The Birth of Terror
View of Alamut Castle, Hasan-i Sabbah’s fortress. Photo: Alireza Javaheri (CC by 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)).
For we who are living at this moment, the most exact and most acute sensation is one of not knowing where we are treading from day to day. The ground is brittle, lines blur, materials fray, prospects waver. Then we realize more clearly than before that we are living in the “unnamable present.”
—The Ruin of Kasch
In the years between 1933 and 1945 the world made a partially successful attempt at self-destruction. What came after was shapeless, rough, and powerful. In this new millennium, it is shapeless, rough, and ever more powerful. Elusive in every single aspect, the opposite of the world that Hegel had sought to grasp in the grip of concept. Even for scientists it is a shattered world. It has no style of its own but uses every style.
This state of things may even seem exciting. But it excites only sectarians, convinced that they hold the key to what is going on. The others—most—have to adapt. They follow the advertising. Taoist fluidity is the least common virtue. One is continually assailed by the contours of an object that nobody has ever managed to see in its entirety. This is the normal world.
was the
