On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Jünger

Author:Ernst Jünger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2023-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

On the back were etched in minuscule Pali script the names of three widows of kings who had sung as they mounted the funeral pyre after it had been set alight by this mirror in a Brahman’s hand.

Next to the mirror lay a small lamp, also carved from rock crystal, bearing the sign of Vesta. It was intended to preserve the power of fire at hours without sun or at moments when haste was necessary. It was with this lamp, not with torches, that the funeral pyre near Olympus was lit the day Peregrine Proteus, later called Phoenix, leapt into the fire before an immense crowd in order to merge with the ether. The world knows of this man and his noble act only through Lucian’s mendacious caricature.

Every good weapon contains magic; we are strengthened merely by the sight of it. So it was for us with Nigromontanus’s mirror; its gleam prophesied that we would not perish completely, indeed, that base powers could not touch the best in us. Our higher powers remained invulnerable, as if secure in crystalline aeries.

Admittedly, Father Lampros would smile and say that there are also sarcophagi for the spirit. For him, the hour of annihilation was the hour of life. Of course, a priest fascinated by death as by a distant waterfall overhung with rainbows in its clouds of mist would speak this way. We, however, were in the prime of life and in great need of signs visible to the human eye. For us mortality appears only in the manifold colors of the one, invisible light.

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