jprussell | (Reply)

From:

I intend to make a much longer comment at a later point, but on the assumption that this will be most read in the next 48 h:

1) I've heard about the Classical, Magian, and Faustian soul images as described by Spengler everywhere else already! Do you find the others, as seemingly everyone else, not worth talking about, or not enough material for doing so?

2) I want to mention that Elias Canetti, in Crowds and Power, compares "national crowd symbols" (unfortunately the only part I read) for a number of countries (as you might expect, all European, considering Jews were overwhelmingly European at the time): for English ... no crowd, but the sea, a ship, crew, and captain; for Germans, a forest, sometimes marching; for Swiss, the mountains; for Dutch, dykes, sometimes only inside themselves, who'd rebuild the physical ones after breaking them upon invaders; for French, a recent one - the storming of the Bastille; for Spanish, a bullfighter and the watching crowd; for Italians - united Italy hadn't yet obtained one, ancient Rome being perceived to belong to "humanity" and Fascism having failed to give it a new one; for Jews, wandering across the desert.

3) some typos, but I only want to mention this because of the most hilarious one (almost "dawizard"-level), which involves "heimjunge".

4) may your next rest be fruitful!