Words Worth Noting - October 23, 2025

“Yet, while former [First World War] soldiers suffered from a high incidence of neurasthenia and sexual impotence, they realized that the war, in the words of Josée Germaine, was ‘the quivering axis of all human history.’ If the war as a whole had no objective meaning, then invariably all human history was telescoped into each man's experience; every person was the sum total of history. Rather than being a social experience, a matter of documentable reality, history was individual nightmare, or even, as the Dadaists insisted, madness. One is again reminded of Nietzsche’s statement, on the very edge of his complete mental collapse, that he was ‘every name in history.’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era