Solitary Individual

Mulch Sorw I walke With
Earlier 13 c.

The sacred pledge of Heav'n
   All things revere,
   Each in his sphere,
Save man for whom 'twas giv'n.

Die Bilder der Vergangenheit sind nicht verlassen
Von der Natur, als wie die Tag’ verblassen
Im hohen Sommer, kehrt der Herbst zur Erde nieder,
Der Geist der Schauer findet sich am Himmel wieder.

[What images once were, they were not banished
by Mother Nature, like her days that paled and vanished
amid high summer: When descends the autumn's power
the sky will show it as the spirit's shower.]

🍂 Hölderlin, excerpt from Der Herbst.

“Engage (Your) Vying in Exuberance until You Come to the Graves” . . .

Noch unverrückt, o schöne Lampe, schmückest du,
An leichten Ketten zierlich aufgehangen hier,
Die Decke des nun fast vergeßnen Lustgemachs.
Auf deiner weißen Marmorschale, deren Rand
Der Efeukranz von goldengrünem Erz umflicht,
Schlingt fröhlich eine Kinderschar den Ringelreihn.
Wie reizend alles! lachend, und ein sanfter Geist
Des Ernstes doch ergossen um die ganze Form —
Ein Kunstgebild der echten Art. Wer achtet sein?
Was aber schön ist, selig scheint es in ihm selbst.

[Ne'er dismantled, o beautiful lamp, you adorn,
By light chains gracefully suspended here,
The ceiling of this nigh forgotten festive room.
Upon your white marble bowl whose rim
The ivy wreath of gold green bronze entwines,
A band of children gaily links up for the roundelay.
How charming it all! Laughing, yet a gentle spirit
Of seriousness flows 'round the entire form.
An art-work of the genuine kind. Who gives it heed?
But what is beautiful shines blessedly in itself.]

• Eduard Mörike, Auf eine Lampe/To a Lamp (1846)

Wen the Turuf Is Thi Tuur
Mid 13 c. or after

Herr! gieb uns blöde Augen
für Dinge, die nichts taugen
und Augen voller Klarheit
in alle deine Wahrheit!

[Lord, give us weak eyes
for things that do not matter
and eyes full of clarity
in all your truth!]

The word 'satanic' can indeed be properly applied to all negation and reversal of order, such as is so incontestably in evidence in everything we now see around us: is the modern world really anything whatever but a direct denial of all traditional truth? At the same time, and more or less of necessity, the spirit of negation is the spirit of lying; it wears every disguise, often the most unexpected, in order to avoid being recognized for what it is, and even in order to pass itself off as the very opposite of what it is; this is where counterfeit comes in; and this is the moment to recall that it is said that 'Satan is the ape of God', and also that he 'transfigures himself into an angel of light'.

In the end, this amounts to saying that he imitates in his own way, by altering and falsifying it so as always to make it serve his own ends, the very thing he sets out to oppose: thus, he will so manage matters that disorder takes on the appearance of a false order, he will hide the negation of all principle under the affirmation of false principles, and so on.

Naturally, nothing of that kind can ever really be more than dissimulation and even caricature, but it is presented cleverly enough to induce an immense majority of men to allow themselves to be deceived by it; and why should we be astonished at this, when it is so easy to observe both the extent to which trickery, even of the crudest sort, succeeds in imposing itself on the crowd, and also the difficulty of subsequently undeceiving them?

Vulgus vult decipi was already a saying of the ancients of the 'classical period', and no doubt there have always been people, though never as many as in our days, ready to add: ergo decipiatur!

[René Guénon, 'Deviation and Subversion', in The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times]

In order to become aware of the importance assigned to the negation of the supra-human by the conscious and unconscious agents of the modern deviation, it is enough to observe how all who lay claim to be 'historians' of religion and of other forms of the tradition (and in any case they usually mix all these forms together under the general title of 'religion') are eager above all to explain everything in terms of exclusively human factors; it matters little whether, according to school of thought, these factors are psychological, social, or anything else, the very multiplicity of the different explanations facilitating the seduction of a greater number; common to all is the well-defined desire to reduce everything to the human level and to retain nothing that surpasses it; and those who believe in the value of this destructive 'criticism' are thenceforth very ready to confuse tradition with anything whatever, since there is nothing in the ideas inculcated into them such as might enable tradition to be distinguished from that which is wholly lacking in traditional character.

Granted that nothing that is of a purely human order can for that very reason legitimately be called 'traditional', there cannot possibly be, for instance, a 'philosophical tradition' or a 'scientific tradition' in the modern and profane sense of the words, any more, of course, than there can be a 'political tradition', at least where all traditional social organization is lacking, as is the case in the modern Western world. Such expressions are nevertheless in common use today, each in its way denaturing the idea of tradition; and it is obvious that if the 'traditionalists' referred to above can be persuaded to allow their activity to be turned aside toward one or another of these domains and to confine their activity to it, their aspirations will be 'neutralized' and rendered perfectly harmless, and may even sometimes be used without their knowledge for a purpose exactly contrary to what they intend.

Indeed it sometimes happens that people go so far as to apply the word 'tradition' to things that by their very nature are as directly anti-traditional as possible: thus they talk about a 'humanist tradition', and a 'national tradition', despite the fact that humanism is nothing if not an explicit denial of the supra-human, and the formation of 'nationalities' was the means employed for the destruction of the traditional civilization of the Middle Ages.

[René Guénon, 'Tradition and Traditionalism', in The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times]

August 6, 1945

The end of the enjoyment of poetry is a pure contemplation from which all the accidents of personal emotion are removed.
[T. S. Eliot]

Er, quan renovella e gensa
[Now that summer's come again]

Sordello di Mantova, 13th c.

Mirie it is while sumer ilast...🌾

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
[Letter 75, to Christopher Tolkien, 7 July 1944]