Winston & Julia, 1984

2,699 words

Love is best. — last line of Robert Browning’s “Love among the Ruins”

He loved Big Brother. — last line of George Orwell’s 1984 (more…)

1,394 words

Christian Petzold’s Undine, set in contemporary Berlin, begins with Undine Wibeau (Paula Beer) having coffee with Johannes, her boyfriend. It’s not going well. She has deep, penetrating eyes and red hair that looks ready to blaze. She says to him: “You said you loved me. Forever. If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you. You know that.”

We’ve all had girlfriends like that, haven’t we? (more…)

4,893 words

Part 1 here,  Part 2 here

You can watch The Big Parade in its entirety here.

Released in 1925, The Big Parade would go on to become the 2nd largest-grossing film of the entire silent film era. Only Birth of a Nation made more money. The Big Parade was so popular that it played in some theaters continuously for a year and at the Astor Theater in New York for two years. (more…)

William Powell Frith (1819-1909), A May Day Celebration (private collection)

6,740 words

Throughout Europe and the United States, the chill mornings and blossoming trees of spring are giving way to summer’s warmth and abundance. As the midway point between spring and summer, the month of May has historically been a season of great importance to the peoples of Europe, a joyful time of sowing, revelry, feasting, and courtship. (more…)

Edmund Dulac, “The Buried Moon” from The Red Cross Fairy Book, 1916.

4,430 words

He had me at: “It was still the South, he knew it for a certainty when they passed an aged negro in overalls hobbling down along the highway toward no conceivable destination. The land was cursed. God, he loved it.” [1] Tito Perdue, author of the two novels here reviewed, The Smut Book and Cynosura, is a proud Southerner who has enjoyed skewering the sacred cows of these, our cursed times since he became a writer in the early 1980s. (more…)

6,990 words

Suppose your best friend from when you were a young’un became the meanest hombre ever to leave boot-prints on the ground. It indeed happened, on the wild frontier of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Had Attila the Hun been brought forward in time to meet him, he wouldn’t have challenged a gunslinger like that to a duel at twenty paces. The town of Linz might not be big enough for both of them, but the 5th-century “Scourge of God” would’ve known better than to tangle with the dastardly desperado of the Danube! (more…)

5,026 words

Known mostly as a novelist, memoirist, and historian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had actually completed four plays before his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962. He composed his first two, Victory Celebrations and Prisoners, while a zek in the Soviet Gulag (more…)

4,445 words

Why does Scruton not examine the role of Melot in Death-Devoted Heart more closely?

Tristan und Isolde echoes themes from Romeo and Juliet and Othello, so it is unlikely that Wagner did not have both plays in mind when he composed his opera. The Othello theme is especially clear in the regrets expressed by King Marke that he could not clearly see, just as Othello could not clearly see. Melot, like Iago, faces death if he cannot make good the claim of adultery; (more…)

5,223 words

Sir Roger Scruton, who died of cancer on January 12th, 2020 at the age of seventy-five, wrote more than fifty books, was the editor of the conservative publication The Salisbury Review, and in his final years was briefly chairman — dismissed and subsequently reinstated — of the Conservative Government’s “Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.”

I once met Roger Scruton. He invited me to his flat in London in 1982 where I remember enjoying his excellent wine. (more…)

552 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note: I discovered these reflections nestled between some pornographic scenes in Michel Houellebecq’s recently published novel, Sérotonine (Paris: Flammarion, 2019), pp. 70-72.

It is perhaps necessary at this point to provide a few clarifications on love, largely aimed at women, because women don’t really understand what love is for men. (more…)

1,160 words

The iron cage of abstract materiality threatens to suffocate Western man. In a time when his systems of government threaten to devour him; when his pride is condemned as hate; his women are cold, mocking, and infertile; and the virility of idealism is desecrated everywhere, a miracle has happened: out of the pit of Hollywood itself a film has erupted bearing witness to the mysterious and inexhaustible fertility of love.

(more…)

1,106 words

A man who claims to “love” all women equally is a man incapable of “loving” any particular woman at all—and a man whose “love” no particular woman wants. The same goes for any woman who claims to “love” all men. To love someone is to love him for what sets him apart from others. We want to be loved and valued for what makes us unique.  (more…)

142 words / 59:52

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Greg Johnson talks to Chris Robertson about his book In Defense of Hatred. Topics include:

• Chris’ intellectual journey
• Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head 

(more…)

54 words / 23:54

To listen in a player, click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”

C. B. Robertson speaks at the Fourth Meeting of the Northwest Forum on Saturday, June 24th on themes discussed in his book In Defense of Hatred (reviewed here by Aedon Cassiel).

1,400 words

Ivan Throne
The Nine Laws: Survival, Momentum, Triumph
Castalia House, 2016

What if Julius Evola had written a samurai treatise? What if Lao Tzu had written a long, systematic book of philosophy instead of the short, poetic chapters of the Tao Te Ching? What if the famed, long-lost book On Nature by Heraclitus — he who was called “The Dark” — were to be found and published?  (more…)

3,770 words

I. (Minor Spoilers)

The opening chapters of Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves introduce the viewer to Bess and her little, pastoral Scottish community, which is pervaded and dominated by a highly austere Calvinist Christianity. In the very first scene, which features the elders of the church questioning Bess about her betrothed, Jan, a stranger to the community, the atmosphere is immediately stifling and rigorous. (more…)

6,280 words

Editor’s Note:

This essay was written in 2000 and published online at a long-defunct website. It is really a sketch of a more detailed research project that somebody else might wish to carry out. Even as such, I think it deserves a new lease on life. I do not regret a single hour spent reading Ortega. 

(more…)

3,188 words

The theme of an original duality or polarity related to that of the sexes occurs in the traditions of almost all cultures. This duality is sometimes expressed in purely metaphysical terms, sometimes in that of divine or mythological figures, cosmic elements, principles, gods, and goddesses.

It seemed evident to the early historians of religion of recent times that this was due to anthropomorphism. In their opinion, as man had created his gods in his own image, (more…)

2,963 words

Part 1 of 2

Translation anonymous, edited by Greg Johnson

Editor’s Note:

The following essay was originally published in English in East and West, vol. 9, no. 4 (1958): 349–55. This is chapter 15 of Julius Evola, East and West: Comparative Studies in Pursuit of Tradition, ed. Greg Johnson, (more…)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Beata Beatrix,” 1864-1870

2,816 words

Part 1 of 2

Translation anonymous, edited by Greg Johnson

Editor’s Note:

The following essay was originally published in English in East and West, vol. 9, no. 4 (1958): 349–55. This is chapter 15 of Julius Evola, East and West: Comparative Studies in Pursuit of Tradition, ed. Greg Johnson, forthcoming from Counter-Currents in the fall of 2013.

(more…)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Damsel of the Holy Grail,” 1874

1,456 words

Part 2 of 2

In the virtue known as Amor, the particular personhood of the beloved is central—just as, in true spiritual realization, God is not an abstraction or an insubstantial wraith, but the most concrete Reality imaginable, one that is also (like the ultimate depths of any true person) infinitely beyond anything we can imagine. From the worldly point of view, love for particular persons is seen as mere bourgeois sentimentalism, (more…)

time: 3:02 / 29 words

949 words

H. A. Covington
The Stars In Their Path: A Novel of Reincarnation
Lincoln, Nebr.: IUniverse, 2002

Harold Covington often says that his Northwest novels don’t tell white people what to do, but show them what to be. They are filled with examples of good character. The same is true of The Stars In Their Path, which follows three souls through multiple incarnations from sixteenth-century Paris to the modern day. (more…)