In Taberna

 SELF-DECEPTION BY PHOTOGRAPHY In a world of pure being, that is, in a world in which there can be no change, propaganda could not exist, no more than a difference between being and appearance, truth and falsehood. No deception could enter such a world – there would be no openings, no crevices to admit it. There could not even be such shadows as Plato believed to be cast by thought, shadows which came between the things and the ideas of things. Wherever the ideas formed in the human mind begin to predominate, there a process of separation sets in: the prototypes vanish while the images we are forming of them multiply. Without this process of ideation no science could have developed. For only as we begin to form ideas of things, does our reason demand to have these things explained. Without this separation between things and ideas, there would be no explanations forthcoming from the human mind. In mythology, for instance, the myth has no need to explain itself. It is only in the lat...

"Our thinking is not mythical thinking, but thinking about the myth. We do not think as the Greeks thought, but we think about what they thought. The question is what coincidence Greek thinking has for our own. The reader may find an answer to this question in this account. We are so familiar with the historical view of the world that we are hardly able to perceive the one-sided and also absurdity it contains. The material of the world does not seem representable to us if it is not dissolved, in movement of concepts, thought as development. The mythologist, who makes special history, is confronted with a thinking that knows nothing about the historicization of consciousness, with which he can therefore only unite in so far as he is able to subject it to historical methods. Hence all the research on the influences, on the origin of myths, on the wanderings that the gods, or rather the ideas about them, have taken, in short, the ethnographic, geographical, physical, chronological. T...

I just noticed that Will R. Bird has never been mentioned here. Of the highest interest will be his war memoir, And We Go On, as it holds some similarity to Junger's memoir. Graphic in its detail, and written based on his notes, it is unapologetic and in parts coldly removed from the events, although perhaps more as a peasant character or in the literary tradition of the fool rather than the nobility of Junger. It is also very Canadian, so there are some notable differences, Bird had little education, he was of a simple farming background, he lost his father when he was young and his brother in the war, and he was a simple soldier of common rank. He had to fight just to join the war. Like Junger, he lost one of his own sons in WWII. Much of the Canadian character is revealed in the struggles with the brass, involving vengeance or pranks of some kind. There is a rough and democratised sense of authority, which is of interest for its contrast and the specific character that Junger sa...