Ernst Jünger
The Forest Passage
Translated by Thomas Friese
New York: Telos Press, 2013
We all live in deserts.
Urban deserts. Suburban deserts. Even in rural areas it is difficult to escape the commercially refined silicates of mechanized and meaningless modernity that blow over and bury the fossilized remains of dead gods and old ways. The desert —
The Nothing — grows and obscures and stifles all.
Describing the terrorized boredom of modern men, Ernst Jünger, quoting Nietzsche, warns: “woe to him in whom deserts hide.”
Jünger was writing in the aftermath of World War II about the chafing of his own individualism against the bureaucratic machine of Nazi Germany, and
The Forest Passage makes mention of dictatorships. But, with uncanny foresight, he predicted our Twenty-First Century predicament, from the pointlessness of voting to near-constant surveillance and the neurotic need to know the news numerous times throughout the day. Jünger prophesied our states that make technicians into priests, while paving over institutions, like churches, which facilitate an inner spiritual life that the secular state is unable to control. That which cannot be counted, measured, or taxed cannot be permitted. This unquantifiable grain of existence that survives beyond the reach of the mechanized world is what Jünger identifies as freedom, and woe to him who knows only the desert, “woe to him who carries within not one cell of that primal substance that ensures fertility, again and again.”