The Darkest Place

29. I am the decisive element.

[entjs-deactivated20220209]

“History, that mysterious entity beginning with a capital letter, does not exist. It is humans, as far as they are truly human, that make history or tear it down.”

— Evola, Tra Mito e Attualita 

[7pleiades7]

La sposa dei Sacri Cantici (also known as The Bride of the Sacred Canticles, and The Bride of the Song of Songs), (Details), (1854), by Gaetano Motelli (1806 – 1858), marble, × 55 × 75 cm (approximately 55.1 × 21.7 × 29.5 in), Gallerie d'Italia, Milan

[oathtoblood-deactivated20260708]

“Men knew that the gods whom they served could not give them freedom from danger and calamity, and they did not demand that they should. We find in the myths no sense of bitterness at the harshness and unfairness of life, but rather a spirit of heroic resignation: humanity is born to trouble, but courage, adventure, and the wonders of life are matters for thankfulness, to be enjoyed while life is still granted to us. The great gifts of the gods were readiness to face the world as it was, the luck that sustains men in tight places, and the opportunity to win that glory which alone can survive death.”

— H.R. Ellis Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

[bobmorane]

[dionysus-to-apollo]

"Fill your souls with Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves when you have faith in his heroes. With a hundred people raised in such an unmodern way, that is, people who have become mature and familiar with the heroic, one could permanently silence the entire noisy pseudo-education of this age."

-Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

[wrathofgnon]

“If you surrender a civilization to avoid social disapproval, you should know that all of history will curse you for your cowardliness.”

— Alice Teller

[illustratus]

Zawisza the Black in a Duel with John II of Aragon by Michal Bylina

[surfingkaliyuga]

“Zawisza Czarny” Michał Bylina 1957

[the-darkest-place]

A disciplined life therefore requires more than motivation. It requires a particular relationship with the truth. You have to prefer clean information over flattering interpretation. You have to become hard to soothe with your own excuses. You have to notice when your mind is switching from diagnosis to self-protection and pull it back into contact with what is actually there. That does not mean becoming theatrical about harshness, nor does it mean turning every setback into an existential drama. It means cultivating a sober and accurate way of seeing. Not dramatic. Not self-pitying. Not inflated. Simply clear. The numbers are the numbers. The standard is the standard. The result is the result. From there you decide what to do next.

-Miske, See things are they really are, not as you wish them to be

[the-darkest-place]

High modernism can manifest itself in architecture with faceless buildings that efface their own inhabitants, or in the urban planning that produces people-unfriendly places like Brasilia or Chandigarh, or in transportation schemes that allow the motorways connecting cities to obliterate neighborhoods and small towns [...] or in such massive rearrangements of landscapes as the New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority, or Khrushchev's Virgin Lands Project, or [...] Hitler's purely Aryan Third Reich, or [...] Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward.

Now, obviously it's a stretch to lump all of these examples together. The human costs of architectural blunders do not begin to compare with the price authoritarian blunders or worse have inflicted upon our era. But remember how often the subject has come up, in this book, of self-similarity across scale. Scott doesn't use that term, but I think it's what he has in mind when he stresses the most distinctive feature of high modernism: the attempt to make not just a landscape and it people legible, but their future as well. It's a pattern that persists across vast differences in scale; and what's most striking about it is that such acts of oppression are almost always justified as acts of liberation.

-Gaddis, The Landscape of History

[the-darkest-place]

Reductionism ... is only a stepping stone toward synthesis. It's not an end - or a method - in itself.

-Gaddis, The Landscape of History

[debarbat]

[illustratus]

The Passing Caravan by Eugène Alexis Girardet

[illustratus]

Mount Vesuvius erupting by night seen from the Atrio del Cavallo with spectators in the foreground, a panoramic view of the city and the Bay of Naples beyond by Pierre-Jacques Volaire

[the-darkest-place]

Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

-Herbert, Dune

[goodbyeeveryonee-deactivated202]

Just saying, but if you’re procrastinating putting in the work that you must, you aren’t hungry enough to change your situation. The universe shouldn’t have to give you the same lesson 20 times before you get it together. Stop treating your life like a game and make discipline your best friend. Nobody can help you out better than yourself.

[illustratus]

Returning to Sinai - A Sketch in the Desert by Elijah Walton

[newskinfortheoldceremony1974]

2025

ACTION IS THE ANTIDOTE TO DESPAIR

KEEP THE FAITH DO THE WORK

PASSION ABOVE ALL IS THE REMEDY AGAINST BOREDOM

EVERY DAY IS ALL THERE IS

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE