RENE GUENON 23

Rene Guenon, Miscellanea (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Henry D. Fohr, Cecil Bethell, Patrick Moore & Hubert Schiff (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1976, 2003).

RENE GUENON 22

Rene Guenon, Insights into Islamic Esoterism and Taoism (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Henry D. Fohr, edited by Samuel D. Fohr (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1973, 2003) (Form "The Influence of Islamic Civilization in the West": "Most Europeans [and Americans?] have not accurately assessed the importance of the contribution that Islamic civilization has made to its own, nor have they understood the nature of their borrowings from this civilization in the past, some going so far as to disregard totally all that is connected with it. This is because the history they are taught makes a travesty of the facts and seems to have been altered intentionally on a great many points. Indeed, this history goes to extremes in flaunting the little respect it has for Islamic civilization, the merits of which it habitually disparages each time an occasion presents itself. It is important to point out that the teaching of history in European universities pays no heed to the influences in question. On the contrary, the truths which ought to be told on this subject, whether though teaching or writing, are systematically set aside, especially concerning the most important events." Id. at 38, 38. "Even stranger is the Europeans consider themselves the direct heirs of Hellenic civilization, whereas the facts belie this claim. The truth is that Greek science and philosophy were transmitted to Europeans through Muslim intermediaries, as history itself incontestably bears out; in other words, the intellectual patrimony of the Greeks reached the West only after it had been seriously studied in the Near East, and had it not been for Islamic scholars and philosophers, Europeans would have remained in total ignorance of these teachings for a very long time, if indeed, they would ever have come to know them." Id. at 39.).

ANOMIE AND THE WESTERN DELUSION OF IDENTITY, FREEDOM (CONTROL), AND EQUALITY

Liah Greenfeld, Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard U. Press, 2013) ("Why do the secular focus of nationalism and the two principles embodied in the society constructed on its basis lead to madness--or schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness? All three of these features place the individual in control of his or her destiny, eliminating the expectation of putting things right in the afterlife, making one the ultimate authority in deciding on one's priorities, encouraging one to strive for a higher social status (since one is presumed to be equal to everyone, but one wants to be equal only to those who are superior), and giving one the right to choose one's social position (since the presumption of fundamental equality makes everyone interchangeable) and therefore identity. But this very liberty implied in nationalism, both empowering and encouraging the individual to choose what to be--in contrast to all the religious pre-national societies in which no one was asked 'what do you want to be when you grow up?' since one was whatever one was born--makes the formation of the individual identity problematic, and the more so the moire choices for the definition of one's identity a society offers and the more insistent it is on equality. A clear sense of identity being a condition sine qua non for adequate mental functioning malformation of identity leads to mental disease, but modern culture cannot help the individual to acquire such clear sense, it is inherently confusing. This cultural insufficiency--the inability of a culture to provide individuals within it with consistent guidance--was named anomie by Durkheim" Id. at 4-5.).

HANS FALLADA

Hans Fallada, Alone in Berlin, translated form the German by Michael Hoffmann, with an afterword beget Wilkes (New York: Penguin Classics, 2009).

Hans Fallada, Once a Jaibird: A Novel, translated from the German by Eric Sutton, revised by Nicholas Jacobs, Gardis Cramer von Laue & Linden Lawson (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2015).

Hans Fallada, A Small Circus: A Novel, translated from the German by Michael Hoffmann (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2015).

Hans Fallada, A Stranger in My Own Country: The 1944 Prison Diary, translated from the German by Allan Bluden, edited by Jenny Williams and Sabine Lange (New York: Polity, 2015) ("But now they tore down the dyke themselves from the outside, and created a new law, or rather one law for the Party and one for those who were not in the Party. Finally, during the war, when any real sense of the law and any faith in the law had long since been extinguished, they decided that judges must reach their verdicts solely on the basis of 'the mood of the people'. As they were not Christians, they had never read the passage in the Bible where the people cry 'Crucify him! Crucify him!', whereupon Christ was crucified--in accordance with 'the mood of the people'. And Pilate went forth, washed his hands, and asked: What is truth?" Id. at 69.).

Hans Fallada, Wolf Among Wolves: A Novel, translated from the German by Philip Owens, restored and with additional translations by Thorstein Carstensen & Nicholas Jacobs (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2010).

RENE GUENON 21

Rene Guenon, Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Henry D. Fohr, edited by Samuel D. Fohr (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1970, 2003).

RENE GUENON 20

Rene Guenon, Studies in Hinduism (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Henry D. Fohr & Cecil Bethell, edited by Samuel D. Fohr (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1966, 2001) (From Chapter 2, "The Spirit of India": 'The opposition of East and West, reduced to its simplest terms, is basically identical to that often held to exist between contemplation and action." Id. at 6. However, "contemplation is superior to action, just as the immutable is superior to change. Since action is only transitory and momentary modification of being, it could not have its principle and sufficient reason within itself, and if it is not joined to a principle that lies beyond its contingent domain it is but pure illusion, which is to say that the principle from which it draws all the reality of which it is capable--both its existence and its very possibility--can only be found in contemplation." Id. at 7. From chapter 12, "Eastern Metaphysics": "For us, the great difference between the East and West (meaning here exclusively the modern West), the only difference that is truly essential, since all the other differences are derivative, is this: on the one hand, preservation of tradition and all that it implies, and on the other hand,  the negate an loss of that same tradition; on the nose side, the safeguarding of metaphysical knowledge, on the other, utter ignorance of ll that relates to that realm...." Id. at 86, 101. "The material superiority of the West is beyond dispute; nobody denies it, but it is hardly grounds for envy. But one must go further: sooner or later this excessive material development threatens to destroy the West if it does not recover itself in time and if it does not seriously consider a 'return to the source', as goes a saying current in certain schools of Islamic esoterism. Today one hears from many quarters of the 'defense of the West', but unfortunately it does not seem to be understood that is chiefly against itself that the West seem to be defended, that the greatest and most formidable of the dangers that threaten it stem from it own present tendencies...." Id. at 101-102.).

RENE GUENON 19

Rene Guenon, Studies in Freemasonry and the Compagnonnage (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Henry D. Fohr, Cecil Bethell & Michael Allen (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1964, 2004) ("Indeed, in a general sense what is dogmatism if not the purely sentimental and very human tendency to present one's own individual ideas (whether these pertain to a man or to a collectivity), with all the relative and uncertain elements they inevitably entail, as if they were incontestable truths? It is but a short step from this to the desire to impose these so-called truths on others, and history shows well enough how many times this step has been taken; nevertheless, on account of their relative and hypothetical--an therefore in a large measure illusory--character, such ideas constitute 'beliefs' or 'opinions', and nothing more." Id. at 2.).

PERHAPS 21st WESTERN (I.E., AMERICAN) POLITICAL CULTURE IS IN THE MIDDLE OF ITS OWN MACHIAVELLIAN MOMENT

J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, with a new afterword (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 1975, 2003) ("'The Machiavellian moment' is a phrase to be interpreted in two ways. [] In the second place, 'the Machiavellian moment' denotes the problem itself. It is a name for the moment in conceptual time in which the republic was seen as confronting its own temporal finitude, as attempting to remain morally and politically stable in a stream of irrational events conceived as essentially destructive of all systems of secular stability. In the language which had been developed for the purpose, thus was spoken of as the confrontation of 'virtue' with 'fortune' and 'corruption'; and the study of Florentine thought is the study of how Machiavelli and his contemporaries pursed the intimations of these words, in the context of those ways of thinking about time . . . " Id. at vii-viii. "It is notorious that American culture is haunted by myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and them regenerate it." Id. at 545.).

MODERNISM IS STILL US

J. W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914 (The Yale Intellectual History of the West) (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2000) (Modernism "genuine novelty is marked . . . by its wholesale refusal to present novelty in the guise of revival and therefore its renunciation of the comforts and inspirations of the past. The renunciation was not absolute . . . but it was comprehensive enough and it was itself a novelty. In the century and a half before 1900, to go back no earlier, innovation in the arts and radical rejections of the dominant conventions had characteristically taken the form of revivals." Id. at 236."One thing the [First World War] had been widely expected to produce was a new cultural epoch. Yet though, as a collective experience, it was far more shattering, more apocalyptic, than could have been imagined, it did not. [] But essentially, with some modifications in its expressive languages, the post-war avant-garde was still recognizably the pre-war one. In a sense the latter is still ours. Experiment has become the norm. [] Post-modernism in literature, for all the critical volubility expended on it, looks more like a gloss on Modernism than its historical grave-digger. Modernism is our tradition." Id. at 252- 253.).

THE PROGRESSIVE MEDIEVAL ATTITUDE TOWARD POVERTY

Marcia L. Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400 (The Yale Intellectual History of the West) (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1997) ("Theorists on poor law considered what attitude should be taken toward poverty and poor people and how the poor should be treated. A striking feature of medieval views of poverty is that, despite the positive revaluation of work found . . . in Benedictine monasticism, the work ethic did not entail the glorification of wealth or the idea that poverty is a sign of vice. Work, to be sure, was praised by monastic writers as a source of moral discipline, breeding humility in the individual and community spirit. A means of supporting the abbey and of serving its extramural neighbors with its surplus, work was also seen as an offering to God and a form of prayer. At the same time, throughout the Middle Ages, theologians and canonists agreed with monastic writers that poverty can have a positive moral value. What determines whether it has this value is whether poverty is embraced voluntarily. Voluntary poverty was one of the central vows taken by monks and nuns and the friars gave it still more emphasis as an aspect of the imitation of Christ. All agreed that the value of voluntary poverty is that it frees those embracing it from worldly cares, the better to serve God and neighbors. On the other hand, when poverty is involuntary, either because one is born into that state or because of economic reverses, poverty is neither a virtue not a vice but a misfortune. All medieval thinkers concurred that it is wrong to punish an involuntary poor person on either count. The appropriate moral response is to help the poor, making special provisions for them not extended to others." Id. at 326-327.).

RENE GUENON 18

Rene Guenon, Symbols of Sacred Science (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Henry D. Fohr, edited by Samuel D. Fohr (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1962, 2001).

RENE GUENON 17

Rene Guenon, Insights into Christian Esoterism (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Henry D. Fohr, edited by Samuel D. Fohr (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1954, 2001).

RENE GUENON 16

Rene Guenon, Initiation and Spiritual Realization (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Henry D. Fohr, edited by Samuel D. Fohr (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1952, 2001) (From "Against Popularization": "Perhaps the most difficult thing in the world to bear is the foolishness of a great number, and even the majority of men, especially in our time, a foolishness which grows ever greater in the measure that the intellectual decline characteristic of the last cyclic period becomes more general and accentuated. To this must be joined ignorance, or more precisely a certain kind of ignorance that is closely linked to it, one wholly unconscious of itself and asserting itself all the more audaciously in the degree that it knows and understands less, and as a result is an irremediable evil for those afflicted by it. Foolishness and ignorance can in short be united under the common name incomprehension; but it must be understood that to endure this incomprehension in no way implies that one must make any concessions to it, nor even abstain from correcting the errors it give rise to and doing all that is possible to prevent it from spreading, which, moreover, is very often a most unpleasant task, especially when the obstinacy of some people obliges one to repeat many times what normally it should suffice to say only once. This obstinacy which one thus comes up against is, furthermore, not always exempt from bad faith; and, to speak the truth, bad faith itself strongly implies a narrowness of view which is after all only the result of a more or less complete incomprehension; thus real incomprehension and bad faith, or stupidity and malice intermingle in such a way that it is sometimes very difficult  to determine the part each plays." Id. at 1, 1-2. Does not this capture the state of discourse--especially political discourse and, specifically race discourse--in twenty-first century America?).

THE GERMAN WAR, 1939-1945

Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945: Citizens and Soldiers (New York: Basic Books, 2015) ("The German War presents a [] problem: how to uncover the fears and hopes of the society from which the victors and perpetrators came in order to understand how Germans justified this war to themselves. To focus in this question I have tried to develop both a sense of breadth and of depth: breadth by using 'micro' snapshots of opinions, drawing on what eavesdropping reporters for the regime picked up from public conversations or military censors from sampling the mail bags; depth by following a select cast of individuals, drawn from a wide range of backgrounds, over a considerable period of time, exploring how their personal hopes and plans were entwined with their changing experiences of the war. Doing this has made the voices of the victims less prominent than in Witnesses of War but they are never absent: without their contrasting perspective, we would not know how differently--and often solipsistically--Germans framed their understanding of the war." Id. at xxiii-xiv.).

Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis (New York: Knopf, 2005) ("Hunger was the most common pain children experienced during and after the war, and they soon learned that their parents could not take it away. Like adults, children turned food fantasies into elaborate games, creating make-believe recipes or enacting the queues in front of soup kitchens. They saw how hunger drove adults to fight, steal and prostitute themselves; and they became participants in the bitter accusations and counter-accusations of theft which tore families apart. . . . Hunger drove children to beg and to risk their lives smuggling goods. It also taught them to distrust strangers: however unhappy their own families were, in most cases these remained the only social institution to which children could turn. The children's homes in Theresienstadt were the exception to this rule. In most other homes and orphanages children starved. In the extremities of the Warsaw ghetto, passers-by might throw a sheet of newspaper over the children who had died in the street, but hunger also drove other children to ignore the corpses altogether and to retreat into the make-believe world of games. Hunger invaded all social relationships, teaching children wariness and self-reliance, and it left its mark on their bodies and their minds." Id. at 364. "During the war, adults and children in the German cities failed to notice the forced laborers who cleared their streets of rubble after the bombing, just as German refugees fleeing westwards in 1945 had ignored the death marches of the concentration camp prisoners in their midst. In this complete nationalisation of empathy lay the fatal work of Nazism, which had legitimized any act of barbarity towards Untermenschen as long as it helped the German cause. Despite all the evidence before them, many Germans did not reflect on what they were seeing." Id. at 370-371.).

SUGGESTED FICTION IN TRANSLATION

Roberto Arlt, The Seven Madmen, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor, with an introduction by Julio Cortazar (New York: New York Review Books, 2015).

Tahar Ben Jelloun, This Blinding Absence of Light, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale (New York: Penguin Books, 2005)..

Umberto Eco, Numero Zero: A Novel, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon (Boston & New York Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015).

Johann Peter Hebel, The Treasure Chest, introduction and translated from the German by John Hibberd (New York: Penguin Classics/ Penguin Books, 1995).

Wolfgang Hilbig, 'I', translated from the German  by Isabel Fargo Cole (New York: Seagull Books, 2015).

Wolfgang Hilbig, The Sleep of the Righteous, translated from the German  by Isabel Fargo Cole (San Francisco: Two Lines Press, 2015).

Michel Houellebecq, Submission: A Novel, translated from the French by Lorin Stein (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015).

Walter Kempowski, All For Nothing, translated from the German by Anthea Bell (London; Granta Books, 2011)

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book One, translated from the Norwegian by Don Barden (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2012).

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book Two: A Man In Love, translated from the Norwegian by Don Barden (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2013).

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book Three: Boyhood, translated from the Norwegian by Don Barden (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2014).

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book Four, translated from the Norwegian by Don Barden (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2015).

Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Time for Everything, translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2009).

Eka Kurniawan, Beauty Is a Wound: A Novel, translated from the Indonesian by Annie Tucker (New York: New Directions, 2015).

Eka Kurniawan, Man Tiger: A Novel, translated from the Indonesian by Labodalih Sembiring (London & New York: Verso , 2015).

Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Satantango, translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes (New York: New Directions, 2012).

Multatuli (aka Eduard Douwes Dekker), Max Havelaar, Or the Coffee Auctions of a Dutch Trading Company, translated from the Dutch by Roy Edwards, introduction by R. P. Meijer (New York: Penguin Classics/Penguin Books), 1987.

Ippolito Nievo, Confessions of an Italian, translated from the Italian by Frederika Randall; introduction by Lucy Riall (New York: Penguin Classics/Penguin Books, 2014).

Rosa Nissan, Like a Bride and Like a Mother: Two Novels (Jewish Latin America Series), translated from the Spanish by Dick Gerdes, introduction by Ilan Stavans (Albuquergue: U. of New Mexico Press, 2002).

Orhan Pamuk, A Strangeness in My Mind, translated from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap (New York: Knopf, 2015).

Alessandro Spina, The Confines of the Shadow: In Lands Overseas, Volume 1, translated from the Italian by Andre Naffis-Sahely (London: Darf Publications, 2015).

Magda Szabo, The Door, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix, with an introduction by Ali Smith (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).

IMRE KERTESZ

Imre Kertesz, Detective Story: A Novel, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 2009).

Imre Kertesz, Dossier K., translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2013) ("The only people who were not besmirched by the shame of the Holocaust were the dead. It is painful to carry the brand of surviving for some unaccountable reason. You remained here so you could spread the Auschwitz myth; you remained here as a sort of freak. You are invited to attend anniversaries; your irresolute face is video-recorded, your faltering voice, you hardly notice that you've become a kitsch supporting character in a fraudulent narrative, and you sell for peanuts your own story, which bit by bit you yourself understand least of all. But instead of mourning your lost story, you complain about your daily food ration. You rake in the breast-beating remorse of the jubilee speeches because you believe the mass is being said for you, and you are late in noticing that you have already played your part and there is no longer any need for you here." Id. at 187.).

Imre Kertesz, Fatelessness A Novel, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 2004).

Imre Kertesz, Fiasco, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011).

Imre Kertesz, The Holocaust Culture, translated from the Hungarian by Thomas Cooper (London: Seagull Books, 2011) (From "A Conversation with Imre Kertesz": "Chancellor Merkel, when she took office, said that the Holocaust was a part of the German Volk, the identity of the German Volk. And, of course, most the historical scholarship on the Holocaust has been done in Germany. But the point is that it's not seen simply as an event of history but, rather, as an event that casts an entirely different light on all our ideas about ethics and morality." Id. at 43. "If we want to understand National Socialism then we need to understand the workings of a dictatorship in which the individual was deprived of the ability to decide and was forced to play a role in the system. But this is not something peculiar to German history. We speak of collective guilt, the collective guilt of the German nation. But Auschwitz is the collective crime of the entire world, not just of the German nation. If we think of the Holocaust as a war between Germans and Jews then we will never understand it." Id. at 48.).

Imre Kertesz, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 2004) (meditations on the Holocaust).

Imre Kertesz, Liquidation: A Novel, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 2004) (the catastrophes of Holocaust and communism).

Imre Kertesz, The Pathseeker (The Contemporary Art of the Novella), translated from the Hungarian and an afterword by Tim Wilkinson (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2008) (" 'There's no such thing as chance,' he heard dully and tremulously from behind the veil. 'Only justice.' " Id. at 80.).

Imre Kertesz, The Union Jack (The Contemporary Art of the Novella), translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2009).

RENE GUENON 15

Rene Guenon, The Metaphysical Principles of the Infinitesimal Calculus (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Michael Allen & Henry D. Fohr, edited by Samuel D. Fohr (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1946, 2003).

RENE GUENON 14

Rene Guenon, The Great Triad (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Henry D. Fohr, edited by Samuel D. Fohr (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1946, 2001).

RENE GUENON 13

Rene Guenon, Perspectives on Initiation (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Henry D. Fohr, edited by Samuel D. Fohr (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1946, 2001).

FOUR FICTIONS

John Banville, The Blue Guitar: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2015) (See Craig Taylor, "Stealing Beauty," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/27/2015.).

Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family: A Novel (New York: Scout Press, 2015) (See Kaui Hart Hemmings, "Then It Was Gone," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/6/2015.).

Andrew O'Hagan, The Illuminations: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015).

Norman Mailer, An American Dream: A Novel New York: Random House, 2015).

RENE GUENON 12

Rene Guenon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Lord Northbourne (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1945, 2001).