Tag: decadence

5,383 words

How many of you have ever flown into Auckland Airport (as in New Zealand), assembled your mountain bike, then headed due south, ending up that evening at a nowhere stop that at least had a large pub featuring karaoke night (which had surprisingly good singers)? Further, how many of you, after food and beer, then pitched your little tent across the river from the pub on the other bank in the dark, listening as remaining patrons jeered the police waiting in the dark for drunk drivers? (more…)

5,090 words

Part 1 here, Part 3 here

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is in the public domain. You can watch it here.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is best remembered today for being the film that launched the career of Rudolf Valentino. (more…)

3,648 words

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn et al.
From Under the Rubble
Boston: Little, Brown & Company (1975)

Shortly before being deported from the Soviet Union in 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn contributed three essays to a volume that was later published in the West as From Under the Rubble. (more…)

1,023 words

Ross Douthat
The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
New York: Simon & Schuster (2020)

Never-Trumper Ross Douthat is a faux-Christian, faux-conservative writer for leftist publications like The Atlantic and The New York Times. His presence at those publications is akin to that of the house Negro, (more…)

4,241 words

Part 1

Other than living near types like Faÿ, Toklas, and the guys, Stein had “indirect ties, notably through her close friendship with a French personalist philosopher named Henri Daniel-Rops.” (more…)

1,534 words

H. P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness, serialized in Astounding in 1936, is one of his greatest works. The tale recounts an expedition to Antarctica in 1930 in which scholars from Miskatonic University stumble upon the ruins of a lost city. (more…)

The Polish poster for the film

1,886 words

Bob Fosse’s 1972 film Cabaret is supposed to be propaganda for Weimar decadence and against Nazi brutality. But the film utterly fails as propaganda insofar as it changes no minds. In fact, Cabaret is more akin to a diagnostic tool—like inkblot tests or gestalt images—for distinguishing between fundamentally different human types: people who love beauty versus people who love ugliness, people who love order versus people who love chaos, people who love health versus people who love decadence. (more…)

4,356 words

My friends on the Right bemoan the fact that we’re not living in Leave It To Beaver. They play the “what era would you like to live in?” game, picking any time other than this one. Because this is the End Time, you see; the Kali Yuga, the Wolf Age. Hell, yes! It is all those things and more. But I, for one, feel privileged to live in Dystopia. Truly, there has never been a better time to be alive. (more…)

The French signing the armistice with the Germans at Compiègne on June 22, 1940.

3,210 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note: The following extracts are drawn from Emil Cioran, De la France (Paris: L’Herne, 2015). The original was written in Romanian in 1941. The title is editorial.

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Sébastien Bourdon, The Sacrifice of Iphigenia

833 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note: The following extracts are drawn from Emil Cioran, De la France (Paris: L’Herne, 2015). The original was written in Romanian in 1941.

Countries – unfortunately – exist. Each one crystallizes a sum of errors called values, which it cultivates and combines, and which it circulates and gives currency towards. Their totality constitutes the individuality of each country and its implicit pride – but also its tyranny, because it weighs unconsciously on the individual. (more…)

2,942 words

Emil Cioran
De la France 
Paris: L’Herne, 2015

This is a strange, vile little book as only Emil Cioran knew how to produce. It was only recently published, in both the original Romanian and in French translation,[1] having been written in 1941 and left to languish for decades in some cardboard box in the Cioran archives. (more…)

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Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto is set in present-day Los Tuxtlas, Mexico in the year 1511 and depicts the final days of Maya civilization through the eyes of a man named Jaguar Paw. The main theme of the film is summarized by the Will Durant quote displayed at the beginning: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it destroys itself from within.”

Apocalypto is hard to find: (more…)