How Ernst Jünger nearly reached 103 years old

The day after turning seventy, with biblical age upon him, Ernst Jünger begins a diary that the Tusquets publishing house published under the title After Seventy (translated by Andrés Sánchez Pascual) and which begins on March 30, 1965 with a walk through Wilflingen, a town where the German thinker lived in seclusion with his wife Liselotte, whom he affectionately called Taurita because she was born under the sign of Taurus.

It is fascinating to observe how Jünger's thinking blends mythology with scientific analysis. Reading his diaries leads us to that elusive point between two seemingly opposing yet complementary worlds. In this way, Jünger surprises us with his precision and sensitivity in perceiving the signs of his surroundings. For example, on this first walk with which he opens the diary, Jünger encounters a lizard. He finds it on one of the rocks on the hill where the "Treasure Castle" stands. It is a real image that, thanks to his interpretive skills, Jünger transports to a fictional dimension , culminating in the description of the reptile's skin as "brown with green stripes." Jünger then wonders if this might be the lizard's first spring outing; it seemed drowsy, as if still retaining remnants of its winter slumber. Jünger approaches it with great care and strokes it.

There is a feeling of resurrection in spring, Jünger seems to be telling us; a feeling that enhances “vital existence.” Hibernation, for Jünger, was the closest thing to “enjoying time stretched to the limit of perception.” With a precise syntax on par with Borges or Canetti —to name two supreme examples—Jünger allows himself to be guided from his German residence to the Far East on a five-month journey. Driven by curiosity, he discovers botanical species such as the Ravenala, known as the traveler's palm, which opens its leaves like a fan and whose canopies rise above the walls of Singapore's gardens.

In another of his entries, Jünger explains that warm-blooded animals are more prone to death than cold-blooded ones because, he says, they must maintain their temperature within narrow limits. Excess heat leads to fever, and deficiency to frostbite, and it is here that Jünger points to air conditioning as a “cosmic provocation.” To clarify, Jünger refers us to the beginning of the world when “creatures lived within Gaia as in a mother’s womb,” immersed in the warmth of swamps or the sea. When cooling occurred, Jünger continues, the organisms that survived did so thanks to their adaptation, achieving a new equilibrium with the environment. This is why warm-blooded animals like seals survive in cold waters, their existence leading to the regressive form of fish that, “to avoid freezing, have acquired a protective covering.”

With these forays into nature, Jünger takes us from curiosity to knowledge on an unrepeatable journey. His diaries, and especially this volume we are discussing here, are a veritable scientific declaration; an example of how to travel a path where prediction and surprise alternate until wisdom is attained.