The Second Light

by Vilhelm Ekelund

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0865472181
• ISBN13: 9780865472181
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: North Point Press
• Length: 186 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

minima moralia

Ekelund began as a poet; wrote nine volumes, then decided that "little lyrics" were trivial compared to "the great song." By the latter he meant not merely aphorisms, which he composed for the rest of his life (and of which this book is a selection), but the unique intuition or sensibility that dictated them. Ekelund's aphorisms are like no one else's. They do not respond to subjective or cultural occasions, whether humorously (like Lichtenberg), sardonically (like Kraus or Cioran), humanely (like Joubert or Chamfort), dialectically (like Adorno), or with Canetti's attempt at sublimity. They are, rather, their own occasion. Though thoroughly grounded in Nietzsche, Ekelund does not pursue Nietzsche's theatrical clash of worldviews. You could say that Ekelund assumes the Superman, and tries to educate him - the Superman being, simply, the modern intellectual. Avoid this book if "elitism" is, for you, a bad word, or if you're concerned to PROVE your elite spiritual status. Ekelund assumes a reader who has put competitiveness, status, all bourgeois (or even anti-bourgeois) values behind him; one who is an artist and/or a philosopher in the ancient sense of this term. Half the time he is utterly lucid - his thought the "stream of light" he hears in Swedish; half the time he is very difficult, using Greek-based neologisms rather the way Heidegger uses German. His aim is to reflect not so much the content as the rhythm of modern, and modernist, intellectuality - to inspire it, hasten it, increase its self-confidence. He leaves politics entirely aside, which I think is unfortunate. You will either find his work absurdly rarefied or, like me, heartening and enlivening: a vademecum.