No virtue can flourish without this strange, instinctive feeling of duty and responsibility that conscience always makes a point of expressing. Curiously, modernity, by massifying man, making him live in ever more populous cities, providing him with ever smaller spaces and tasks, has not only annulled this feeling, but transformed it into one of insignificance. Modern man lives in a space he did not conquer, in a house he did not build, spending his life on tasks whose real purpose, if he does not ignore it, is devoid of his personal stamp. One cannot accept charges for what one experiences as disconnection.
Category: Notes
The Cult of Form Can Only Occur…
The cult of form can only occur in spirits whose artistic motivation is not strong enough, or not clear enough. In the first case, we do not really have an artist, and in the second, we have an artist who has not yet understood himself. More often than not, however, whether consciously or not, the cult of form is merely a mask put on to cover up an inner emptiness.
This Thing of Attributing Heroism to Depraved Murderers…
This thing of attributing heroism to depraved murderers is something that really irritates in history books, and it is disgusting to see in them the naturalness with which the most astonishing perversities driven by the most despicable ambition are narrated and, worse, the innocuous effect of these on the historian’s opinions. Heroism is always detachment, never the other way around. The normalization of barbarity is the worst historical stain on the European character.
Faced With the Possibility of Near Death…
Faced with the possibility of near death, the average man collapses in terror and begins to behave like a primate. In other words: fear overrides his reason and makes him look like a child. For this reason and others, the fear of death is the first to be overcome and it is the fear that frees, stimulates and hardens the spirit. To overcome it is to transform oneself and, in a way, to overcome all other fears.