On Sehnsucht and sorrow (ft. Savitri & Tolkien)

Pyongyang is the last abode of eternal beauty.

History, Action, and the Timeless
by Savitri Devi
Chapter 5 of Souveniers et réflexions d’une Aryenne
(Memories and Reflections of an Aryan Woman)

Nothing gives us more intensely the experience of what I called in other writings the “bondage of Time” than the impossibility of letting our “I” travel in the historical past in which we did not live, and which we thus cannot “remember.” Nothing makes us feel our isolation within our own epoch, like our incapacity to live directly, at will, in some other time, in some other country; to travel in time as we travel in space. We can visit all the earth as it is today, not see it as it was formerly. It is impossible for us, for example, to actually plunge ourselves into the atmosphere of the temple of Karnak—or even only one street of Thebes—under Thutmose III; to find ourselves in Babylon at the time of Hammurabi—or with the Aryans, before they left the old Arctic fatherland; or in the midst of the artists painting the frescos in the caves of Lascaux or Altamira, with as much realism as we have somewhere in the world in our own epoch, having come there on foot, or by car, by train, by boat or airplane. And this impression of a definitive barrier––or of a veil, which lets us divine some outlines but prohibits us forever from a more precise vision—is all the more painful, perhaps, that the civilization that we would like to know directly is chronologically more close to us, while being qualitatively more different from that in the midst of which we are forced to remain.

History always fascinated me; the history of the whole world, in all its richness. But particularly painful for me is knowing that I will never be able to know pre-Colombian America directly . . . going to live there for some time; that it will never again be possible to see Ténochtitlan, or Cuzco, as the Spaniards saw these cities for the first time, four hundred and fifty years ago, or less, i.e., yesterday. As a teenager, I cursed the conquerors who changed the face of the New World. I would have wished that nobody discovered it, so that it remained intact. One could then have known it without reversing the course of time; known it as it was the day before the conquest, or rather as a natural evolution would have modified it little by little over four or five centuries, without destroying the characteristic traits.

But it goes without saying that my true torment, since the disaster of 1945, is to know that it was from now on impossible for me to have direct experience of the atmosphere of the Third German Reich, in which I have not, alas, lived. (Believing that it was to last indefinitely—that there would be no war or that, if there were one, Hitlerian Germany would come out victorious—I had the false impression that nothing pressed me to return to Europe, and that, moreover, I was “useful” for the Aryan cause where I was). Now that all is finished, I think with bitterness that one could, thirty years ago only,¹ plunge oneself immediately, without the intermediary of texts, images, audio recordings, or accounts of comrades, into this environment of enthusiasm and order, power and manly beauty, that belonged to Hitlerian civilization. Thirty years! It is not “yesterday,” it is today; it is “a few minutes ago.” And I have the sensation of having come so close to the life and the death—the glorious death, in the service of our Führer—that should have been mine.

But one cannot “go back” five minutes much less 1500 years, or 500 million years, into the unalterable past, now transformed into “eternity”—timeless existence. And it is as impossible to attend today the Congress of the Socialist National Party of September 1935 as it is it to traverse the earth in the epoch when it seemed to have become forever the domain of the dinosaurs; impossible . . . save for one of those very rare sages who are, by asceticism—the transposition of consciousness—released from the bonds of time.

The birth-day of Unity Valkyrie Mitford (1914-1948) – the noble feeling of sorrow

Quenta Silmarillion
by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
AKALLABÊTH
(The Downfall of Númenor)

Among the Exiles many believed that the summit of the Meneltarma, the Pillar of Heaven, was not drowned for ever, but rose again above the waves, a lonely island lost in the great waters; for it had been a hallowed place, and even in the days of Sauron none had defiled it. And some there were of the seed of Eärendil that afterwards sought for it, because it was said among loremasters that the far-sighted men of old could see from the Meneltarma a glimmer of the Deathless Land. For even after the ruin the hearts of the Adûnâim were still set westwards; and though they knew indeed that the world was changed, they said: ‘Avallónë is vanished from the Earth and the Land of Aman is taken away, and in the world of this present darkness they cannot be found. Yet once they were, and therefore they still are, in true being and in the whole shape of the world as at first it was devised.’

For the Adûnâim held that even mortal Men, if so blessed, might look upon other times than those of their bodies’ life; and they longed ever to escape from the shadows of their exile and to see in some fashion fee light that dies not; for the sorrow of the thought of death had pursued them over the deeps of the sea. Thus it was that great mariners among them would still search the empty seas, hoping to come upon the Isle of Meneltarma, and there to see a vision of things that were. But they found it not. And those that sailed far came only to the new lands, and found them like to the old lands, and subject to death. And those that sailed furthest set but a girdle about the Earth and returned weary at last to the place of their beginning; and they said:

‘All roads are now bent.’

Thus in after days, what by the voyages of ships, what by lore and star-craft, the kings of Men knew that the world was indeed made round, and yet the Eldar were permitted still to depart and to come to the Ancient West and to Avallónë, if they would. Therefore the loremasters of Men said that a Straight Road must still be, for those that were permitted to find it. And they taught that, while the new world fell away, the old road and the path of the memory of the West still went on, as it were a mighty bridge invisible that passed through the air of breath and of flight (which were bent now as the world was bent), and traversed Ilmen which flesh unaided cannot endure, until it came to Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, and maybe even beyond, to Valinor, where the Valar still dwell and watch the unfolding of the story of the world. And tales and rumours arose along the shores of the sea concerning mariners and men forlorn upon the water who, by some fate or grace or favour of the Valar, had entered in upon the Straight Way and seen the face of the world sink below them, and so had come to the lamplit quays of Avallónë, or verily to the last beaches on the margin of Aman, and there had looked upon the White Mountain, dreadful and beautiful, before they died.

Nikolai Roerich – The Holy Mountains (1933)

Ted Nasmith – The First Dawn of the Sun