Pages 70-123

Naglfar is described as an apocalypse, an end of an age he can sense, a ship that is shifting “into a calculable position.”

The brilliant musings in dreary ken related by Manuel in his journal of soliloquies move steadily from survival at his academic and political occupations, towards secretly building a bug-out retreat. He has no thought of defending his master, if instead, he might make off in the chaos and be thought of as dead. During this process of heretical planning—a course heretical to the tyrant AND whatever revolution or coup might unseat him—the journalist dispenses doctrine for the prepper. It is no accident that this book was written in the 1970s.

The science-fiction elements include:

The phonophone, a government badge in gold, silver and gray [this one is defined later, belonging to his lowly hooker for public news only] grades that is an audio communicator.

Thermal rings for warming without fire.

Surveillance through microphone.

The luminar, which I gather as a vast archive, sometimes referred to as a place of meeting or debate, but accessible alone by Manuel when at work. Might this be a computer?

-1. “If a man succeeds in playing life as a game, he will find honey in nettles and hemlock; he will even enjoy adversity and peril.”

-2. Political revolution in the toppling of a tyrant or king is “the transition from visible to anonymous power.”

-3. “...scholarship has not managed to draw an adequate distinction between tyrant, despot and demagogue.”

-4. Revolt is applauded because a man breaking his bounds is recognized by observers as sharing a common violent, fettered core.

-5. “Both are unbounded, but the tyrant follows certain rules, the despot his cravings.”

-6. “The old tyrants, to be sure, did preliminary work as “blenders of peoples,” not only by destroying the elites and egalitarianizing the demos into a mass, but also by deporting people and filling the gaps with foreign mercenaries and workers.” [His brother Georg’s analysis of technically organized human society as a mess of arw material is here applied.]

-7. “I take my duties seriously within an overall context that I reject for its mediocrity.”

-8. “The distances between people do not change.” [as the political world tilts like a ship’s deck] “I actually see them more sharply against the deceptive background. Their standing so close to the abyss also arouses my sympathy.”

-9. “I never cease to be amazed at how unabashedly my genitor tries to dovetail his basically praiseworthy theories with a slanting reality…”

-10. “That is a third variant of conduct in Eumeswil: failure to recognize the slanting situation, which I accept as a task while my genitor misjudges it. Gullibility is the norm; it is the credit on which states live: without it, even their most modest survival would be impossible.”

[Descriptions of government defense drills against unrest are done in a manner that presents the textures of the compromised functionaries tasked with boots on the ground regime defense.]

-11. “The best job is one in which you see a lot and are seen little.”

[WWII is described as a civil war.]

-12. “The world civil war changed values. National wars are fought between fathers, civil wars between brothers. It has always been better to fall under the father’s hand than into the brother’s; it is easier being an enemy of another nation than of another class.”

-13. “The anarch sticks to facts, not ideas.”

-14. “For the anarch little has changed when he strips off a uniform that he wore partly as a fool’s motley; partly as camouflage.”

[Manuel starts a bird watching job for his masters so that he might construct a survival retreat.]

-15. “Placards come and go, but the wall they are pasted on remains. Theories and systems pass over us in the same way.”

[The phonophone keeps him linked to the Red Network for political alerts against revolt. Being a low level first response officer, he is in a better position than those higher or lower in the hierarchy to make away in times of crisis. Junger survived as a functionary after the loss of 1919, the rise of National Socialism, as an officer in occupied Paris, and as a civilian in post war Germany, half a life under one iron heel or another.]

-16. “… after the Second World War—that is after the triumph of the technician over the warrior.”

[The survival retreat is described, a wetland bunker obscured in a wildlife reserve.]

-17. “I had tricked the good man.” [his boss] “However, one of the anarch’s emoluments is that he is distinguished for things that he has done on the side or that go against his grain.” [The ability to mimic the human robot to maintain his disguise and not be found out as an autonomous human.]

-18. “Man is neither an animal nor an angel; but he becomes a devil when he tries to be an angel.”

Junger’s character quotes Sir Richard Francis Burton, set the traveler’s words in adamant with the prequel: “Every born historian knows the terror sparked by facts…” and epilogues… “There is a degree of senselessness and glaciation that, in terrifying the eye, brings out contrast. Realty becomes suspect, and so phantoms drawn nearer.”

[The Casbah, or political citadel is largely maintained by denying entrance to women. Women are socialized with down in the city, and are not permitted access to intrigue.]

-19. “Equality is based, as we have seen, on the possibility that anyone can kill anyone.”

And so we prepare for the The Night Bar, a place this reader suspects might pose hazards for the tyrant and the anarch servant.