Goethe, Dostoevsky, the longhouse, and gays

Goethe: The much-talked-of “Age of Werther” . . . belongs in truth not to the course of world culture but to the course through life of every individual who, born with a sense of freedom and naturalness, must find his place and learn to accommodate himself in the constraining structures of an outdated world.

Dostoevsky: Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply ten-fold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal - such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them.

Salinger: The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause. The mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

The only men who get an “out” from the oppression of overcivilization in the end are (1) living in revolutionary times (such as Napoleon, Hitler... Lee Kuan Yew said nobody wants revolutionaries in the present day, all world governments want lame technocrats now) or (2) gay.

For the straight man, an authentic affirmation of life is in raising children, which involves the sacrifice of your life for the sake of theirs. This possibility is denied to the homosexual who has nothing to lose and therefore has the “freedom” of radical egoism. They wear death on the sleeve, and are quite smug about it. But in death alone you can find no reason to live; only in the creation of life is there to be found what is worth dying for. This is why every extravagant fascist out of time who countersignals life itself predictably ends up being gay.

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