Three hours of Ernst Jünger's own voice: the opening of Das Sanduhrbuch, his speech on Alfred Kubin, a 1965 interview at seventy on his collected works, his address to Munich entomologists and a reading on subtle hunts, the 1968 speech for his brother Friedrich Georg's seventieth birthday, the 1982 Goethe Prize speech, a radio interview during Borges's visit to Wilflingen, aphorisms on author and authorship, and a conversation with Albert Hofmann on LSD.
Ernst Jünger — 2 recordings in the archive.
Related reading: Ernst Jünger's WWI Diaries by Ernst Jünger.
The reader will know the mood in which an object, whether we use it daily or merely glimpse it in passing, begins to speak to us. That is the beginning of every inclination and of all collecting. We begin to immerse ourselves in the object and to penetrate it. It reveals its secrets to us, and if we are patient, we shall find that one secret follows another. Even the smallest flower has its roots in the infinite, and it is our inclination that discovers them. The inconspicuous is merely a veil. It went much the same way for me with hourglasses. The first was given to me by Klaus Valentiner, who, like so many dear friends, sadly went missing in Russia. I regarded it as one of those curiosities one likes to keep on a shelf or among one's books. Only much later, in the course of working at night, did I notice that a peculiar calm, a still life, emanated from this hourglass, squeezed into its iron spindlework as into a cricket cage. Was it age that had lent it that opaline sheen, that fine veil one otherwise finds on excavated glass? The white sand ran soundlessly from one vessel into the other. In the upper one it hollowed out into a funnel; in the lower it rose into a cone. One could take this mound, heaped up out of lost moments, as a consoling sign that time does indeed elapse but does not vanish. It accumulates in the depths. This kinship of the hourglass with the calm of learned study and with domestic comfort has often been remarked. For both we have the testimony of famous pictures: Dürer's "Melencolia" and "St. Jerome in His Study." In the first we see a brooding angel holding a pair of compasses, amid a Faustian array of instruments: crystals, scales, arrangements of numbers. An alchemist's fire burns against a cosmic background. The other shows the saint in his cell, writing. Books, candlesticks, vessels, sheets full of notes, a skull and a crucifix make up the furnishings. Under the bench stands a pair of garden shoes; the sun falls in through the leaded panes. In both pictures a large sandglass stands out, a true hour-glass. In both it shows half the time run, which may mean that the painter sees the saint and the angel in the midst of their activity. In…