A beautiful Symbolist world that lures us along, like a robed novitiate drunk on the scents of strange foreign incense, through a moral half-dreamed landscape where landmarks look hazily similar to very important questions and events out in the real world. But, like in our own sometimes real world, moments of horrified detail find a way of inserting themselves into our paths, rousing us from dreams and studies.
Jünger’s first explicitly fictitious novel after Storm of Steel is difficult to read without mapping onto events in the twentieth century and in Jünger’s own life. A pair of veterans move into an abandoned monastery high above a marina on the Mediterranean where they hope to pursue a career of botany, following some inborn directive to classify the world around them, inspired by their only named patron saint, Carl Linnaeus. But their efforts to calmly bring observational category to the natural world are halted by the slowly encroaching flawed ambitions of men from neighboring tribes. How could we not read in direct parallel with Jünger and his own brother’s aloof decision to study entomology while the Nazis tore apart Europe around them?
But I won’t add my voice to the chorus of people that have admonished Jünger for his lack of action, while they sit nearly a century in the future behind a computer terminal. I’ll just come along in his art and let my imagination share the world that he’s created for a little while. I’ll stroll through the doldrums of the sort of calm lifework that can never help but be threatened by the slowly creeping bounds of a techno capitalist unfeeling butcher shop of progress, left or right. I won’t pretend that the sides are as clear cut as people seem to think when they are separated from them by the safety net of time and distance. But I will revel in the enrapturing natural descriptions here where calyxes of rare flowers trail pollen from the surface of forgotten forest pools while, just one clearing over, lie tanner’s shacks erected under the supervision of strange sadistic gods who turn classification into a perverse and violent hierarchy.