"You must realize that I am far from feeling beaten…it seems to me that… a man ought to be deeply convinced that the source of his own moral force is in himself — his very energy and will, the iron coherence of ends and means — that he never falls into those vulgar, banal moods, pessimism and optimism. My own state of mind synthesises these two feelings and transcends them: my mind is pessimistic, but my will is optimistic. Whatever the situation, I imagine the worst that could happen in order to summon up all my reserves and will power to overcome every obstacle."
—Antonio Gramsci.

"I drink to you, the bourgeoisie, and to the wish that your comfortable life be buried in an ocean of shit."

—Gabriele D'Annunzio.

"Let each person shout: there is a vast, destructive, negative task to fulfil. To swipe away, and blot out. In a world left in the hands of bandits who are ripping apart and destroying all centuries, an individual’s purity is affirmed by a condition of folly, of aggressive and utter folly."

https://aristocratsofthesoul.com/julius-evola-paintings-and-artistic-career/

“Retire into thyself. The rational principle which rules has this nature, that it is content with itself when it does what is just, and so secures tranquility.”
—Marcus Aurelius.

“Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought: hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year — what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn to see more and more as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all and all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Today is Ernst Jünger's 128th birthday, the man who I believe represented the European twentieth century more closely than any other individual. He was a legendary veteran of both world wars as well as one who left an indelible imprint as a writer, philosopher, entomologist, and pioneering psychonaut — and who lived to witness five governments in his homeland of Germany from the Kaiserreich through German reunification. Originally a man of the Right, similar to Julius Evola and Martin Heidegger he ended up distancing himself from politics after concluding that technological transformation is driving the world irreversibly into a monstrously inhuman new era, which he wrote about in words that often seem prophetic today. He also made suggestions regarding how the last remaining heroic individuals who see through the fog of ideology and propaganda and who wish to resist these trends might be able to find a way to survive amidst the deluge. In my view he is one of a very few thinkers who fully understood what the world is currently undergoing and who attempted to offer some form of possible freedom to those of us who resist it.

Here is my tribute to his life and work.
https://counter-currents.com/2023/03/remembering-ernst-junger-9/

[We would have to] seek a class of men which is active without working, which can idealize without becoming ecstatic, which unites all realities of life with as few limits as possible, and is carried by the current of events without becoming its prey. Only such a class of men can preserve the beautiful unity of human nature which all work destroys momentarily and a lifetime of work destroys permanently; such alone can, in all that is purely human, give by its feelings universal laws of judgement. Whether such a class really exists, or, rather, whether the class actually existing in like external conditions corresponds to this concept internally is another question with which I am not concerned here.

—Friedrich Schiller in Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Mankind.

We live in the post-Guénonian age — “post-” not in the sense that Guénon’s thought has been “assimilated” or “overcome” or “aged” to any “extent,” but in the sense that any approach to thinking and existing in the face of the crisis of the modern world must take into consideration the metaphysical due underlying it and the accompanying existential drama of being-in-the-end. This is, of course, no easy feat, and many of those claiming to be carrying on Guénon’s cause have shied away from such, instead settling into the vestiges of one or another tradition as if nothing happened over the past thousands of years, as if committing to spiritual realization in the Kali-Yuga was merely a matter of stepping into old shoes, as if the existential challenge of the end boils down to renormalizing old exoteric forms alongside scholarship engaged in comparing and contrasting theologies. The obscuration and withdrawal of the Divine, the diminution of the sacred, the disenchantment and hardening of the world in the cosmic decline, the degeneration of the human being — it is as if the whole drama is no longer relevant as soon as one becomes a Traditionalist and rejoins a tradition. Eventually, Guénon’s thought itself, its event, is relegated to a halfway house, a rehabilitating reminder, or an introductory, roundabout textbook that can soon enough be shelved in favor of a copy of the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, or the Edda, or a resuscitation of a “re-spiritualized” Aristotle or an Aquinas, or a plane ticket to an ashram in India -- all of them equipped with QR-codes. The hermeneutic circle collapses, like so many other phenomena in the modern world, into a superficial plane; the hermeneutic revelation is mistaken to be a “closure.” Whether this “de-velopment” is due to some pronunciations within Guénon’s own thought and recommendations is not our concern here; instead, what is essential is preserving, or perhaps at this point rediscovering, the dramatic challenge in which Guénon’s thought arises in the first place: the facticity of living in and through a world in which Tradition, in accordance with the very same metaphysical due to which it testifies, is no longer our surrounding reality, no matter what confession one may read about after work on the weekdays or attend on the weekend. And this world, let us remind ourselves, is slated to end, but there is no end in sight, not to mention any calculable new beginning...

Guénon wrote in 1945: “The end of a world never is and can never be anything but the end of an illusion.” In these words lies one of the fundamental turns of thought in the 20th century which, coming to be rediscovered in our days, sounds like a caesura. Neither historiography nor activism can grasp what follows the caesura, whose ensuing notes are — according to those who were seeking and following its trails before us — to be found in a certain clearing which we ourselves are called to think and to be here and now.

This is the fundamental reason — raison d’être — why we read Guénon, Evola, Heidegger, Jünger, Dugin, Nechkasov (Askr Svarte), and Daria Platonova Dugina in our days.

"No one is easier to terrorize than the person who believes that everything is over when his fleeting phenomenon is extinguished…"

—Ernst Jünger, Der Waldgang.

“The highest thing would be to understand that everything factual is already theory. The blueness of the sky reveals to us the fundamental law of chromatics. One should seek nothing behind phenomena: the phenomena themselves are the teaching. Before the ‘ur‑phenomena’, when they are revealed to our senses, we experience a kind of awe, even fear… When at last I calm myself before the ur‑phenomenon, it is still only resignation; yet there remains a great difference between resigning oneself at the limits of humanity and within the hypothetical narrowness of my own bounded individual.”

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, No. 488 & Urphänomen commentary.

“In this unlimited marshaling of potential energies, which transforms the warring industrial countries into volcanic forges, we perhaps find the most striking sign of the dawn of the age of labor […] In order to deploy energies of such proportion, fitting one’s sword-arm no longer suffices; for this is a mobilization that requires extension to the deepest marrow, life’s finest nerve. Its realization is the task of total mobilization: an act which, as if through a single grasp of the control panel, conveys the extensively branched and densely veined power supply of modern life towards the great current of martial energy.”

—Ernst Jünger, Total Mobilisation.

“When the world seems to tremble on its foundations, a glance cast upon a flower can restore order.”
— Ernst Jünger, Das Gärtlein (La cabane dans la vigne), Journal 1945–1948​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“There are no longer anything but economic categories, without spiritual distinctions, without differences of manners — there are only moderns, people on profits or wages, who think of nothing but that and argue about nothing but that. The captains of industry who govern the democracies and the communist dictators flanked by bourgeois technicians are the same heads, under white or red bonnets […]Everyone strolls about satisfied in this incredible hell, this enormous illusion, this universe of shoddy goods that is the modern world — into which soon not a single spiritual gleam will penetrate.”

— Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Mesure de la France.

All the systems which explain so precisely why the world is as it is and why it can never be otherwise, have always called forth in me the same kind of uneasiness one has when face to face with the regulations displayed under the glaring lights of a prison cell. Even if one had been born in prison and had never seen the stars or seas or woods, one would instinctively know of timeless freedom in unlimited space.

’Napoleon Bonaparte at Valence’ by Maurice Réalier-Dumas