How Ernst Jünger reached the age of 103 | The stone ax Science | EUROtoday

The day after turning seventy, with the biblical age in tow, Ernst Jünger begins a diary that the Tusquets publishing home printed below the title After seventy (translated by Andrés Sánchez Pascual) and which begins on March 30, 1965 with a stroll via Wilflingen, a city the place the German thinker lived in ambush along with his spouse Liselotte, whom he affectionately referred to as Taurita for having been born below the signal of Taurus.

It is curious to see how Jünger’s pondering combines mythology with scientific evaluation. Reading his diaries leads us to succeed in that tough level that’s between two worlds, apparently reverse, however complementary to one another. In this manner, Jünger surprises us along with his precision and sensitivity when capturing indicators from the atmosphere. For instance, on this first stroll with which the diary opens, Jünger encounters a lizard. He surprises her on one of many rocks on the hill the place the “Treasure Castle” stands. It is an actual picture that, due to his interpretive abilities, Jünger transfers to a fictitious dimension, ending with the outline of the reptile’s pores and skin “brown with green stripes.” Jünger then wonders if it won’t be the lizard’s first spring outing; She appeared drowsy, as if she nonetheless had remnants of her winter sleep. Jünger approaches her with nice care and caresses her.

There is a sense of resurrection in spring, Jünger tells us; a sense that enhances “vital existence”. Hibernating, for Jünger, was the closest factor to “enjoying time stretched to the limit of perception.” With a exact syntax on the degree of Borges or Canetti – to provide two supreme examples – Jünger permits himself to be accompanied from his German residence to the Far East on a visit that lasts 5 months. Driven by curiosity, he discovers botanical species such because the Ravenala, referred to as the traveler’s palm, which opens its leaves like a fan and whose crowns protrude from the partitions of Singapore gardens.

In one other of his entries, Jünger illustrates to us about warm-blooded animals, which die extra simply than cold-blooded ones, since, based on him, they’ve to keep up their temperature inside lowered limits. Excess brings fever and deficiency brings frostbite, and it’s right here the place Jünger factors out air-con models as a “cosmic provocation.” To make clear issues, Jünger refers us to the beginnings of the world when “creatures lived within Gaia as in a mother’s womb” involving themselves within the warmth of the swamps or the ocean. When the cooling occurred – Jünger continues – the organisms that survived did so due to their adaptation, attaining a brand new steadiness with the atmosphere. For this motive, warm-blooded animals corresponding to seals survive in chilly waters, main their existence to the regressive type of fish that, “in order not to freeze from the cold, have put on shelter.”

With these forays into nature, Jünger takes us from curiosity to data on an unrepeatable journey. His diaries, and particularly this quantity we’re speaking about right here, are fairly a scientific assertion; an instance of find out how to journey a path the place prediction and shock will alternate till knowledge is reached.