Nietzsche on dueling.

The Worker in the Thought of Ernst Jünger
Julius Evola

This essay presents and analyzes Jünger's main work from his early period, "Der Arbeiter," in which the echoes of his existential experiences as a highly decorated combatant were still alive, and which essentially addresses the problem of vision and the meaning of life in the modern age, and especially in the age of technology. For Junger, the worker is not a social class, and even less so the proletarian worker. He is a symbol.

In the 1950s, Evola tried unsuccessfully to have a translation of the book published; failing in his attempt, he decided to produce a long annotated paraphrase with updates necessary for the post-World War II period, in order to make it an autonomous and personal work. This new edition includes other of Evola's writings on Jünger published between 1943 and 1974, documenting the evolution of his point of view, and an extensive bibliography.

https://tradition.st/the-worker-in-the-thought-of-ernst-junger/

"Three good resolutions. First, "Live moderately", because almost all of the difficulties in my life have been caused by a lack of moderation.

Second, "Always keep an eye out for the unfortunate". Man's inability to perceive real misfortune is one of his innate tendencies, and even more than this: he turns away from it. Compassion lags behind.

Finally, I want to banish the desire for individual salvation in the vortex of possible catastrophes. It is more important to behave with dignity. We secure ourselves only on the surface points of a whole that remains hidden from us, and the very evasion that we devise can kill us."

"The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology."
—Carl Schmitt.

“The only thing that matters is the silent endurance of a few, whose impassible presence as “stone guests” helps to create new relationships, new distances, new values, and helps to construct a pole that, although it will certainly not prevent this world inhabited by the distracted and restless from being what it is, will still help to transmit to someone the sensation of the truth — a sensation that could become for them the principle of a liberating crisis.”
—Julius Evola.

And, ultimately, the “Olympic” ideal is a value, a value of clarity, order, hierarchy, of a cosmos in the original Greek sense, sovereignty that has resolved chaos and transcended the purely human element, just as the cold clarity of the peaks overlooks the uncertain mists of the valley.

“Before my eyes, there slowly emerged a giant snake coiled about the earth a snake that by constantly swallowing its own tail vanquished polarities; the ultimate huge snake that mocks all opposites.

Opposites carried to extremes come to resemble each other; and things that are farthest removed from each other, by increasing the distance between them, come closer together. This is the secret that the circle of the snake expounded.

The flesh and spirit, the sensual and the intellectual, the outside and the inside, will remove themselves a pace from the earth, and high up, higher even than the where the snake-ring of white clouds encircling the earth is joined, they too will be joined.”
—Yukio Mishima.

“When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically…when a boxer counts as a great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a spector over all this uproar the question: what for?-where to?-and what then? The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline.”
—Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics.

“His apartment was a long sequence of rooms. At the end was his library, in the center of which hung the Stieler portrait of Goethe, and beyond it his study. Nothing ‘genius-like’ or chaotic in this home. Next to his desk hung the death masks of Napoleon and Frederick the Great. And in the first room stood the grand piano on which he played old Italian music, Verdi, and Wagner. This fondness for Wagner, which had often brought him to Bayreuth, was probably more for the last musical genius than for the artist. Here, too, there was something of wistfulness and longing.”

—Fritz Behn describing the apartment of his friend Oswald Spengler.

"Faustian man has become the slave of his creation. [...] The Western industry has diverted the ancient traditions of the other Cultures. The streams of economic life move towards the seats of King Coal and the great regions of raw material. Nature becomes exhausted, the globe sacrificed to Faustian thinking in energies. The working earth is the Faustian aspect of her, the aspect contemplated by the Faust of Part II, the supreme transfiguration of enterprising work and contemplating, he dies."

— Oswald Spengler, 1922
Image: Prometheus Bound, Thomas Cole (1847)

Roman soldier’s tombstone: “I emulated myself.”

The term 'asceticism' is also susceptible to being misunderstood by those who view Buddhism from the outside.

Evola reminds his readers that the original meaning of the term asceticism is "practical exercise," or 'discipline' — one could even say 'learning.' It certainly does not mean, as some are inclined to think, a willingness to mortify the body that derives from the idea of penance, and even leads to the practice of self-flagellation, since it is believed that one must suffer in order to expiate one's sins.

Asceticism is rather a school of the will, a pure heroism (that is, it is disinterested) that Evola compares to the efforts of a mountain climber.

To the layman, mountain climbing may be a pointless effort, but to the climber it is a challenge in which the test of courage, perseverance, and heroism is its only purpose. In this we recognize an attitude that Brahmanism knew under certain forms of yoga and Tantrism.

"Not long before the Russian occupation of the city, a bombing raid caused an injury to my spinal cord. The injury, which appeared lethal at first, caused the partial paralysis of my lower limbs.

I thus found myself confined to hospital. Such an accident, no doubt, was not unrelated to a rule I had long chosen to follow: not to avoid, but, on the contrary, to seek dangers as a tacit way of putting fate to the test. For this very reason, in the past, I had pursued mountain climbing at dangerous altitudes. I remained faithful to this very principle during the war, when a world was crumbling and the future was shrouded in uncertainty. The accident I fell victim to, however, lent itself to no obvious explanation. Not much changed in my life following the accident, as my handicap was merely physical: aside from the practical disadvantages, and the limitations it entailed from the point of view of my profane existence, the handicap hardly bothered me, for my spiritual and intellectual work remained unaffected by the accident. In my heart, I have always thoroughly subscribed to the traditional doctrine I often quoted in my writing, which teaches that we have wished all relevant events in our life before our birth. I could not, therefore, avoid applying such a doctrine to the aforementioned event. To remember why I had wished such an accident upon myself, and to understand its most profound significance, is what truly mattered in my eyes — more than ‘recovery’ itself."

— Julius Evola, The Path of Cinnabar