/lit/ - Literature

>There are periods of decline when the pattern fades to which our inmost life must conform. When we enter upon them we sway and lose our balance. From hollow joy we sink to leaden sorrow, and past and future acquire a new charm from our sense of loss. So we wander aimlessly in the irretrievable past or in distant Utopias; but the fleeting moment we cannot grasp.
>As soon as we had become aware of this failure we strove to free ourselves. We felt a longing for actuality, for reality, and would have plunged into ice or fire or ether only to rid ourselves of weariness. As always when despair and maturity combine, we turned to power-for is that not the eternal pendulum that drives on the hand of time by day or night? So we began to dream of power and domination, and of the forms that in bold array advance to combat in the deadly struggle for existence, whether the outcome be disaster or triumphant victory. We studied them with the pleasure one finds in watching corrosions form as acid bites into dark mirrors of polished metal.

>I, as an anarch, renouncing any bond, any limitation of freedom, also reject compulsory education as nonsense. It was one of the greatest wellsprings of misfortune in the world.
>Compulsory schooling is essentially a means of curtailing natural strength and exploiting people. The same is true of military conscription, which developed within the same context. The anarch rejects both of them – just like obligatory vaccination and insurance of all kinds.
>The pauper, so long as he does not think parasitically, wishes to see as little government as possible, no matter what pretexts the state may use. He does not want to be schooled, vaccinated, or conscripted; all these things have senselessly increased the numbers of the poor, and with them, poverty.
>Proletarii were the citizens who served the state not with money but with children.
>one sees eunuchs convening in order to disempower the populace in whose name they presume to speak. This is logical, since the eunuch's most heartfelt goal is to castrate the free man. The results are laws demanding that “you should run to the district attorney while your mother is being raped.”
>A nihilist feels an urge to blow up something; these are the beacons of the impotent.
Jünger is actually terrifying. In an exhilarating, Promethean sort of way. I just picked a few quotes relating to contemporary politics, he bulldozes so many ideologies, collectives, and institutions in this book and never without losing his sense of detachment and historicality.

"Whatever we ponder, we have to start with the Greeks."
Eumeswil (1977), 2015 Telos Press edition, page 244.
So Ernst Jünger pioneered /lit/'s phrase all the way back in 1977. Was he, dare, I say it, /ourguy/? We've been a Jünger board all along.

I'm fascinated with the concept of the inwardly free individual - Ernst Junger's Anarch or Evola's Aristocrat of the soul. What are some works that will deepen, or challenge, my understanding of inner liberation? I'm open to more Western works, but I also suspect there are Eastern works that address the subject, though I wouldn't know where to start.