Author and Authorship
selected translations of Ernst Jünger's 1984 collection of aphorisms "Autor und Autorschaft"
Friendship is a stroke of luck. Established on love of a common cause and a sympathy which grows with the years. La Bruyère dedicated a series of maxims to the relationship between love and friendship. He reckons that both are mutually exclusive. "Love begins with love; and only a tenuous love could bind even the strongest of friendships." Thinking about Droste and Levin Schücking here would not be unreasonable.
There are women whose biography is reminiscent of a Valhalla. Already the change betrays that she stimulates without satisfaction. This remains preferable to what Nietzsche feared: "That one loses himself in the sultry dreams of a woman."
Today, in the era of the atom bomb, Homer would have to apologize as a glorifier of war. Schiller and Hölderlin also require purification in this respect.
A young visitor: "You can become a writer. You must be an author."
Money for artistic creation is a type of dream - and fantasy money, hence it's also harder to collect and more easily spent than a mercurial salary.
The temple of the body, scorned since the flight of the Gods, now degraded to a public lavatory.
Language as the "house of being". The reader should find himself at home in the work of an author, especially when it has become inhospitable outside. In such times, the book of books [the Bible] is more strongly and intimately consulted.
The modern way of reading books is just as one smokes cigarettes. Relaxation, excitement. The text is soon forgotten like a film. Conversely, poems which thrilled us in our youth are preserved word for word.
Monuments in our time are best made of plastic or plaster. Some last no longer than snowmen.
The poem is a sacrifice; this often remains bent, yet where it is not made as a sacrifice, it's blown away like smoke and mirrors.
Revolutions. The aesthete can support them, let them pass him by, or refuse them. Beaumarchais, Chateaubriand, Rivarol, Schubart, Schiller and all the others. Politics provides more motives, especially for drama, than the content of an aesthetic existence. Sympathy and refusal can vacillate within the same person, like in the relationship between the classic German authors and the French Revolution. The author is sovereign. Politics can fit into his biography and his system - but he never fits into theirs.
The laws of nature work in large and small ways - in the whirling of galaxies as in the tea that one stirs with a spoon at breakfast. An inkling of this should penetrate both poetry and prose. If a door is opened, not only a person enters, but fate with him. With the beloved Aphrodite and the judge of death.
Democritus: "People who wish to flee from death run down its throat.".
Novalis ‘Fragments’ : “Nothing is more poetic than heterogenous mixtures.”
Different afterwards on the mat, with a cigarette and wine. Shouldn't every thought be preceded by a weakening - a loss of instinctive vital strength?
In addition, Nietzsche's maxims on the influence of sickness on philosophy.
"Did you sleep well?"
“Alas, only moderately. I thought in my dreams."
A dream can be so compelling that it resembles wakefulness. On the other hand, real events can enthrall the mind with such power that one thinks he is dreaming. The poem reaches a ridge, where dream and reality are no longer distinguishable. This unity is the precondition for the occurrence of the divine.
The further back an event lies and the denser its mythical or cultic substance, it becomes all the more embarrassing to imagine that it was photographed. That would be a trespass into the kingdom reserved for the author. The attempt to film Golgotha does not succeed in credibility; it borders on blasphemy. Whereas the performance of painting, music, and poetry has always been successful.
Functionalization, numerification, insurance, pension, sales tax, the telephone. Bohemianism no longer offers a way out. The knowledge that poverty is a big deal has been lost.
Two temperaments after an adverse attack: one goes before the front door to chop a cord of wood, the other to his garden to look at a rose.
Enjoyed the distinctions between writer and the necessity to author and the resilience of the poem (some few, I suspect) in contrast to prose (to many words to recall in their entirety). A poem, perhaps is like a good wine or a kiss for it's wiff and aftertaste remains.