/lit/ - Literature

>The forest rebel is the concrete individual, and he acts in the concrete world. He has no need of theories or of laws concocted by some party jurist to know what is right. He descends to the very springs of morality, where the waters are not yet divided and directed into institutional channels. Matters become simple here - assuming something uncorrupted still lives in him. We already saw that the great experience of the forest is the encounter with one’s own Self, with one’s invulnerable core, with the being that sustains and feeds the individual phenomenon in time. This meeting, which aids so powerfully in both returning to health and banishing fear, is also of highest importance in a moral sense. It conducts us to that strata which underlies all social life and has been common to all since the origins. It leads to *the* person who forms the foundation beneath the individual level, from whom the individuations emanate. At this depth there is not merely community; there is identity. It is this that the symbol of the embrace alludes to. The I recognizes itself in the other, following the age-old wisdom, “Thou art that.” This other may be a lover, or it may be a brother, a fellow sufferer, or a defenceless neighbour. By helping in this manner, the I also benefits itself in the eternal. And with this the basic order of the universe is confirmed.

>These are facts of experience. Countless people alive today have passed the midpoint of the nihilistic process, the rock-bottom of the maelstrom. They have learned that the mechanism reveals its menacing nature all the more clearly there; man finds himself in the bowels of a great machine devised for his destruction. They have also learned firsthand that all rationalism leads to mechanism, and every mechanism to torture its logical consequence. In the nineteenth century this had not yet been realized.

>Only a miracle can save us from such whirlpools. This miracle has happened, even countless times, when a man stepped out of the lifeless prisons to extend a helping hand to others. This has happened even in prisons, indeed especially there. Whatever the situation, whoever the other, the individual can become this fellow human being - and thereby reveal his native nobility. The origins of aristocracy lay in giving protection, protection from the threat of monsters and demons. This is the hallmark of nobility, and it still shines today in the guard who secretly slips a piece of bread to a prisoner. This cannot be lost, and on this the world subsists. These are the sacrifices on which it rests.

>This is what man really wants to know. Here is the germ of his temporal anxiety, the cause of his thirst, which grows in the desert - this desert that is time. The more time dilates, the more conscious and compelling but also the more empty it becomes in its tiniest fractions, the more will burn the thirst for orders that transcend time.

-- Ernst Junger, The Forest Passage