What was once a sublime Tumblr has metamorphosed into that rarest of all tweetstreams, a sublime tweetstream found daily at (1) Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) / Twitter. ⬅RECOMMENDO.
Here’s a selection of what has been on offer for over ten years.
Senjoukaku is a shrine building in Hiroshima Prefecture. Construction halted suddenly in 1598, since the building consists of a single floor space, 1419m². The floor is 4″ thick boards of camphor tree, never polished never repaired, worn to a mirror smoothness over the centuries. pic.twitter.com/BAmvI04LGg
— Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) January 24, 2022
The city of Ghadames on the edge of the Saharan desert in Libya is maybe one of the finest examples of desert urbanism still in existence. Inhabited since the 4th millennia B.C., many of its 1300 houses have been continually inhabited, improved, expanded, for over 3000 years.
A book for Japanese children teaching them about those they are descended from. This is a society that is not ashamed of its ethnic origins. Unlike present company.
Gerard Van der Leun
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All of this was truthful and inarguable.
Not quite inarguable, I think:
“A book for Japanese children teaching them about those they are descended from. This is a society that is not ashamed of its ethnic origins. Unlike present company.”
A society without shame would not be turning out its lights all over its increasingly geriatric homeland. A viable society does not self-extinguish, I think, as the current generations of Nippon are doing, day by day. They have simply lost interest in reproduction. Ones ancestors mean nothing if their march ends by agreement with eternal oblivion.
Of course, the Japanese are far from alone, and may simply be “first adopters,” outliers of a far wider fatal trend. It seems my own line will end, alas, with my son and his equally well-educated, talented and deservedly ambitious second wife, who have decided that a dog is as much nourishment of life as their busy household can sustain. Two to six such lovely creatures will arrive as shelter adoptees, grow out of puppyhood, become beloved pals, age and die, which I would find as agonizing and awful as it is inevitable. And then they, too, will perish.
My three brothers respectively had zero, four and five bright, remarkable offspring. I need not pray they will reproduce; my youngest brother is already a grandfather twice over, and greatly, rightly pleased as any grandparent should be.
But as the brilliant Mark Steyn has said, written and demonstrated again and again, an Iron Law of Reality is that the future belongs only to those who show up. Consider the myriad civilizations, races and empires that have come and gone in humanity’s paltry mega-annums, leaving only their bones, their stones, faded reminisences of their accomplishments — and dust. Is ours a dry, silent parade of Ozymandian rulers, anonymous immobile feet heaved in the empty, barren sand?
Time alone will tell, either way.
Although a primary issue with Japan is demographic fertility rates, at least when I lived there in the 70s, there are some nuances in their genealogy perspectives that are also weird from a western viewpoint. Apparently some Japanese will go to almost heroic lengths to hide ancestry that come from burakumin: people who worked in tanning hides and butchering animals. At least in the past, that kind of family legacy could prevent an upwardly mobile marriage or business relationship, even if it was over a century in the past. Perhaps that is changing now, I hope.
Seems a little depressing there, Frederick. In defense of Vanerleun, @WrathOfGnon, and ultimately the Japanese: I would say – having walked the Nakasendo Trail across Japan – that the Japanese have come closer to defying Ozymandius than most. While it is true that they are coming under the onslaught of western cultural moral assault, much like the entire world today, there are quiet nooks of cultural purity that may survive. A lot of their defense is purely geographical. But some is indeed cultural.
I understand there is a part of North Africa that lies outside of the European influence. Ouled Nails. “Odalisques.” Desert peoples. Cities like white doves; Biskra. You go there to escape time; it essentially doesn’t even exist anymore. And yet…
Wisdom is found in the debris of the past. We in the present can sift the remains and see what happened, maybe discover why, and create an equation to help solve the puzzle of “what now”. But when the past was their present, do you suppose those people were aware of the components they were assembling, the intersecting pieces of action and re-action and how their future, our present, might be affected? If they were they were in possession of a power I am missing. I think their days were what they were, and ours compared are thin and watery. The character of people seems more practical and honest the further back I look, and I imagine they took their intrinsic value as a matter of course without comment.
The salt of reality Belloc commented about in 1925 was underfoot and everyone’s boots were dusted with it; I saw it with my grandparents approach to every single day of their lives, and in the older people I’ve come across since. What we experience today is a purposeful insulation from daily effort; we have more energy spent in complaining than in production, and God help us if an emergency demanded common sense action.
The citizens of the past seem more engaged with life, maybe because it was not a tamed frontier but a wild one that required level-headed action and created an appreciation for all things good. The older I get the more I see I do not belong.
I have long thought that I should have been with the legions of Scipio when he warred against Hannibal at the Battle of Zama (201 BC).
This so-called “modern world” is soul destroying and man killing. There is scarcely any room for honor, for adventure. All is prefabricated and force-fed. It also bores to tears. This is the true reason behind the decline in birthrates. Why bother? Why bother with anything, even sex? What would be the point?
I spend a large part of every year outdoors: camping, backpacking, bikepacking, bicycling, hiking. When I started this outdoor life 40 years ago in Guatemala all was fresh, new, open, unorganized, unstructured—and more than a little dangerous. A man could walk and camp and explore wherever the Hell he wanted to walk and camp and explore. Now most of that world is almost gone. All is tame, homogenized, subdued, ultra-organized—and so damn safe. It’s more dangerous these days to visit Disneyland than it is to venture outdoors.
Everything connected—what a word!—with the outdoors these days is hooked up the internet and a GPS. I constantly see backpackers and bicyclists with super sophisticated computers that tell them where to go, where they can find water, how steep the path is and where they can camp. In other words, outdoor types resemble city-types: at all times existing with a machine shoved into their faces. They have no ability to use a compass and read a map. Those skills are being lost.
I leave in a few weeks to ride a bicycle from Oklahoma to Idaho, camping most of the way. I will be by myself. I have no idea what old roads, Jeep tracks and forest trails I will take to get there, but I will figure it out along the way. No pavement for me. I will carry my Silva compass and a bunch of DeLorme paper maps—no computer to tell me when and where to shit and piss. My companions will be the Bible, Canadian whiskey and Samuel Colt.
No GPS. My face will be looking straight ahead and not into some damn device. Yippe ki-yo, Yippee ki-yay!
That sounds like an excellent trip.
Photos and reports will be very welcomed.
Will do. I promise to keep the lies to a bare minimum.
May you travel well, and with a liquid filled compass.
Thank you. And may my flask be always filled with liquid as well.
Some excellent comments. Thank you, Gentlemen. And, I too, think
Wrath of Gnon recommendable.