What I've Been Reading | September 2023

Buddhism and Jünger

In terms of reading volume, I had a less successful month than usual. I’ve been working on projects requiring more targeted philosophical reading, but that’s a matter for another day.

📖 No-Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners by Noah Rasheta

Clear, fast, and approachable introduction to secular Buddhism. Minimal extraneous detail. Practice focused.

📖 The Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger

Ernst Jünger nearly lived through the entire 20th century.

The Storm of Steel is his memoir of WWI. The book is unrelenting. The sense one gets is that war is mind-numbing boredom and fatigue interrupted by a rush of the heroic and terrible, again and again.

Most of the book is descriptive. Jünger sequentially describes things as they occur without too much introspection or overarching narrative. He does not meditate on the futility or stupidity of war. When he does offer a vision of the war it’s inspired by his nationalist, elitist, and aristocratic ethos. 

“He was scarce up when a shot fired from the sap got him in the skull and laid him dead on the floor of the trench. He was married and had four children. His comrades lay in wait a long while behind the parapet to take vengeance. They sobbed with rage. It is remarkable how little

they grasp the war as an objective thing. They seem to regard the Englishman who fired the fatal shot as a personal enemy. I can understand.”

📖 On The Marble Cliffs by Ernst Jünger

“On the pointed gables, the redstarts now began their day and fed their second brood, whose hungry chirps sounded like the whetting of knives.”

I read On The Marble Cliffs as a story about how to respond to a rapid decline of civilization. It was written in 1938 and published in 1939 in Germany.

The story of this book is not that noteworthy. What’s striking are the images that Jünger is able to conjure. His assessment of the admirable ways of responding to tyranny and decay are striking. He offers several notable examples:

• A noble who sacrifices his life standing up to savage forces of destruction.

  I had often doubted; now I was convinced: there were still noble beings among us in whose hearts knowledge of the higher order was preserved and perpetuated. A lofty example enjoins us to follow, and I swore before this head that for all the future I would cast my lot with the solitary and free rather than with the triumphant and servile.

• A Father, serene and good, whatever the circumstance.

  From this and many other traits we learned that Father Lampros avoided argument; his silences were more effective than his words. So, too, in the science of which he was counted among the masters, he took no part in the squabbles of the schools. It was his firm belief that each theory in natural history represents a contribution towards genesis, for the human spirit in every age conceives the creation anew; in each interpretation lives no more truth than in a leaf that unfolds to fade.

• The two brothers – scientists and aesthetes who study, admire, and preserve. The only characters to survive.

  His fundamental principle was to treat everyone we met like a rare find made on a journey. He liked to call humans optimates, to indicate that they are all to be counted among the natural aristocracy of this world and that every single person has excellence to offer.

Jünger’s own strategy was closest to the last.