But I do have the religious-detector.

Atheist, intellectually steeped in the scepticism of the scientific method and the discipline of ruthless Occham raizor application, and having overcome in my youth a difficult run-in with religion, I find most of Mircea Eliade’s thinking uncongenial. Yet, a single quotation from his work has riveted me in place:

“The extraordinary interest aroused all over the world by Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (The Sacred), published in 1917, still persists. Its success was certainly due to the author’s new and original point of view. Instead of studying the ideas of God and religion, Otto undertook to analyze the modalities of the religious, experience. Gifted with great psychological subtlety, and thoroughly prepared by his twofold training as theologian and historian of religions, he succeeded in determining the content and specific characteristics of religious experience. Passing over the rational and speculative side of religion, he concentrated chiefly on its irrational aspect. For Otto had read Luther and had understood what the “living God” meant to a believer. It was not the God of the philosophers — of Erasmus, for example; it was not an idea, an abstract notion, a mere moral allegory. It was a terrible power, manifested in the divine wrath. (…)

Man becomes aware of the sacred because it itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane. To designate the act of manifestation of the sacred, we have proposed the term hierophony. It is a fitting term, because it does not imply further; it expresses no more than is implicit in its etymological content, i.e., that something sacred shows itself to us. (…)

In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act — the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural “profane” world.”

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Prophane

Just as some people naturally detect “cool”, by an inborn capacity of perception (while I don’t), I perceive the sacred. I know that this is a special modality of my mind because I know intimately people who have never experienced these states and who find my descriptions of them puzzling. I have no doubt that they simply lack the brain device necessary to experience that state. Studies of identical twins reared apart have conclusively shown that there is a genetic element to religiosity: that is, that one either has a religious gene or one does not.

I do.

There are areas of my life and conduct, and of the world I live in, both social and natural, which are sacred and inviolable in a way so direct, so powerful, so undeniable, that I find it almost impossible to imagine that someone else might not see them that way. When asked to explain why they seem that way to me, all I can do is open my hands in helplessness. To explain the blinding intensity with which I feel that friendships may not be betrayed; or why courage — in the Conradian sense, as a certain form of insesitivity to fear — is priceless; is to me beyond words — like having to explain what I mean to say when I say that the sky is blue.

Many of my encounters with art are in fact hierophonies. My intellectual apparatus protects me from imagining that these hierophonies are manifestations of supernatural beings; but they nevertheless appear to me as manifestations of another, higher reality, of something deeply profound, urgent and in some sense more real than other facts or occurences, which are, in comparison, mere inconsequential shadows, illusory and insignificant.

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Prophane

“What is it”, asked Atlanta, settling herself behind the wheel of a male friend’s car, which she drives once a week on an errand, and adjusting her seat, “about sitting so low? Why do they always sit so low? “

Atlanta is tall, the owner of the car is short. Like me, who am also tall, Atlanta finds that sitting higher gives her better field of vision, and therefore better control of the car; meaning that the car’s owner, who is even shorter than she, should, in order to see around as well as she does, sit even higher than she does; but he sits lower. Why, Atlanta puzzles.

Atlanta does not understand that the reason why the owner of the car always adjusts his seat lower is the same reason why her husband painted his bicycle Darth-Vader black. The reason is — “cool”.

Like me, Atlanta does not get “cool”. Like me, Atlanta was born with a defective brain — a brain without the cool-detector.

One reason why, after running a series of more or less mildly successful businessness, I am still not a billionaire is that, I, too, do not get “cool”. I could have never invented Nike shoes, or Facebook, or Instagram, or bell bottom pants, or the Rubik’s cube; it just would have never, not in a million years, occured to me that those things are in any way cool.

I don’t get cool. I get handsome/beautiful/graceful. I get well dressed (meaning dressed to look decent as well as attractive). I get smelling nice.

But “cool” is and has always been beyond me, it has always left me confused and puzzled and helpless. I am just… cool-blind.

Another interesting case is the French envoy in Belgrade, Léon Descos. A Russian colleague who knew Descos well reported that the ‘deep moral blow’ of the two Balkan wars had damaged his‘nervous system’. ‘He started to become more solitary [. . .] and from time to time he would repeat his favourite ditty on the inviolability of peace.’

During the Balkan wars, Berchtold (foreign minister of Austria-Hungary) complained constantly to his diary of nightmares, sleepless nights and headaches.

When the new French prime minister René Viviani, a man of fundamentally pacific temperament, travelled to St Petersburg for the summit talks of July 1914, he came close to suffering a complete nervous collapse.

Hartwig (the Russian envoy in Serbia), too, was under strain. Alexander Savinsky, the Russian minister in Sofia, believed that Hartwig had ‘lost hisbalance’ during the Balkan Wars; Hartwig, Savinsky observed, ‘sees enemies everywhere that he has created himself’. By the early summer of 1914, Hartwig was constantly complaining about the poor state of his heart and longing for his summer break and cure in Bad Nauheim. He would not outlive the July Crisis.

Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914

“I am accustomed, most of all at night, when the agitation of my soul fills me with cares, and I seek relief from these bitter worries and sad thoughts, to think about and construct in my mund some unheard-of machine to move and cary weights, making it possible to create great and wonderful things.”

These words are spoken by the statesman Agnolo Pandolfini in a philosophical treatise written by one of Filippo [Brunelleschi]’s ablest disciples, the architect and philosopher Leon Battista Alberti. Della Tranquilita dell’animo (“On the Tranquility of the Soul”) was composed in 1441, a few years after Filippo’s dome had been completed. It features a dialogue between two men who have suffered miserably from changes of fortune: Agnolo, who has retired, disillusioned, from public life, and a younger man, Nicola de’ Medici, whose bank has failed, leaving him destitute. Their conversation takes place inside Santa Maria del Fiore, under the new dome, and concerns the various means of overcoming depression. Agnolo lists a number of traditional remedies for raising spirits, such as wine, music, women and sports. But his most effective tactic, he tells Nicola, is to create “great and wonderful things”– machines for raising magnificent structures that is like the dome that swells above them.

Ross King, Brunelleschi’s Dome

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Today, long awaited second volume of Donald Keene’s Japanese Diaries has arrived. Eagerly, I opened the package and immediately turned to the book’s last essay, on Nagai Kafu.

Perhaps Donald Keene is not a profound reader of Kafu; or perhaps the diaries of Kafu which he has chosen to discuss are by a different Kafu from the Kafu I know. This Kafu here is the young Kafu of his diaries from his trip to America and France and the early days after his return to Japan (roughly 1905-1910). This Kafu here reminds me of many people I have known, not just Asians, who have traveled abroad, licked a little of the life there, and returned home to hate everything they now found on their return. Kafu’s comments on these experiences are typical of the sort: their understanding of the wonderful abroad is poor, often wrong; the analysis to which they then submit their own country is seen through a faulty lense, and therefore also usually wrong.

Voltaire’s story is emblematic: upon seeing a little Shakespeare in London, he dashed off a long and passionate essay just ripping into this total shit French classical drama was and praising how much better Shakespeare was; as he spoke no English and didn’t really understand the plays he attended, the essay is hogwash. Kafu’s contrasts between the West and Japan, as expressed in these essays, are hogwash, too.

But Kafu grew up and matured, and as he did, he understood better just why he felt so bad in modern Japan, and he stopped blaming Japan for it and began to blame the true culprit: modernity. He became an antiquary of old Edo, turning to Japanese classical arts and music, the lifestyle of the floating world, old literature. His late diaries, Danchōtei Nichijō (断腸亭日乗), written in bungo, the literary language of Edo era, document day to day changes of modernizing Japan, becoming ever more popular and vulgar, drowning in ugliness and stupidity of the rising new men, with their mores, their manners, and their culture.

On New Years’s Day 1937, Nagai went out to visit a shrine and sweep his father’s grave. In the street he saw many women dressed and coiffed in the newest fashion. “Goodness gracious, he wrote in his diary, had they dressed this way 20 years ago, people would have thought they were country bumpkins on a holiday visit to the capital. Dress and conduct are all going the same way — provocative and vulgar.”

At about the same time in Europe, a German writer (Reck-Malleczewen) observed the same phenomenon and called it “being drowned in the sea of the Dolinskis”:

“I am writing this in a Berlin hotel which is about as quiet and discreet as a howitzer. At this moment, a lady on the floor below whose name probably is Dolinski and who is certainly of the type I described earlier, is giving all the details of her divorce to her friend at the other end of the telephone. The windows are open, and all the spicy details are as though implanted in the still, hot air. Finally, whether I want to or not I learn what drove Herr Dolinski prematurely out of Madame’s arms. I hear it, and recall a parade of the League of German Maidens which I saw go past in the city yesterday… a procession of bowlegs and broad hips marching between the ecstatically ugly facades of a city in love with its own ugliness, an exhibition of joylessness, a declaration of war on everything that ‘comforts and pleases in life’. Pondering the great changes of the nineteenth century, and with this procession of females still in my mind, I realise that the moment, seventy years ago, Germany in its infatuation with prosperity agreed to let Prussia be its organiser and procurer, it did not merely go to the dogs – much worse, it went to the Dolinskis”.

Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair
Donald Keene, Modern Japanese Diaries
Nagai Kafu, Danchōtei Nichijō

In the wake of the First Balkan War (1911), the crown prince of Serbia is said to have conducted a sort of ad hoc survey of ethnic minorities in the newly conquered parts of Macedonia. “What are you?” he would ask some hapless peasant. “I am a Bulgarian”, the man would answer sheepishly. “You are not a Bulgarian, fuck your father”, the prince would correct him.

Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914

Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Austro-Hungarian Chief of Staff before and during WW1, is said to have fallen in love with Virginia Reininghaus, wife of an industrialist and mother of six, while sitting next to her at a party in 1907. Eight days later, he called on her and declared: “I am terribly in love with you and have only one thought in my mind, that you should become my wife”. Virginia demurred. “Nevertheless”, he said, “this will be my only thought”. The next day, an adjutant of his called on Mme Reininghaus and pleaded with her, that in view of his commander’s fragile state of mind, she should not deprive him of hope. Eight days later, Conrad called on her again and told her that if she turned him down definitively, he would resign his post as a chief or staff and disappear from public life. They reached an agreement: Virginia would remain for the foreseeable future with her husband, but should it ever appear in the future that she might leave her marriage, she would give consideration to Conrad’s declaration. The brilliant application of the art of the offensive to the art of courting had paid off. We do not know when Virginia became his lover, but she married him in 1915.

Between the time they met and his death in 1925, he would write her 3,000 love letters.

Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914

Raphael, says Ross King, was sweet, and gentle, and social, and agreeable, and helpful to friends, and generous; while Michelangelo was depressive, melancholy, unsocial, confrontational. Vasari thought this was because Raphael had been fed on his mother’s milk (while the practice of the time was to give the child to a country woman to breast feed). More likely, it is because of his genteel descent: his father, while a professional painter, was also a courtier, a theater man, and a poet; this inheritance can be seen in his portraits: long neck, oval face, large dark eyes, olive skin: Raphael is beautiful. Contrast this with Michelangelo: hairy, hook-nosed, unwashed. (“I see myself so ugly, my face is of a shape that causes fright”). Once, when meeting him in the street in Rome, Michelangelo commented on Raphael’s retinue of friends: “you with all these people, like a bravo” (meaning: a gangster); and Raphael replied: “and you, all alone, like a hangman”. And one can see this in their art: Michelangelo painted twisted, tortured, troubled human figures in no lanscape at all, or one of dessicated desert; while Raphael painted happy, content, peaceful figures, in dignigifed poses, in beautiful surroundings, in symmetrical spaces full of greenery and flowers.

Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling