Gnarly Authenticity .’s Reviews > A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945 > Status Update

" The towering intelligence of human beings seems to transcend this proportional requirement. At the same time, the surplus can be explained as relegated to invisible organs. When these metaphysical organs are no longer stimulated, when they atrophy, a disruption of the balance appears of the sort we are now experiencing; large amounts of intelligence are freed up to be applied to annihilation."

" concerning prayer. It possesses a conductive power, in the sense of a superior mechanism that dissipates and depletes fear. In ages when the practice is lost, large indigestible masses of feral dread build up in populations."

" what can one advise a man, especially a simple man, to do in order to extricate himself from the conformity that is constantly being produced by technology? Only prayer. Here even the lowest human being has a vantage point that makes him part of the whole and not just a cog in the machinery. Extraordinary benefit surges from this source as well as self mastery."

" as long as we follow our destiny, chance os powerless; we are guided by our trust in Providence. If we lose this virtue, chances set free and attacks us like an army of microbes"

In my mind, curiously enough, Ernst Junger and Tintin are linked. Some similarity.

" In World War l, I was alone and free; I am going through this second one with all my loved ones and all my belongings."

Hipped me to Henri Rousseau's sublime 1894 painting "War" which I had never known of before. "Then there is the Mexican element ..without a doubt, a source of our world of terror derives from these tropical seeds that developed on European soil"