Gnarly Authenticity .’s Reviews > Approaches: Drugs and Altered States > Status Update

" in the beginning is the Word. It directs the progress, whether muscle or steam power electricity or radiation is employed for the work. The world of things, by contrast, is a fiction that would dissolve into smoke were it not regularly brought back to the word and to Poetic creation." -Mumford explains the literal scientific truth of this poetic claim in Technics & Human Development

EJ is often cryptic and allusive, like one who speaks while being overheard by sinister forces. When this is combined with a hamhanded English translation like the available version of "The Worker" he can be nearly unreadable. When translated well, as here, it's rather pleasant

Titans of 19th c germany ranked according to homosexuality from wagner (gayest straight man who ever walked the earth thru Mann (heroically repressed, source of his genius, bourgeoise paterfamilias) down to the lowly nietzsche.

" Today, any aspirations to faith increasingly look like chin-up exercises - when the aspirants do not simply let themselves drop to the ground. Such discussions take place in houses with crumbling cornerstones; one does better at that point to head for the cellar." harsh but fair

" Ultimately, the personal and economic hardships played out on the surface of the calamity. My mother felt it in a deeper manner than my father - the undivided grip of fate, which she answered from the undivided substance of her people. She might sometimes fall into a sort of trance at the dinner table and utter a sentence that would have fit in some ancient chronicle, such as: "He had inherited a beautiful kingdom"

Russell Berman & the translator spend most of the introduction on Junger & psychedelics because the spectacle of the icy Teutonic warrior as psychedelic cowboy is novel, but more than half the book is about alcohol & cocaine. His hilarious and perfect description of the coke crash is 🤌🏻🤌🏻