The desert encroaches. Woe to him whose desert lies within! /  by Nathan Jones

“He can in truth find no further support from without. There no longer exist the organizations and institutions that, in a traditional civilization and society, would have allowed him to realize himself wholly, to order his own existence in a clear and unambiguous way, and to defend and apply creatively in his own environment the principal values that he recognizes within himself. Thus there is no question of suggesting to him lines of action that, adequate and normative in any regular, traditional civilization, can no longer be so in an abnormal one–in an environment that is utterly different socially, psychically, intellectually, and materially; in a climate of general dissolution; in a system ruled by barely restrained disorder, and anyway lacking any legitimacy from above.”
— Julius Evola in Ride the Tiger (title from Nietzsche's Dithyrambs of Dionysus)

Man does not want to choose. He wants to be chosen. /  by Nathan Jones

“There is no feeling more desperate than being free to choose, and yet without the specific compulsion of being chosen. After all, one does not really choose; one is chosen. This is one way of stating the difference between gods and men. Gods choose; men are chosen. What men lose when they become as free as gods is precisely that sense of being chosen, which encourages them, in their gratitude, to take their choices seriously. Put in another way, this means: Freedom does not exist without responsibility. ”
— Philip Rieff in The Triumph of the Therapeutic