life?

The men who rule have practiced keepin’ their tongues still, not exercisin’ them.

This civil service law is the biggest fraud of the age. It is the curse of the nation. There can’t be no real patriotism while it lasts. How are you goin’ to interest our young men in their country if you have no offices to give them when they work for their party?

I know more than one young man in past years who worked for the ticket and was just overflowin’ with patriotism, but when he was knocked out by the civil service humbug he got to hate his country and became an Anarchist. This ain’t no exaggeration. I have good reason for sayin’ that most of the Anarchists in this city today are men who ran up against civil service examinations.

I know that the civil service humbug is stuck into the constitution, too, but, as Tim Campbell said: “What’s the constitution among friends?”

First, this great and glorious country was built up by political parties; second, parties can’t hold together if their workers don’t get the offices when they win; third, if the parties go to pieces, the government they built up must go to pieces, too; fourth, then there’ll be h—— to pay.

The fact is that a reformer can’t last in politics. He can make a show for a while, but he always comes down like a rocket. Politics is as much a regular business as the grocery or the dry-goods or the drug business.

It’s as easy as rollin’ off a log—when you’ve got a good workin’ majority and no conscience to speak of.

There’s only one way to hold a district: you must study human nature and act accordin’. You can’t study human nature in books. Books is a hindrance more than anything else. If you have been to college, so much the worse for you. You’ll have to unlearn all you learned before you can get right down to human nature, and unlearnin’ takes a lot of time. Some men can never forget what they learned at college. Such men may get to be district leaders by a fluke, but they never last.

If a family is burned out I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don’t refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation.

The poor are the most grateful people in the world, and, let me tell you, they have more friends in their neighborhoods than the rich have in theirs.

The politicians who make a lastin’ success in politics are the men who are always loyal to their friends, even up to the gate of State prison, if necessary; men who keep their promises and never lie.

It’s because the Irish are in a majority. The Irish, above all people in the world, hates a traitor.

Me and the Republicans are enemies just one day in the year—election day.

You see, we differ on tariffs and currencies and all them things, but we agree on the main proposition that when a man works in politics, he should get something out of it.

The time is fast coming when civil service or the politicians will have to go.

Live like your neighbors even if you have the means to live better. Make the poorest man in your district feel that he is your equal, or even a bit superior to you.

Another thing that people won’t stand for is showin’ off your learnin’. That’s just puttin’ on style in another way. If you’re makin’ speeches in a campaign, talk the language the people talk. Don’t

The time is comm’ and though I’m no youngster, I may see it, when New York City will break away from the State and become a state itself. It’s got to come. The feelin’ between this city and the hayseeds that make a livin’ by plunderin’ it is every bit as bitter as the feelin’ between the North and South before the war. And, let me tell you, if there ain’t a peaceful separation before long, we may have the horrors of civil war right here in New York State. Why, I know a lot of men in my district who would like nothin’ better today than to go out gunnin’ for hayseeds!

Of course, the day may come when we’ll reject the money of the rich as tainted, but it hadn’t come when I left Tammany Hall at 11:25 A.M. today.

THE Democratic party of the nation ain’t dead, though it’s been givin’ a lifelike imitation of a corpse for several years. It can’t die while it’s got Tammany for its backbone.

In two Presidential campaigns, the leaders talked themselves red in the face about silver bein’ the best money and gold hem’ no good, and they tried to prove it out of books. Do you think the people cared for all that guff? No. They heartily indorsed what Richard Croker said at die Hoffman House one day in 1900. “What’s the use of discussin’ what’s the best kind of money?” said Croker. “I’m in favor of all kinds of money—the more the better.” See how a real Tammany statesman can settle in twenty-five words a problem that monopolized two campaigns!

Every morning their agents went to their respective headquarters before seven o’clock and read through the death notices in all the morning papers. If they found that anybody in the district had died, they rushed to the homes of their principals with the information and then there was a race to the house of the deceased to offer condolences, and, if the family were poor, something more substantial. On the day of the funeral there was another contest. Each faction tried to surpass the other in the number and appearance of the carriages it sent to the funeral, and more than once they almost came to blows at the church or in the cemetery.

By these means the Tammany district leader reaches out into the homes of his district, keeps watch not only on the men, but also on the women and children; knows their needs, their likes and dislikes, their troubles and their hopes, and places himself in a position to use his knowledge for the benefit of his organization and himself. Is it any wonder that scandals do not permanently disable Tammany and that it speedily recovers from what seems to be crushing defeat?

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. A delightful biography of an English artist written by an English author. GK Chesterton lives up to his billing as a wonderful English author and a wonderful thinker to spend time with. I can’t say that I really learned much about Blake so much as I learned about Chesterton’s thinking where his views of the world and Blake’s life intertwine. I thoroughly enjoyed Chesterton’s rambling though. Getting to spend some amount of time with Chesterton felt like a treat. The man’s extreme command of the English Language is a wonder to read.

How I Discovered It

It was a very on target Amazon kindle suggestion

Who Should Read It?

True Blake fans, thorough Chesterton fans, and rationalists who want to see why he is the favorite author, artist and poet of that time period for the rationalist community.

Highlights

His manners and morals were trained in the old obvious way; nobody ever thought of training his imagination, which perhaps was all the better for the neglect.

It is probably true that Ireland, if she were free from oppression, would produce more pure mystics than England. And for the same reason she would still produce fewer poets. A poet may be vague, and a mystic hates vagueness. A poet is a man who mixes up heaven and earth unconsciously. A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both. Broadly the English type is he who sees the elves entangled in the forests of Arcady, like Shakespeare and Keats: the Irish type is he who sees the fairies quite distinct from the forest, like Blake and Mr. W. B. Yeats.

No one can understand Blake’s pictures, no one can understand a hundred allusions in his epigrams, satires, and art criticism who does not first of all realise that William Blake was a fanatic on the subject of the firm line. The thing he loved most in art was that lucidity and decision of outline which can be seen best in the cartoons of Raphael, in the Elgin Marbles, and in the simpler designs of Michael Angelo. The thing he hated most in art was the thing which we now call Impressionism—the substitution of atmosphere for shape, the sacrifice of form to tint, the cloudland of the mere colourist.

The figure of man may be a monster, but he is a solid monster. The figure of God may be a mistake, but it is an unmistakable mistake.

In these plates it is quite plain that the artist, when he errs, errs not by vagueness but by hardness of treatment.

He did not see any particular reason why he should not be fond of a man merely because he had called the man a murderer a few days before. And he was innocently surprised if the man was not fond of him. In this he was perhaps rather feminine than masculine.

It was a time of tyranny, and tyranny is always full of small intrigues.

A BROTHER artist said of Blake, with beautiful simplicity, “He is a good man to steal from.” The remark is as philosophical as it is practical. Blake had the great mark of real intellectual wealth; anything that fell from him might be worth picking up. What he dropped in the street might as easily be half-a-sovereign as a halfpenny. Moreover, he invited theft in this further sense, that his mental wealth existed, so to speak, in the most concentrated form. It is easier to steal half-a-sovereign in gold than in halfpence. He was literally packed with ideas—with ideas which required unpacking. In him and his works they were too compressed to be intelligible; they were too brief to be even witty. And as a thief might steal a diamond and turn it into twenty farms, so the plagiarist of Blake might steal a sentence and turn it into twenty volumes.

The idea obviously is this;—that we still for some reason admit the tools of destruction to be nobler than the tools of production, because decorative art is expended on the one and not on the other. The sword has a golden hilt; but no plough has golden handles. There is such a thing as a sword of state; there is no such thing as a scythe of state. Men come to court wearing imitation swords; few men come to court wearing imitation flails.

Blake knew as little about the Middle Ages as Stothard did; but Blake knew about eternity and about man; he saw the image of God under all garments.

People talk about something pedantic in the knowledge of the expert; but what ruins mankind is the ignorance of the expert.

The fuller and fairer way is this: that Blake was one of those few painters who understood his subject as well as his picture.

Nowhere else has he so well expressed his primary theistic ideas—that God, though infinitely gigantic, should be as solid as a giant.

Some people will be quite satisfied with saying that the mere solemn attestation of such miracles marks a man as a madman or a liar. But that is a short cut of sceptical dogmatism which is not far removed from impudence. Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the mad-house on all the mystics of history. To call a man mad because he has seen ghosts is in a literal sense religious persecution. It is denying him his full dignity as a citizen because he cannot be fitted into your theory of the cosmos. It is disfranchising him because of his religion. It is just as intolerant to tell an old woman that she cannot be a witch as to tell her that she must be a witch. In both cases you are setting your own theory of things inexorably against the sincerity or sanity of human testimony. Such dogmatism at least must be quite as impossible to anyone calling himself an agnostic as to anyone calling himself a spiritualist. You cannot take the region called the unknown and calmly say that though you know nothing about it, you know that all its gates are locked. You cannot say, “This island is not discovered yet; but I am sure that it has a wall of cliffs all round it and no harbour.” That was the whole fallacy of Herbert Spencer and Huxley when they talked about the unknowable instead of about the unknown. An agnostic like Huxley must concede the possibility of a gnostic like Blake. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.

Like every great mystic he was also a great rationalist.

If a ploughman says that he saw a ghost, it is not quite sufficient to answer merely that he is a madman. It may have been seeing the ghost that drove him mad. His lunacy may not prove the falsehood of his tale, but rather its terrible truth.

I have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might be paralleled and represented in their beverages. Wine might stand for genuine Catholicism and ale for genuine Protestantism; for these at least are real religions with comfort and strength in them. Clean cold Agnosticism would be clean cold water, an excellent thing, if you can get it. Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might be well represented by soda-water—which is a fuss about nothing. Mr. Bernard Shaw’s philosophy is exactly like black coffee—it awakens but it does not really inspire. Modern hygienic materialism is very like cocoa; it would be impossible to express one’s contempt for it in stronger terms than that. Sometimes, very rarely, one may come across something that may honestly be compared to milk, an ancient and heathen mildness, an earthly yet sustaining mercy—the milk of human kindness. You can find it in a few pagan poets and a few old fables; but it is everywhere dying out.

The pagan gods had become pure fables when Christianity gave them a new lease of life as devils.

The old pagan commonwealths were democratic, but they were not in the least humanitarian. They had no tears to spare for a man at the mercy of the community; they reserved all their anger and sympathy for the community at the mercy of a man. That individual compassion for an individual case was a pure product of Christianity; and when Voltaire flung himself with fury into the special case of Calas, he was drawing all his energies from the religion that he denied.

It is amusing to remark that in the eighteenth century for the first time start up a number of societies which calmly announce that they have existed almost from the beginning of the world. Of these, of course, the best known instance is the Freemasons; according to their own account they began with the Pyramids; but according to everyone else’s account that can be effectively collected, they began with the eighteenth century.

Nevertheless, if a mesmerist really had the powers which some mesmerists have claimed, and which most novels give to him, there is (I hope) no doubt at all that any decent mob would drown him like a witch.

But Blake really had to begin at the beginning, because it was a different beginning. This explains the extraordinary air of digression and irrelevancy which can be observed in some of the most direct and sincere minds. It explains the bewildering allusiveness of Dante; the galloping parentheses of Rabelais; the gigantic prefaces of Mr. Bernard Shaw. The brilliant man seems more lumbering and elaborate than anyone else, because he has something to say about everything. The very quickness of his mind makes the slowness of his narrative. For he finds sermons in stones, in all the paving-stones of the street he plods along. Every fact or phrase that occurs in the immediate question carries back his mind to the ages and the initial power. Because he is original he is always going back to the origins.

The mystic is not the man who makes mysteries but the man who destroys them. The mystic is one who offers an explanation which may be true or false, but which is always comprehensible—by which I mean, not that it is always comprehended, but that it always can be comprehended, because there is always something to comprehend. The man whose meaning remains mysterious fails, I think, as a mystic: and Blake, as we shall see, did, for certain peculiar reasons of his own, often fail in this way.

Impressionism is scepticism. It means believing one’s immediate impressions at the expense of one’s more permanent and positive generalisations. It puts what one notices above what one knows. It means the monstrous heresy that seeing is believing. A white cow at one particular instant of the evening light may be gold on one side and violet on the other. The whole point of Impressionism is to say that she really is a gold and violet cow. The whole point of Impressionism is to say that there is no white cow at all. What can we tell, it cries, beyond what we can see? But the essence of Mysticism is to insist that there is a white cow, however veiled with shadow or painted with sunset gold. Blessed are they who have seen the violet cow and who yet believe in the white one.

The personal is not a mere figure for the impersonal; rather the impersonal is a clumsy term for something more personal than common personality. God is not a symbol of goodness. Goodness is a symbol of God.

Naturally his divinities are definite, because he thought that the more they were definite, the more they were divine. Naturally God was not to him a hazy light breaking through the tangle of the evolutionary undergrowth, nor a blinding brilliancy in the highest place of the heavens. God was to him the magnificent old man depicted in his dark and extraordinary illustrations of “Job,” the old man with the monstrous muscles, the mild stern eyebrows, the long smooth silver hair and beard. In the dialogues between Jehovah and Job there is little difference between the two ponderous and palpable old men, except that the vision of Deity is a little more solid than the human being. But then Blake held that Deity is more solid than humanity.

No man had harder dogmas; no one insisted more that religion must have theology. The Everlasting Gospel was far from being a simple gospel. Blake had succeeded in inventing in the course of about ten years as tangled and interdependent a system of theology as the Catholic Church has accumulated in two thousand.

Any mere tuft or twig can curve with a curve that is incalculable. Any scrap of moss can contain in itself an irregularity that is infinite. The sea is the one thing that is really exciting because the sea is the one thing that is flat.

Some of his views were really what the old mediaeval world called heresies and what the modern world (with an equally healthy instinct but with less scientific clarity) calls fads. In either case the definition of the fad or heresy is not so very difficult. A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something which, even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always prove themselves true in the long run. In short, it is the setting up of the mood against the mind. For instance: it is a mood, a beautiful and lawful mood, to wonder how oysters really feel. But it is a fad, an ugly and unlawful fad, to starve human beings because you will not let them eat oysters. It

There is nothing at all poetical in this revolt. William Blake was a great and real poet; but in this point he was simply unpoetical. Walt Whitman was a great and real poet; but on this point he was prosaic and priggish. Two extraordinary men are not poets because they tear away the veil from sex. On the contrary it is because all men are poets that they all hang a veil over sex. The ploughman does not plough by night, because he does not feel specially romantic about ploughing. He does love by night, because he does feel specially romantic about sex. In this matter Blake was not only unpoetical, but far less poetical than the mass of ordinary men. Decorum is not an over-civilised convention.

The chief difference between Christianity and the thousand transcendental schools of to-day is substantially the same as the difference nearly two thousand years ago between Christianity and the thousand sacred rites and secret societies of the Pagan Empire. The deepest difference is this: that all the heathen mysteries are so far aristocratic, that they are understood by some, and not understood by others. The Christian mysteries are so far democratic that nobody understands them at all.

They thought that one might entirely alter a man’s head without in the least altering his hat.

It is broadly a characteristic of all valuable new-fashioned opinions that they are brought in by old-fashioned men. For the sincerity of such men is proved by both facts—the fact that they do care about their new truth and the fact that they do not care about their old clothes.

The wise man will follow a star, low and large and fierce in the heavens; but the nearer he comes to it the smaller and smaller it will grow, till he finds it the humble lantern over some little inn or stable.

A peculiar book by a peculiar author about a peculiar man. I’ve been fascinated by Junger since I read Storm of Steel, and then his various sci fi books.

The author of the book was a certifiable, and apparently jailable, odious nutcase. Feel free to google him for more info.

It succeeds fairly well as a biography in that, after reading the book I don’t have anywhere near as many questions about the subject as I had before reading the book. His post WW2 experiences did not interest the author that much so that period is not covered as closely. The between the wars era is covered quite thoroughly.

Junger seemed to settle somewhere in the very small far right pro Jewish anti Hitler slice of German political opinion. Junger’s primary motivations were the thought of German people living under non German rule. I guess this book was a good reminder that politics, and political leaders are differing things to differing people in differing places, certainly initially.

Things of particular interest

• He edited things into and out of Storm of Steel with each version – mostly to take away any propaganda value to the Nazis.
• Despite being vocally and publicly anti-Hitler he had his fans as a writer in the 3rd Reich, and got some protection from them, including Hitler (life is strange)
• The range of opinion in the Weimar Republic was quite large
• The Weimar era was probably the only time in history where one could just summon thousands of people for street fighting in some sort of organized fashion
• The notion of a European identity, distinct from both race and America comes into form, mostly from the author of the book and not the subject. As an American I felt a sense of smug superiority after reading over the European complaints.

Reading a book by a foreign author aimed at a foreign readership was an interesting thing – there were numerous comparisons and examples that would be obvious were I raised in France

Not a perfect book but to fill in some of the missing gaps, particularly the sci fi era, but it’s worth reading if you’re a Junger fan (there’s not much else out there on him).

Quotes

An essayist, a poet, and the author of numerous works, Friedrich Georg (1898–1977) would, to the end of his days, maintain a close relationship with his elder brother, thanks to their intimate intellectual complicity.

Though, at their mother’s request, the children were indeed baptised, they would not receive any religious education, thus fulfilling the wishes of their father, who was unwaveringly rationalistic.

Just like Goethe, his father felt sympathy for the French and made certain that Ernst learned their language. He even organised for him a language stay with a French family, at a time when Ernst was still very young.

Indeed, Ernst seemed to be the very embodiment of those imaginative and talented duffers who, ever impervious to mathematics yet passionate about literature, prove to be full-blooded authors.

After three weeks, he felt smothered by despair. With an older comrade, he proceeded to desert the Legion so as to reach the Africa that the walls of the barracks had kept hidden from him. The two fugitives would be promptly brought back by the natives, who received a bounty for this type of work. Ernst thus found himself locked up in the regimental prison of Bel-Abbès.

Patriotic passions set Germany and all other European countries ablaze. Ernst Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg rushed to be enlisted. On the third day of the war, they were incorporated into the 73rd Hanoverian Rifle Regiment,

Nearly a century later, a century that seems to have flown by in the blink of an eye, the stories told by those who witnessed the Great War are now many. None, however, could ever compare to the accounts given by Lieutenant Jünger. Beyond the obvious stylistic qualities, what is most striking about this young man is that although war did not spare him in any way, his descriptions are characterised by a staggering absence of complaints, compassion or moral judgement. In his accounts, life and death, laughter and suffering are intermingled. One thus draws from them a deep feeling of serenity and peace, despite all the fury of action.

Convalescing in the family home in Hanover, Lieutenant Jünger begins to carry out the formatting of the sixteen notebooks in which he had, on a daily basis, noted his memories of the great ordeal. Casting his eye over those notes, his father displays great enthusiasm. Convinced of the exceptional quality of his son’s testimony, he offers to publish it all himself. As regards the publisher’s name, it would be that of the gardener, Robert Meier.26 With Stendhal’s The Red and the Black in mind, Ernst, for his part, initially considers titling his book The Red and the Grey, the latter being the colour of the German field uniform. Soon, however, his recollections of ancient Icelandic sagas would inspire him to opt for the highly evocative title of In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel).

There is no doubt that Jünger was a born writer or almost, but it was the war that offered him the opportunity to open his mind to things and reveal the gifts he bore within.

Written, for the most part, in chronological order, it does not mention any dates, and the reader is often at a loss to put a date, even an approximate one, to the events and circumstances reported by the author. Jünger himself would not withhold the fact that, to him, the literary concern of the artist prevails over the memoirist’s concern for accuracy. As much out of modesty as for the sake of keeping a certain distance, the author deliberately redacted from his journals all exceedingly personal notes that were present in his original notebooks.27 For instance, he erased any mention of his relationships with women almost completely.

Such comments would be deleted in Storm of Steel, where the author takes on the appearance of a model officer, an officer who, in the truthfulness of the original notebooks, wondered at times when ‘this shitty war’ would end.

In the eyes of certain commentators, this rewriting of Jünger’s journals would raise the question of their authenticity. I consider this to be a fake issue, since the author is not a high-ranking actor in the war whose decisions or thoughts have a historical impact, but merely an insignificant witness to an immense tragedy.

Following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Jünger would delete all political comments so as to prevent any exploitation at the hands of the new regime’s propaganda. As pointed out by Hervier, the editions that came out after 1934 are thus paradoxically closer to the 1920 and 1922 editions than to the one published in 1924.30

Unlike so many other Germans of his generation, Ernst Jünger was not demobilised after the defeat of November 1918. Nor did he participate in the turbulent adventures of the Free Corps. What was left of the old army did not want to let go of such a promising young officer. In the defeated and chaotic Germany of the 1920s, infantry Lieutenant Jünger would punctually take up his service every morning at the Reichswehr barracks in Hanover.

What Ernst Jünger would retain from Hölderlin’s poetry is the impression that the human adventure takes place in a world whose meaning remains hidden. Thanks to art, however, it is indeed possible to decipher it. Art, in fact, allows us to sense the mysterious universal order that embraces men instead of rejecting them;

At the time, the author was no longer part of the Reichswehr, having been discharged on 31 August 1923.

On the contrary, what we encounter is evident esteem and even sympathy for those whom Jünger had fought against with unbridled fury. The reason is not that he could ever doubt his own rights, even for a single moment– that is not the issue here. Indeed, going back thirty centuries to reconnect with the ethos of the Iliad, he is willing to acknowledge the fact that his adversary is also within his rights. The actions of a Frenchman who kills a German in the name of his French fatherland are as justified as those of a German who kills a Frenchman in the name of the German fatherland. Each of the two armies is within its right. When one understands this, ‘one honours heroism; one honours it everywhere and above all among the ranks of one’s enemy.’

There is no eternal rest. There is only eternal movement that presses every smallest particle into its service.

In both Moscow and Rome, in Warsaw as well as in Berlin, the war had indeed given rise to a new type of man that supplanted the futile phrasemongers of the previous era: men who, in the words of Nikolai Berdyaev, are inclined ‘to transpose military methods to the very structure of life, practicing methodical coercion — a type of human that is fond of power and mindful of force and that manifested himself in both communism and fascism.’

On the evening of 9 November 1918, at a time when Wilhelm II had made the decision to seek refuge in the Netherlands, Berlin and the other major cities fell prey to the outbreak of Spartacist riots, that is, to the German version of Bolshevism, which had triumphed in Russia a year earlier. In Moscow, Lenin was convinced that the red revolution would extend to Germany. And it would indeed prove to be a very close call. The ultimate failure of this revolutionary project was due to the agreement sealed by socialist minister Noske with the Freikorps, an unforeseen phenomenon that had arisen from the chaos and rubble of the former imperial army. Against all expectations, the latter would reap success in Germany, while their equivalent counterparts, the ‘White Guards’, failed in Russia.

On two occasions, in December 1918 and January 1919, they would reclaim Berlin before intervening throughout the Reich to crush the red uprisings. This would be achieved by means of cannon fire and machine guns, with hundreds of deaths and quite a few atrocities perpetrated by each side. For a long time, Germany thus found itself in an endemic state of civil war. The final act of this era of armed unrest would be the Munich Putsch on 9 November 1923, which would throw a spotlight on Adolf Hitler’s name.

The myth of the eternal return reinforces a cyclical vision of history that is in radical opposition to the linear and finalistic viewpoint that results from Christianity and which the Enlightenment proceeded to secularise.

As for conservatism, and contrary to its French meaning, it suggests neither immobility nor attachment to deciduous forms. In the mindset of German romanticism, it represents, in fact, man’s awareness of the permanent and the essential, of all that resists time and that a revolutionary impulse will be able to free from any and all outdated forms. This notion of a revolution that would ensure the resurgence of a fundamental kind of order is a bearer of great dynamism. It rests upon the metaphysical conviction that the epoch in question is that of an interregnum that lies between an already dead order and another yet to come, a sort of ‘zero point’, as Jünger would say, starting from which everything becomes possible.

Owing to his temperament, furthermore, he was a doctrinarian, which Jünger was not in any way.

Within their own generation, the men that were thus moulded constitute an active minority that was not overwhelmed by the ordeal. In this generation, the fundamental bourgeois aspiration for comfort, hedonism and security simply crumbled.

Between 1914 and 1923, tens of thousands of young men acquired a taste for a type of existence wherein one’s indulging in risk led them to despise individualism and well-being both as values and as ultimate ends. To borrow some of Jünger’s words, these youths belonged to a race whose members ‘can gladly be blown up and still perceive the event as a confirmation of order’.

In Germany, the borders that delineate people’s feelings towards Russia coincide with the very ancient, cultural and historical border of the Limes and the Main. It divides Germany in two: a predominantly Catholic Germany, that of the South-West, which was subjected to Roman and Catholic influence; and another, that of the North-East, which evaded it. The former is associated with the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and was often at odds with Russia, with the latter acting as heir to the Prussian and Lutheran tradition and frequently seeking an alliance with Russia.

Unlike Napoleon or Hitler, who were both from the south of Europe and had fed upon imperialist traditions originating from Rome or Habsburg, no Prussian statesman ever fell into the trap of attempting to conquer Russia’s vast expanses.

Indeed, positions were rarely immutable. Socialists would rally around nationalism, and nationalists would sometimes join communism without betraying any of their profound convictions.

To those close to the National Bolshevik movement, Russian communism was only superficially Marxist in nature. It seemed to be, above all, a Russian phenomenon,

The appeal exerted by the ‘romanticism of the abyss’ is, as a rule, very foreign to Prussian coldness.

However, what would ultimately turn him into the most prominent author of the revolutionary Right was his rather fiery collaboration with Die Standarte (The Banner), a newspaper launched in June 1925.

In 1929, as part of the first version of his Adventurous Heart, he had already clearly distanced himself from all collective action.

In accordance with a phrase used within certain officer circles, nationalism would be experienced as one’s ‘altruistic duty towards the Reich’ and socialism as one’s ‘altruistic duty towards the people’. The only clearly designated adversary is the ‘bourgeois’, the focus of the author’s condemnation in The Worker (1932).

After 1927, however, one would notice a significant evolution in some of Jünger’s writings, a detachment that would have been unthinkable a year earlier. His artistic temperament would thus visibly take priority over political polemics, which was in contrast with his very nature.

Ernst von Salomon’s testimony highlights all that sets Jünger apart from the other authors of the nationalist movement. Jünger’s 1923 novella entitled Sturm had already heralded this distancing, which would be even more palpable in his political-literary work The Adventurous Heart, published in 1929. What one notices in it is a deliberate contrast between the passages dedicated to the martial fury of combat and others that display cold artistic distancing. He thus visibly cultivates a tendency towards egotism that one could never imagine in a political actor.

The French suddenly discovered that they were no longer the ‘Great Nation’ of yesteryear. They thus became resentful and surrendered to an inexpiable hatred for the Germans, revealing their own decline. Thus was modern nationalism born, the offspring of Jacobin passions, Boulangism and ‘revenge’. Through a reciprocal sort of movement, the demons of Pan-Germanism would awake in Germany.

the Germans saw themselves, by contrast, as the defenders of art against intellectualism and of authentic culture against the cosmopolitanism and artificiality that they deemed characteristic of France.

And it wasn’t a mere speech he was giving, for he embodied a manifestation of the elemental, and I had just been swept away by it.

From the very outset, a connection seemed to have been established between the still little-known young leader and the young combatant made famous by the publication of Storm of Steel. Hitler had also been a valiant WWI soldier, albeit a less prestigious one. He would thus send Jünger the first edition of Mein Kampf, dedication included. By return of post, Jünger would thank him by sending him his own war books. On the cover page of Fire and Blood, he inscribed the following tribute dated 9 January 1926: ‘To Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the Nation! Ernst Jünger.’

The following year, in 1927, Hitler offers Jünger a mandate to become a member of the Reichstag. The offer is turned down, for as Jünger would later state, to him, ‘the writing of a single verse was of more interest than the representation of 60,000 imbeciles in the Parliament’. Much later, on the eve of his hundredth birthday, he would respond to a journalist by adding with an ironic smile: ‘Later on, however, I would have equally rejected a similar offer from our highly esteemed Federal Republic had I been made one.’

despite the article published in Die Kommenden, the former officer had already distanced himself from political action by and large. There are multiple reasons for this. During the year of 1929, he published the first version of his work entitled The Adventurous Heart. This marks a certain break with his previous writings and a clear withdrawal into the inner sphere of reflection, that of more or less fantastical dreams and a writer’s formal concerns.

A careful reading reveals, however, that the writer did not sever his ties to the combative spirit of the previous years: he had only stopped believing in the resources of collective action: Nowadays, one cannot labour for Germany as a society; indeed, this must be done in solitude, just like a man who opens a breach in a virgin forest, sustained by the only hope that, somewhere, among the thickets, others are engaged in the same task.

One of the little-known reasons behind the success of the National Socialist Party lay in the unexpected support it had received from the female electorate, whose members had apparently been seduced by its promises of security and family policies.

Meeting Ernst von Salomon in 1929, he says to him: ‘I have chosen a high observation post from where I can watch the bedbugs devour each other’.

In other words, freedom is not a metaphysical idea. Jünger and the Germans do not believe in freedom per se, but in freedom as a function, such as the freedom of a given force. This idea is the very opposite of the notion of ‘cunning vote collectors’ and ‘freedom merchants’. The latter are ‘prisoners of the moral scheme of a corrupt Christianity that transposes the biblical curse to the worldly relationship between the exploiters and the exploited […]. They thus prove themselves incapable of envisioning freedom under any other terms than one’s deliverance from a certain evil.’ (pp. 99–100).

So what is Prussia? ‘Prussia is not a nation; it is the unadulterated and serious face of life.’

A State conceived of as being a chivalric order; to be free and to serve: the Prussian notion of State cannot be summarised more accurately than this. According to Spengler, it was the Prussian army itself, that of Frederick the Great; of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, of Moltke the Elder and the old Marshal von Hindenburg that had embodied this very notion.

This idea is in sharp contrast to the specifically Hitlerian conception of race.

His racism owes nothing to the writings of someone like Gobineau.119 His true master was the author of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, albeit in the latter’s simplified formulation spread by popularisers at the time of Hitler’s youth.

Ernst Jünger had sensed that, just like Marxism, Hitlerism was a distortion of Enlightenment rationalism, a sort of madness-afflicted reasoning. Hitler believed himself to have discovered the secret of the ideal City based on science and reason. What had once been experienced as immemorial, accommodating and flexible wisdom would be imposed with geometric rigour by a dictatorial law that would enact thorough and tyrannical rules to be enforced by legions of obedient and narrow-minded officials. This distortion of reason, it must be said, is not specific to ‘totalitarianism’. Indeed, most modern societies have fallen prey to it, under the pretext of hyper-rationality and submission to the judgements passed by ‘experts’ and ‘specialists’.

Very present in The Worker as part of the author’s response to the challenges of technological domination, the attitude of ‘heroic realism’ would subsequently disappear from Jünger’s mental universe, once his mind had undergone the great ‘humanist’ reversal heralded by the publication of On the Marble Cliffs in 1939.

The ‘elemental’ is to be understood as the instinctive forces of life, which are stifled by rationalism and the bourgeois rule.

In it, von Trotha criticised Jünger for his ‘fundamentally individualistic attitude’ and concluded by stating that by authoring such a book, Jünger was getting dangerously close to ‘being shot in the back of the neck’. One wonders what could have justified such a threat. The explanation would soon be given. Jünger, continues Trotha, ‘disregards the fundamental question of blood and soil’. Indeed, nowhere in Jünger’s work does one find a single trace of the racial Darwinism that characterises Hitlerian National Socialism. Additionally, nowhere in this cryptic book of his are the party and its leader mentioned or even hinted at, although they were already marching towards power.

Although basically retired from politics, Jünger chooses his side: that of Prussia and the Reichswehr, against National Socialism.

And yet, those of us who study history in a desire to elucidate its mysteries can readily interpret the writer’s motivations. Indeed, everything points to the fact that what he favoured was a revolution from above, in accordance with the Bismarckian model. A total revolution, as heralded by his writings, but a controlled and regulated one, a new and enlightened sort of despotism.

he is targeted with a first raid in April 1933, initiated by the subordinates of the local police amidst the climate of general suspicion and latent civil war that characterised the first months of the new regime.

Over the following years, Jünger would never relinquish his increasingly greater reservations, while still refusing to emigrate and sever his ties to his own homeland. Opting for inner exile, he devotes himself to his entomological work and to penning texts that are truly timeless, until the publication, in September 1939, of his novel On the Marble Cliffs. The work is immediately perceived as a coded condemnation of the regime. He is denounced accordingly to Hitler himself by Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler (1899–1945), the head of the ‘Party’s Control Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Writings’. Harbouring respect for the heroic soldier of the Great War that authored Storm of Steel, Hitler would, however, prohibit all persecution: ‘No one touches Jünger!’

In response to the pleas made to him, he would dryly reply, ‘There is no room for me in an army where Göring is a general.’

Indirectly involved in the plot of 20 July 1944, he evades the fate of a great many other officers. During a long life in which he would also experience other, less dramatic developments, he had overcome many a mortal peril while enjoying a strange privilege of invulnerability.

To put it very simply, the purge, which also targeted right-wing opponents, was the result of a manipulative plan hatched by the leaders of the Reichswehr, who wanted to neutralise the now troublesome SA.141 For once, they had enjoyed the complicity of some of the highest-standing party leaders, namely Göring, Goebbels and Himmler, who also wanted to bring the all too independent SA back in line by eliminating its leaders.

As soon as Hitler took power in 1933, Jünger, Spengler, von Salomon and many other major authors of the Conservative Revolution became his virtual opponents. The new regime seemed to them a mere travesty of the authentic ‘national socialism’ they wished for. In accordance with the excellent thought expressed by the historian Ernst Nolte, ‘“national socialism” was not, until 1934, a protected trademark’.

One had better be wary, therefore, of placing their entire trust in all that has been written in the aftermath of 1945, as memories do tend to undergo the occasional obscuration. It is not that the actual honesty of the witnesses should necessarily be called into question, but what was clear before 1945 might no longer be so afterwards. This is because the unconscious part of one’s memory will always engage in a selective sifting process, especially among intellectuals, who are naturally tempted to add coherence to their past conduct in light of newly acquired principles.

No one could thus have foreseen a future that had no precedent.

In 1933, and over the next five years, Hitler appeared to a large majority of Germans as a providential statesman who channelled all his efforts towards the sole objective of curbing the crisis while simultaneously striving to avoid a communist takeover.

Among the celebrities of the intellectual world, the historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was one of the rare minds to distance themselves early from the new regime. He thus joined Ernst Jünger in this respect, although his reasons were actually quite different.

It is no time or occasion for transports of triumph. Woe betide those who mistake mobilisation for victory!

This would become obvious during the plebiscite of 12 November 1933, when Pastor Niemöller, the physicist Max Planck, the poet Gerhart Hauptmann, most bishops and even the Union of German Citizens of Jewish Faith urged people to vote for the Führer. The same choice would also be made by the young Claus von Stauffenberg, the future initiator of the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt.

Indeed, unlike Moeller van den Bruck and his friend Niekisch, Jünger was not a doctrinaire. He was, instead, an extraordinary writer, a writer who actually had ideas; and these ideas were subject to variation, without any concern for ideological coherence.

We nationalists do not believe in general ideas. We do not believe in general morality. We do not believe in mankind, in a collective being endowed with central consciousness and uniform rights. On the contrary, we believe that the truth, rights and morality are all conditioned to the extreme by time, space and blood. We believe in the value of the individual.168   Such a nominalistic speech was undoubtedly a little too subtle for the less than crystalline minds characterising the ideological functionaries of the NSDAP.

This is also the downside of all political parties that long to subjugate the independence of intellectuals to the requirements of their propagandas. They judge writers according to the latter’s conformity to the simplifications of the prevalent dogma. Concerning Jünger, it was his rejection of anti-Semitism, his individualism, and his literary frivolity that were regarded as suspicious.

Having observed the leaders of the NSDAP rather closely, he quickly fell into a state of disgust. Indeed, he saw them as nothing more than callous plebeians that had transformed into status seekers and social climbers as soon as they had seized power, as was the case with Göring.

is indeed a well-known process where strong opposition to a political-religious power such as the Third Reich drives ‘heretics’ to move further and further away from what they once had in common, to the point of denying what they had previously professed.

Without any doubt, I had underestimated the man’s talents: his passion-arousing dynamism, his instinctive manner of using simplifying concepts, which summarised the trend of the era of masses and machines. All of it was extraordinary, especially when one considers his origins. In this regard, his adversaries had a lot to learn from him. Traditionalist, aesthetic and moral scruples rendered one easily blind to these gifts, as did pure intellectuality. His ruin was, incidentally, far less the result of his gifts than that of his temperament and insatiable greed. […] Scarcely has a single human being, in all of modern history, attracted such amounts of enthusiasm but also hatred.

What is to blame here, therefore, is not politics as such, but the delusions brought about by utopias that were, particularly in the 20th century, responsible for burdening politics with eschatological and moral expectations pertaining to religiousness.

In other words, certain eras are simply not conducive to action, as they require one to withdraw into the background.

German readers did indeed interpret the content as a veiled condemnation of the regime. And it was the author’s notoriety that accounted for the book’s best-selling success, with more than 30,000 copies sold during the first few months.

After 1945, one would find out what Jünger himself had been unaware of at the time: that Hitler’s protection had shielded him.

However, Jünger did realise that several former members of the various circles of the Conservative Revolution who had started their career within the Party itself, the SS and even the Gestapo were watching over him.

Following closely behind the front line troops, he briefly captures Laon, whose mediaeval library he protects against all threats of pillaging and depredation.

Indeed, Speidel was one of Jünger’s admirers, as well as the very soul of a small circle of officers united by the same veiled hostility towards Hitler’s policies — this was the ‘George Circle’, alluding to the George V Hotel, where the colonel had set up his quarters. On 22 June, Jünger is transferred to the Parisian headquarters at Speidel’s request, who places him under his own protection.

Outside the administrative or strictly military tasks entrusted to him, Jünger enjoys great freedom. With the support of his superiors, he spends a lot of time exploring the Parisian artistic and literary environment.

At the beginning of 1942, the first part of Jünger’s Journal is published by a Berlin-based house under the bucolic title of Gardens and Streets.

One thus finds extensive traces of this aversion in the description that Jünger gives of the man in his Journal: He speaks with a manic, inward-directed gaze, which seems to shine from deep within a cave. […] He spoke of his consternation, his astonishment, at the fact that we soldiers were not shooting, hanging, and exterminating the Jews — astonishment that anyone who had a bayonet was not making unrestrained use of it. […] It was informative to listen to him rant this way for two hours, because he radiated the amazing power of nihilism.

As part of a continuation of his diligent reading of the Bible during the years of war, Jünger now perceived the Church as an institutional and theological recourse capable of warding off nihilism.

After the failure of the 20 July 1944 assassination plot, at a time when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and many officers were arrested before being executed,205 Jünger would miraculously escape the repression. It would seem that he was still under Hitler’s protection.

Shortly after leaving Paris on 15 August 1944, Jünger is demobilised.

Despite having faced his own trials and tribulations, Jünger had, until then, enjoyed a state of grace resulting from his Parisian position, but also from a mental hygiene that had kept him sheltered from psychological destruction. He remained protected against horrors thanks to his apparent detachment, calculated coldness, and nurtured insensitivity.

At the beginning of 1944, the then seventeen-year-old teenager is at a naval cadet school in Wilhelmshaven. Soon, Jünger learns that his son had been thrown into prison for saying that he would gladly pull the rope that would be used to hang Hitler — a very serious situation considering the context of the time.

He would ultimately manage to have his son shown leniency by the military judges in exchange for the boy’s immediate recruitment into the army. This would prove to be a fatal mistake, as Ernstel would be killed in Italy on 29 November 1944,

Jünger would thus experience the suffering that had stricken so many men and women all across Europe. Nothing of what characterised the lives of 20th-century Europeans would therefore be foreign to him. He would remain inconsolable. Every day, for the rest of his life, he would lose himself in contemplations at his child’s grave.

And this is what Jünger wrote about it in his Journal: Such a good lad. Ever since childhood, he strove to emulate his father. Now he has done so on his first try, and truly surpassed him.207   Was he thinking of the audacity displayed by the boy when proclaiming his opposition to Hitler, as he himself had never openly done? Perhaps so, but he might also have been thinking of Ernstel’s death in battle, one which he, the famous Ernst Jünger, had unintentionally escaped.

Several times already, we have attempted to understand the reasons that had led the former heroic soldier of 1914–1918 (who then became the most famous intellectual of the radical Right during the 1925–1930 period) to embrace dissidence. Additionally, we have listed the ideas that resulted in his being opposed to Hitler: his rejection of anti-Semitism and racial Darwinism, and his objection to Russophobia, as he himself wished for an alliance between Germany and Russia, even if the latter were Bolshevik. We have also spoken of Jünger’s ever-growing aversion to the leaders of the brutal National Socialist Party, which he considered unworthy of embodying the new Germany.

Around 1925, and until around 1930, Jünger had been a passionate yet utterly sincere intellectual. To use Ernst von Salomon’s terminology, he lived for an idea and not through it. And although the idea in question gave him a reason to live, it ultimately caused him nothing but trouble, as he was both an idealistic and a profound thinker, and never a practical politician, although he did devote himself to political romanticism more than he would have been willing to concede.

Among other things, he lacked what was necessary to achieve success in politics: the charismatic magnetism of a leader; ambition and opportunism; bad faith; an argumentative temperament; a penchant for demagogy; and both cunning and ruthlessness towards adversaries and competitors alike. Instead, what he had was a surplus of intellectual integrity, righteousness and poetic lyricism.

It is within this new mindset that he spends the four years of the Occupation in rather pleasant conditions, protected by a few high-ranking officers and aware of the 20 July 1944 scheme, without, however, participating in it.

On 3 April 1945, realising that any and all opposition had been rendered useless, he orders his men not to resist the American troops upon arrival.

We see the will to destroy, even at the cost of one’s own destruction. This is a demonic trait.

Throughout the Journal, the days of pain begin to stack up. Indeed, Kirchhorst was pillaged by the first American troops and Jünger himself was almost shot dead by a Colt-wielding looter. Practical and determined, Perpetua sends her husband to the attic once again, where he would be shut in among his books, so as to avoid a fatal manifestation of his fearlessness.

“We cannot, however, strip ourselves of our belonging to our people. The nature of things dictates that the misfortune of our family, the suffering of our brother, affects us more deeply — and also that we are more closely bound to his guilt.”

From this sinister spectacle sprouts a new reflection: The theory of collective guilt has two parallel threads. For the vanquished, it signifies: I must declare myself to be in solidarity with my brother and his guilt. For the victor, it acts, in practice, as a driving force for indiscriminate pillaging. This is a good summary of the predicament, and Jünger expands further: If the bow is drawn too tightly, a dangerous question may arise: was the brother truly so unjust?

The authorities of the area would thus make him pay the price of his mental independence by banning him from publishing any works, and the ban would not be lifted until 1949. This change would not, however, be the result of unexpected and sudden benevolence. Simply put, Jünger and his family had chosen to emigrate to the French occupation zone, which was less fault-finding and censorious.

The word Waldgänger takes its name from an ancient mediaeval Scandinavian custom. According to the latter, any outlaws guilty of murder could be legally slain by anyone who met them. The outcast, however, also had the right to ‘take the forest path’ and take refuge in the woods, living freely there at his own risk.

Any mindset that remains disconnected from real history runs the risk of plummeting into abstractions and confused or unrealistic thoughts. Conversely, any attempt at strict historicisation can make one lose all sense of long-lastingness and permanence.

Turning his back on Nietzschean thought, he believed, at the time, that certain Christian themes would enable him to find the political foundations of resistance to nihilism, which he equated with Nazism. In The Peace, he would thus write the following, for example: The true conquest of nihilism and the attainment of peace will be possible only with the help of the churches.

Jünger had always had the desire to live in accordance with the rites of his own country. He therefore thought it necessary to adopt the religion of his own community. Swabia, however, where he had lived for a long time, was Catholic. Furthermore, German legislation requires one to declare the religion according to which burial ceremony is to be held. This was one of the primary motivations for his late conversion, so that his funeral could be conducted in harmony with the rites of his village and its people.

Jünger was not a doctrinaire, and his thoughts and work were not guided by a concern for logical coherence.

Indeed, the anarch is not the monarch’s adversary. He observes the world around with both interest and detachment, standing ever aloof. He is an attentive observer that has renounced combat, but despite having relinquished all weapons, he has not been vanquished. What he is concerned about is, in fact, his integrity. Unable to be the king of the world, he is the king of his own self.

These intrepid travellers would never be rivalled by anyone in Asia. Although the latter did, admittedly, sometimes encroach into the West, it always took on the shape of conquering swarms charging behind Xerxes, Attila, Tamerlane or Genghis Khan. And all of the latter owed their greatness not to their discoveries, but to the terror of the massacres that they perpetrated.

Jünger apprehends the word freedom in its two main meanings and touches upon each of them successively. Spiritual freedom is the first. It is the freedom of the ‘free will’, an innovation that Ulysses had already embodied: ‘one of the types of Western man, an explorer and an inventor of the highest rank whose spiritual freedom never shrinks from anything and defies the gods themselves.’244 Next comes political freedom, and the rejection of arbitrariness, whose limits and necessity Jünger clearly perceives:

Immersed, since 1918, in an era of perpetual and dangerous upheavals, Jünger was no political theorist, but a superior mind that reflected on things based on his particularly rich historical experience. He never theorised about any specific forms of government. What he did instead was reflect on the demands of a European world made for freedom, while the Asian world flourished in despotism.

Showering in cold water every morning, he would go for a walk through the countryside on a daily basis and indulge in the daily practice of contemplative reading, transcribing his thoughts into his diary and never neglecting the beneficial effects of good wine and sleep. Such was the life of the very active hermit of Wilflingen, until the very end.

[Epistemic Status: Ramble]
As I’m wrapping up the historical part of my folk music obsession – here are random thoughts relevant to group interest

1. The red scare is misnamed and started much earlier and went much longer than I previously thought.
2. The blacklist and all that went with it was much better organized and not designed to be effective
3. Being on an FBI watchlist is a great gift to a future biographer
4. In many ways the range of acceptable behavior was much broader in times past and some degree of social repression is desirable and represents progress
5. The use of the term communist and socialist carries over throughout time, and their theoretical meanings have stayed relatively stable over time, but their practical usage has changed dramatically enought as to make historical comparisons largely meaningless
6. Midwestern Left populism is curious by its absence in cultural prominence, as are the Wobblies
7. The zeitgeist is difficult to summarize in modern forms of media consumption, i.e. 10-minute youtube videos and 5-minute wikipedia reads, there really is no substitute for books for conveying zeitgeist
8. Types of information and metis have different bandwidth and transmission methods – that is probably an area where rationalism can contribute greatly

From My Notion template

What It’s About

A weird collection of observations that bounce back and forth between fact and fiction

How I Discovered It

I like the band the author is in

Thoughts

It was definitely mixed and somewhat repetitive. There were several interesting insights to be found though.

What I Liked About It

I like Weird Fiction – and observation that bounce back and forth between fancy and reality

What I Didn’t Like About It

It was a tad repetitive

Highlights

Much of this book was inspired by my own hunting and dreaming while foraging in the wilderness of dusty books, vague notions and the endless trails of our great Internet.

What a quiet world that would be! Everything governed by the softest movements of the littlest things. In the stillness of a grove of trees — what great orchestral melodies might finally be revealed?

Mary Sweeney, the Wisconsin Window Smasher, may have lived in just such a world of secret revelation. In the 1890’s Mary was arrested more than a hundred times for attempting to smash plate-glass windows in various small towns across the state. She was a wife and mother, a former school marm, who periodically ran away from her family in St. Paul, boarded a train for Wisconsin and then would be caught again, “indulging in her wild sport” according to The Badger State Banner. Mary’s method of smashing windows was a strange one. She would repeatedly throw her satchel at a window until it shattered and she was often caught before completing her task. It’s as if she had no plans to smash a window, but had simply gotten off a train and then, upon being confronted with a pane of glass, became so upset she could not help but throw her bag again and again at the terrible sight.

Our tendency is, of course, to believe that Mary was simply delusional. What, though, if the opposite is true? Consider for a moment that we may all be ‘sane’ simply because we are blind. Are there things inside a pane of glass that we are blessed not to see? Would we all stop in mid-sentence and begin throwing things at the very air if our blinders were suddenly removed? Such is the experience of larvae born deep within a tree trunk. Some larvae actually tunnel for years within the dark wood, gradually changing shape as they travel through the tree, heading outward toward light they have never seen. How amazed such creatures must be when, at last transformed into beetle or moth, they emerge into the air and spread wings they never knew they’d grown. Can you imagine your own world suddenly made shining, weightless and stretching infinitely in all directions?

It’s a mercy that most of us remain as blind to such things as the larvae lost within their dark world. Those cursed to peer out beyond our tree trunk before they’ve grown wings may resort to tin foil hats and the smashing of windows in an effort to forget what they have seen.

Those who hear and see too much may end up like the shining trout thrown back to the river after being hooked and pulled into the air. This sad fish can never return happily to the waves. Such fish tell fabulous tales of another world directly above the water. They speak of a hell-realm of suffocating brightness where their once-weightless bodies suddenly sunk and flopped upon the dirt as enormous demons pricked and pulled at them merely for sport. Alas, these hook-scarred Cassandras are doomed ever to speak the truth but never to be believed. We swim away from them into the comforting darkness of our muddy pond and do our best never to catch their eye again.

The wolf got along fine with dogs and with a house full of cats. Still, however tame and friendly this ‘husky’ was, other dogs knew at once she was not a dog. They might eventually accept her, but their first glance at her was often tinged with the same shocked alarm you and I might feel upon spotting a Neanderthal strolling through the supermarket.

It is scary because it is transcendent and other-worldly — it offers entrance into a larger, more mysterious realm waiting just outside the window. The white wolves are emissaries from a lost empire beyond and surrounding ours, completely forgotten to our waking selves but still accessible if we dare to take the leap into the branches outstretched within our dreams. Poor little Serge was too frightened to leap and his cowardice haunted him for the rest of his sad life.

Consider this: what if the big, bad, black wolf has also been trying to draw you out into the wider world all these years he has chased you? Has he been huffing and puffing all these centuries not to blow your house down, but simply to get you to come outside and look at the stars? Does he long to gobble you up simply to give you a chance to finally see through his eyes the dark forest full of shining light?

And so, dear reader, as you live out your allotted time inside your lonely cage of flesh as I do in mine — can we believe beyond the three minutes of our favorite song that we run together across this arid plain?

Does it bother the turtle that it will never see its own shell? Or does the turtle simply take it on faith that it is born into a world where invisible help is always at the ready?

John Audubon, in fact, killed thousands of birds in order to find perfectly-shaped corpses to pose for his famous water-colors. Once you realize this truth his work is ruined. All you can see in those finely-detailed illustrations are the limp, oddly-bent necks, the empty eyes and the frozen wings all pulled into a terrible facsimile of life with wires and sticks.

Audubon once buried a dead rat in a flower pot with only its tail protruding from the dirt and presented it to a friend as a ‘rare flower’. That’s the kind of joke you can only laugh at, I suppose, after you’ve killed at least a hundred birds. I don’t feel like laughing about any of this.

Termites build nests that are narrow, mound-like structures. These nests can, nevertheless, rise as high as twenty feet tall. Considering the size of these little creatures such buildings are the human equivalent of a 180-storey skyscraper built by hand, brick by brick—yet termites only live about two years.

Termites can communicate with each other by banging their heads on the floor of their tunnels, but they also have a far more deeply-felt level of communication that is somehow transmitted through their queen. Scientists actually call it a ‘group soul’. Deep within this teeming maze of non-stop activity, the queen lies motionless in her dark bower yet somehow without moving a muscle she orchestrates all movement around her.

Even Thoreau, who wisely said that the mark of a man was his ability to leave things alone, still felt the need to write a great deal about all the things he was thinking about leaving alone. Where are the Thoreaus that keep silent? Where are the ones who simply let the light of the moon fall upon them without feeling the need to comment on its beauty? These sages may be all around us, but they leave no trace save for a few stray footprints in the dirt.

suspect then that the reason I find the shark’s glance so frightening is not that it triggers some primordial fear of attack, but rather that the shark’s face reminds me of something I’d rather forget — that this world is by nature a world of hunters and prey, where all are born to be eaten by something else. Our world may be a bloodthirsty place, but it is dispassionately so and thus neither good nor evil. That’s what’s so unsettling — realizing that good and evil are concepts that don’t mean a thing when it comes to a turtle eating a snail or a snail eating a flower or even a shark eating a person.

There’s a good book written on the subject called, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. You might say it’s one of the most irrational books ever written given that it is written specifically as a self-help book for the newly dead.

The gold that these mystics dreamed of isolating from baser materials like lead and copper and quartz was not physical gold, but a golden state of purity from which they believed all things emanated. This invisible, perfect, prima materia, was called the Philosopher’s Stone.

Alas, the salamander is deaf and none of these little creatures will ever hear a Blind Willie Johnson song save by pressing their skin against the speaker and letting the vibrations fill their small bodies. I have never caught a salamander doing such a thing and so I have to believe that either they only listen to music very late at night in houses that are burning down or that they have found other ways to transcend pain besides listening to the Blues.

Rabbits only dare venture out at dusk and dawn because at those half-lit times they are best camouflaged and can still hopefully see a predator approaching. Even so they are constantly watching in all directions as they eat their grass and clover. They’re right to do so. Most rabbits die in the jaws of something.

I was so excited to spot these little creatures that I got out of my car and tried to sneak towards them. Of course they all immediately dove underground. It’s a strange but sad fact: one of the best ways to watch wildlife is by staying inside your car.

Is this why dogs run away during lightning storms? Is this why moths gather around a light bulb? Is this where the astronauts were taking me when they carried me from my bed as a child?

We have, in fact, a long history of saying otherwise about the crow. Our opinion of crows is so low that we call a group of crows a ‘murder’ and a group of ravens an ‘unkindness’. Groups of owls, on the other hand (a bird far more deserving of suspicion) we insist on describing politely as a ‘parliament’.

Think back again to the plague doctor in his crow mask and remember: it was medieval Europe’s penchant for killing cats (they suspected the whole species of devilry) that left an unchecked rat population to spread plague-infested fleas wherever they went.

Crocodiles have survived as a species for at least one hundred million years. They are actually one of the few creatures alive now that once shared the earth with dinosaurs. What legends do they tell among themselves of those ancient giants and of the mysterious cataclysm that turned an empire of titans into a pile of bones?

Others assumed that those with blonde hair were living ghosts, unnatural phantoms not meant to walk the earth.

It is sometimes the case, for example, that a person found dazed and disheveled at the side of the highway remembers only an owl swooping in front their car right before they crashed the car into a tree. Only under hypnosis does the confused victim suddenly recall a flying saucer that had disabled the car engine with a beam of light. They remember now being levitated skyward and examined by aliens with strange machinery before being returned to their car with some four hours of missing time and a false memory of a swooping bird stuck in their head.

The Jains, however, don’t make themselves miserable over the unavoidable suffering their survival must cause — from the things we kill and eat to the bacteria destroyed by our guts and the viruses fought by our blood. Instead Jains focus on feeling empathy with the hunger that drives all life — the lust that has driven the world ever since the first one-celled creature divided itself in two and suddenly found itself facing a delicious looking stranger.