New Review of Ernst Jünger’s The Adventurous Heart

Gary Lachman reviews Ernst Jünger’s The Adventurous Heart for Reality Sandwich:

The Adventurous Heart is a collection of short essays, thoughts, stories, dreams, philosophical musings, and other unclassifiable writings on a number of experiences: nature, death, travel, sex, drugs, antique shops, museums, practically anything that caught Jünger’s ever inquisitive eye. It provides, as Jünger says, “small models of another way of seeing things.” This “other way” is what Jünger calls “stereoscopy,” the ability to see things in a dual aspect, perceiving their surface and depth simultaneously. . . . Jünger’s “stereoscopy” revealed to him the “secret correspondences existing between things,” and his reflections, written in an elegant, often lapidary style, trigger in the attentive reader a similar effect. . . . “When we comprehend one secret,” Jünger tells us, “many others also draw near.”

There are indeed many secrets here, too many to do justice to in a short review. Who knew so much is contained in the color red? Or in the activities of beetles—Jünger was a keen entomologist. Or in a tiger lily, whose “narcotic stamens” awaken associations with an “Indian conjurer’s tent”? Read this book slowly, while walking, preferably in a rugged landscape, or a foreign city—Jünger didn’t use the term, but he was a master psychogeographer—dipping in every now and then. The “secret harmony of things,” I guarantee, will be revealed to you, and you will find, no doubt, that your heart is adventurous too.

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