Julius Evola’s Recognitions gathers essays from his final years, arranged under his own supervision and issued as a number in Orizzonti dello spirito, the series he founded and directed for Edizioni Mediterranee. The pieces range across esotericism, verdicts on literary and political figures, the secret history of antiquity, critiques of contemporary politics, Traditionalism, and metaphysical spiritualism. Each essay stands on its own, yet the translator’s notes describe them as parts of an integrated whole, readable either in sequence or by browsing. The title carries a double sense: to recognize a face—the persona, a personality—and to judge merit, assigning rank and hierarchy by the standards of the Right and of Tradition.
“Recognitions is Evola’s last book.”
Modern civilization, Evola argues, has lost the capacity for right recognition, and recovering it demands a revolution from above rather than from below. He measures the Renaissance and its humanism against what it displaced, contending that the shift of the center of being from transcendence to the merely human was a one-sided and finally teratological development. The same measure is applied to work, to the State, to democracy, to the Church, and to the Orient.
The Last Book and Its Title
John Bruce Leonard’s editorial apparatus opens the volume with a case for Recognitions as Evola’s true final opus. Ride the Tiger usually carries that honor as his last unitary work, but Recognitions collects essays from his final years, published as the fifteenth number of Orizzonti dello spirito. Leonard argues the book earns the title of testament: Evola oversaw its arrangement, and its range—esotericism, verdicts on literary figures, the secret history of Antiquity, critiques of current politics, Traditionalism, metaphysical spiritualism—gives it an integrated wholeness despite each essay standing alone. He singles out themes he considers still pertinent: the “Fifth Estate,” the “Tarantula’s Bite,” Western materialism’s forces in the Orient, the question of whether the West has its own idea, and the “culture of the Right” of the closing chapters.
The title itself receives a careful gloss. To “recognize” first means to know a person’s face—the persona, the personality—and secondarily to judge merit and demerit, assigning rank and hierarchy by the standards of the Right and Tradition. The essays, on this reading, correct errors of recognition: regarding Giovanni Gentile, Giovanni Papini, and Pope Rancalli; recalling Joseph de Maistre, René Guénon, Vilfredo Pareto, Werner Sombart, Metternich, Epicurus, and Emperor Julian; addressing “work” and Masonry. The innermost sense is self-recognition—of one’s own ideas and rank—preparing a new “orientation,” likened to metal feeling the magnet, toward an internal “revolution from the heights” set against spiritual degeneration. Evola’s own words are quoted: “Today there is truly a great need for people who do not chatter, nor ‘write,’ nor argue, but who begin with being.” Leonard adds a translator’s note: he rendered the prose more Anglo-Saxon, preserved idiosyncrasies (Benedetto Croce opposing fascism from his “personal equation”), kept the first-person plural “we,” and left difficult passages—the chapter on Michelstaedter above all—exacting, since reading can carry an “initiatory” aspect.
The New Humanism and Its Descent
Chapter 1, “On the ‘New Humanism’,” begins by defining humanism broadly as the modern era’s orientation making man as man the center of life, activity, and values. It started in the Renaissance with profane science, new artistic creativity, altered customs, and the study of antiquity; its watchword was overcoming the Dark Medieval Period and discovering Man’s “dignity” and “liberty.” Guénon’s verdict applies: man severed himself from heaven with the excuse of conquering the earth. The center of being shifted from transcendence in man to the purely human—a one-sided, abnormal, finally teratological development of the latter, atrophying the former, which alone characterized man’s true dignity. Renaissance humanism neglected antiquity’s sacral, metaphysical, symbolic, and “non-human” aspects, favoring simple “culture” and “formation of the personality.” Neo-humanism, defended by Wilhelm von Humboldt, reacted against man’s enslavement to productive work after traditional craftsmanship’s decline, defending “culture” against labor; its needs were affirmed by those viewing the new civilization as Zivilisation rather than Kultur—Spengler’s terms—though such values rarely exceeded culture and philosophical speculation. Then came a defection: T. Litt and E. Spranger argued speciously that applying oneself to nature, work, technology, and technical-professional training forms true personality. Marxism and Soviet communism claimed “integral humanism” and a “new humanism,” stigmatizing aristocratic cultural humanism; the “humanism of work” marks a descent to the cult of collectivized man—enough to make the Olympians smile.
Against the Scientistic Utopia
The argument turns on the claim that science and technology carry an ethical message of “unity and unification.” Evola calls this a mere exterior unification whose counterpart is internal emptying, uprooting, standardization, the world of quantity and masses; modern comforts and narcotics conceal the void and the loss of any true sense of existence. True unity is realized “at the zenith,” hierarchically, through differentiation. Spirito revives nineteenth-century scientistic utopias, attributing to science the power to eliminate every profounder motivation and bring about harmony—possible only through a “washing” of minds and souls, which Spirito concedes when he locates obstacles in politics, religion, and metaphysics. The logical inference is tabula rasa. His “humanism of work” yields a gray levelling; his “actualism” conforms to the “meaning of history.”
Masonry’s Passing Hour
Evola opens with a verdict: Masonry’s hour has passed. In democratic Italy it revived but now reaches only minor parties—republican, liberal, radical, social-democratic—with no determining role. France remains solid, and its hidden action is credited with obstructing the national and military right; American Masonry is unchanged. Yet the rhythm of history runs against it. Following the sequence from the First Estate of pure spiritual authority through the Second Estate of aristocracy and monarchy to the Third Estate of bourgeois democracy and capitalism, the tendency now descends toward the Fourth Estate under Marxism and collectivist forms. Masonry’s task was to prepare the Third Estate’s revolution, destroy the First and Second Estate systems, and spread the “immortal principles”—but it fatally opened the breach for the socialist revolution. The same applies partly to Judaism as an international power tied to capitalism, no longer determining. Having done its work, Masonry is undermined and supplanted; outside communist areas the Western forces have largely freed themselves from Masonic obedience, treating Enlightenment ideology as mere adornment. Attempts to redirect Masonry toward an “operative” spiritual tradition—including appeals inspired by René Guénon—found little echo in the great lodges, just as men of the right wish the Catholic hierarchies would fight modern subversion uncompromisingly. Catholic tendencies toward “putting oneself in step,” and political Catholicism aligned with Masons, count among the times’ unedifying signs.
The Twilight of the Orient
White racial hegemony is in full crisis; the Orient awakens and moves to the offensive, with recent revolutions centered on the yellow race as precursors of a vaster motion. The white races harvest what they sowed—historical Nemesis. Their centuries-long subjection of the world lacked true spiritual superiority; the “superiority of civilization” was presumption, as was the conviction that Christianity authorized haughty detachment from “pagan” humanity. Heroic-religious factors failed, supplanted by economic exploitation, by commercial companies imposing “free trade” by armed force. The superiority myth rested on progressivist superstition—science and technology as history’s last word. The First World War was the decisive turning point. Disseminating “the rights of man” and fundamental equality destroys every hegemony not reducible to oppression; the “self-determination of peoples” used at Versailles against aristocratic-imperial Europe is a demon evading its summoners, so Westerners descended to preaching anti-colonialism and adopting “mandates” to “educate” peoples who will then show them the door. Leninism indicted “moribund capitalism” forced to industrialize remaining areas, creating local proletariats to aggregate with international communism against imperial bourgeois white peoples. The West chose materialistic, plebeian civilization and bears the consequences in ricochet. The Orient’s “awakening” means setting out down the same descending, spiritually inverted road—rising as antagonist only when it assimilates perverting Western ideas, defaulting in traditions, directing outwardly the spiritual tension once gathered inwardly toward the heights. Thus the Orient’s waking equals its twilight, as Spengler spoke of the West’s twilight. No one can grasp the peril when the already ascetic, spiritual Orient hurls itself in this direction—except one who senses the explosive force spiritual intensity makes possible when detached from its non-terrene object and expanded outwardly as material, politico-social, military force. Orientals released from traditions can give lessons to Americans, “activists” par excellence, once familiarized with technology; in combat they show impetus, fanaticism, contempt for death, unflattering to Western democratic soldiers. The traditional vision of life—birth not the beginning, death not the end, existence a mere episode—relativizes tragedy and yields readiness for absolute sacrifice. This Oriental “potential,” freed by the West, is mobilized by red subversion, producing in a few years, as in China, the landslide from Empires to Marxism that took Europe centuries. Political and economic solutions are trifles; the radical formulation rests on cyclical laws: civilizations’ last forms lose spiritual character, materialize, thicken, dissolve “atavistically,” until a new animating principle bursts forth. The West is near a cycle’s end, hence perhaps nearer a new beginning—nearer those populations now adopting modern civilization and “liberating themselves,” who will be conducted toward the same crises. If we overcome these crises, primacy could newly be guaranteed us, in terms much different from those legitimating white supremacy and violence. This is the only perspective open if one thinks problems through to their depths.
Dionysus and the “Left-Hand Path”
Nietzsche’s Dionysus and Apollo, drawn from The Birth of Tragedy, scarcely correspond to antiquity’s esoteric understanding, but they serve as a point of departure for defining existential orientations. A myth: man in Eden was a blessed immortal; the Tree of Life flowered in him. A new vocation arises—the will to dominion over life.
The Case for a European Reintegration
A theoretical reintegration of Europe, the argument runs, must move past both individualism and the shapeless collectivized mass in every sphere, the economy included. Heinrich, following Spann, draws reservations: to hold that man is a person only through a preexisting community anterior and superior to him risks dragging the organic conception into naturalism and justifying collectivizing forms. The human persona is the primary element in being, formed in itself; what carries it beyond itself into a vaster order can only be a freely chosen idea, not the binding obligations of a given community. Understood as an essential internal liberty, this still accommodates Heinrich’s demands against practical materialism—that profession become vocation, economy become service, property regain the conditioned functionality once tied to the fief.
Heinrich sets out four principles for a conservative revolution in the sign of the European idea: a non-individualistic liberty obedient to an internal law; an organic order with wide decentralization and partial autonomy, favoring intermediate unities that rearticulate what modernity has atomized and leveled; full restoration of the personality in its directive functions, with true authority and direct responsibility; and, as background, an interior steadfastness and elimination of every fear regarding the surrounding world, drawn from reconnection with super-mundane reality—spirituality in severe, virile terms. On this basis one may speak of a “West,” and living European forces should work toward it. Little can be objected; Heinrich has gathered valid individuals who hold their posts. But practical optimism is unwarranted.
The Postwar European Landscape
Since the collapse ending the Second World War, no important foundation exists for levering real change. Garrulous democracy continues, producing unstable forms of badly organized disorder; in Italy it cedes ground to the left through the pusillanimity and insipidity of its rulers. France’s experiment remains unclear. Western Germany has recovered economically while falling in spiritual tension, intolerant of any worthy idea, flinging its recent past into the sea. England, historically acting for its own merest profit, offers no European conscience. Spain’s influence is limited. Americanization gallops through the European West with often irreversible effects, the counterpart of financial and military gravitation around the United States. Monarchies have passed or lost prestige, and the dominant religion scarcely offers a decided counter-current. The distance between Heinrich’s exigencies and any efficacious action is great, beyond what small groups might achieve—yet it is good that some maintain a precise consciousness of higher tasks, acting from freedom of spirit and impersonality, expecting no immediate tangible effects.
Ernst Jünger at the Wall of Time
Ernst Jünger, one of the greatest living German writers, has drawn interest chiefly from literary cliques and dilettante intellectuals fixed on less relevant aspects. What attracts attention now is not the refined essayist but the author of the early war books. Jünger fled his paternal home for the Foreign Legion out of intolerance for the bourgeois climate; when the First World War erupted he volunteered, was wounded repeatedly, and earned the highest decorations. His early books treat the war—one might call him the “anti-Remarque,” against the defeatist and pacifist literature of the first postwar period. The Worker presents its “Worker” as a new human type, technology and “total mobilization” as its domain, with destruction or transformation as the alternative; the “Orders” and a “classic” phase follow, then Jünger’s later shift and At the Wall of Time. The survey closes with Sombart on the infantile psyche behind high capitalism and with Raffaello Prati on Emperor Julian.
Julian and the Solar Empire
Julian composed his texts in his tent between march and battle, seeking spiritual forces against harsh vicissitudes. His reading refutes the notion that pagan religion equals superstition: against Christianity he opposed a metaphysical vision, forcing recognition of superior content behind the allegorical clothing of myth. When myths of sacred subjects appear irrational, this very fact tells us not to cling to words but to investigate the secret sense, perceiving the absolute substance of the gods. To speak of superstition and idolatry here is mental obtusity and bad faith. What matters is the esoteric idea of the gods’ nature and “knowledge” of them as interior realization—the gods as symbols and projections of transcendental states of consciousness. Julian, an initiate of the Mithraic Mysteries, links superior self-knowledge to knowledge of the gods, so high that dominion over Roman and barbarian lands is nothing beside it. He invokes a secret discipline transmuting self-consciousness through purity, ascesis, and initiatic rites. His hymn is to Helios: the Sun not as divinized star but as symbol of metaphysical light, manifesting as sovereign mind and as mystical force “from the heights” linked to sovereign dignity.
Against Guénon’s Chains
Evola opens by qualifying his debt to René Guénon. He cannot accept Guénon’s insistence, in Aperçus sur l’initiation, that spiritual influence must pass through a “chain” or regular organization—a bishop ordaining a priest being the model. Guénon grounds this chiefly in Islamic chains, which offers little to anyone unwilling to entrust himself to Muslims and Orientals. Recalling a 1972 exchange in La Destra, Evola refuses to follow Guénon in treating present-day Masonry, however degenerate, as a real dispenser of initiation rather than a merely symbolic and ritualistic shell. For Western Masters he names Gurdjieff, and Aleister Crowley on the Left-Hand Path; otherwise one must seek operative Kabbalism, not a Western tradition. Modern sects and theosophic or pseudo-Rosicrucian conventicles are spurious. The problem stays open, perhaps needing reformulation—yet “integral traditionalism” can still be detached and used to build a culture of the Right.
Culture and Liberty
“Culture” once meant self-formation, the development of one’s own possibility, not the intellectualistic possession of learning. Its models belong to civilization and tradition: the civis romanus, the Stoic sage, the Samurai, the medieval knight, the Prussian Junker, the English gentleman. Evola separates liberty “from”—negative, presupposing coercion—from liberty “for.” A totalitarian State may rightly defend itself; in democracy everything is licit, with no authority opposing a destructive culture. He does not want censorship, but deplores a state where it might sometimes be opportune if applied with intelligence and measure. Christoph Steding’s Das Reich und die Krankheit der europäischen Kultur described degenerescence as domains become autonomous “neutral” zones—a “Switzerization” of Europe—and the absence of any center answering to empire (Reich) as center of animation and gravitation, as in the medieval Western ecumene. Organic systems grant culture “liberty for something.” He partly agrees with Lukács’s indictment of superficial bourgeois culture; a man of the Right can frame similar charges. Culture should grow creatively and organically, not arbitrarily, which presupposes the self-forming human type. Anarchic freedom resembles “freedom of the press”: in publishing, organized gangs in criticism and publishing block authors; consumer culture has excessive liberty; informative culture raises the question of what is worth or dangerous to know—Maistre on withholding certain knowledge, fire that burns rather than illuminates. The superstition that humanity has “grown up” ignores contemporary passivity before advertising and slogans. The problem belongs to a civilization now nearly nonexistent, massified rather than organic in Goethe’s sense. Sporadic affirmations of liberty under a “system” remain inconclusive, perhaps dictated by a mania for standing out—as with anti-conformist Soviet “intellectuals,” not to be overvalued; something hysterical and peripheral marks these manifestations. Only a presently unforeseeable revolution would change matters.
The Right and Culture
A true culture of the Right requires reference to tradition and distance from individualism, whereas the left valorizes the new without continuity. There is a danger that Italy’s “culture of the Right” reduces to formulae; some hold it overestimated and left-leaning culture’s apprehensions unjustified. Positive content is needed, not mere critique—equally difficult for the Right as a political formation. The economic Right is set aside. Italy’s “historical Right” (Crispi, Di Rudinì) cannot compare with central Europe’s conservative Right, rooted in traditions and social articulations where French Revolutionary ideologies had little hold. Italy lacks the presuppositions for an integral traditional Right; democracy and republic are not congenial soil; a true Right requires monarchy and an integral aristocracy; a Right reduced to generic nationalism and bourgeois values is approximate. Antecedents are sporadic: the Fascist period requires distinctions (see Fascism Viewed from the Right); Gioacchino Volpe; Vilfredo Pareto as anti-conformist and antidemocratic; the Corradinian current set aside as political nationalism, possibly the antithesis of the Right; G. A. Fanelli, monarchical-traditionalist writer and author of Vigliaccherie del secolo XX, around whom gathered Nino Serventi and Nino Guglielmi; Evola’s own Revolt Against the Modern World (1933); collaborators of the “Diorama” page of Il Regime Fascista. Giuseppe Prezzolini’s conservative past and recent volume on conservatism are not taken seriously. One should examine the “credentials” of alleged exponents—publicists who overnight discovered they were “racist” during the Fascist racist revolution and are now democrats.
The Apparatus of Notes
The volume closes not with argument but with annotation. Endnotes gloss the terms, persons, and events Evola cites, and they read as a small encyclopedia of the book’s intellectual furniture. Indian philosophy gets its due: Samkhya, which in some forms denied theism and sought freedom through the elimination of ignorance, and Yoga, the related discipline of meditation and bodily control aimed at the same liberation. A quotation is traced to Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism, with the editor admitting uncertainty about Evola’s original citation while supplying the Italian for a line noting that no indications are generally given about the inner work preceding satori. The kōan and mondo are defined—paradoxical statements and recorded dialogues used by masters to ready novices for awakening—with one kōan attributed to Linji Yixuan, the Chinese master known for shouting at and striking his students. Laozi, the “Old Master” of the sixth century, is credited with the Tao Te Ching.
Warriors, Death, and the Schools
The Samurai appear as a warrior caste rising around 700 and declining in the 1800s, renowned for discipline and a strict code of honor; the Kamikaze, the “divine wind” of aviators who flew into enemy vessels, are noted as steeped in Samurai-like codes pervaded by Zen. Jung is identified as the Swiss psychiatrist. Egyptian funerary texts, Plutarch’s De facie quae in orbe lunae apparet, Gehenna as the place where the kings of Judah consigned their children to flames, and the viaticum as the Catholic final communion all receive brief glosses, alongside Timothy Leary, remembered for controlled psychedelic experimentation and dismissed from Harvard—officially for missed lectures, though speculation holds his encouragement of student drug use was the real motive. Epicurus and Lucretius, Stoicism from Zeno through Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, the meanings of mos and fas, and the Bolsheviks’ name from bol’shinstvo, “majority,” are all unpacked.
Persons, Errors, and Wordplay
The notes correct Evola’s slip of “Vasilloff” for Nikolai Vavilov, the botanist who built the world’s largest seed collection, criticized Lysenko’s genetics, and starved to death in Siberia. Evola’s stress on “person,” from the Latin persona, a mask or face, is explained as pointing to his alternative of distinct faces against a faceless mass. Behaviorism, tied to Skinner, and Dewey’s pragmatism are flagged, as is a wordplay aimed at Descartes’s Cogito ergo sum. “Know thyself” from Delphi and Nietzsche’s “Become yourself,” traced back through Pindar’s “Become what you are, having learned what that is,” receive their lineages, with Plotinus cited alongside. Walter Heinrich, pupil of Othmar Spann, and the conservative sociologists Schelting and Freyer round out the roster.
Manacorda, Cato, and the Executioner
Manacorda emerges as a philologist and decorated soldier who converted to Catholicism in 1927, mediated between Hitler and the Vatican, and remained a strong adherent until death; Orestano is named an Italian thinker. The note on Cato distinguishes the Elder, called Censor for fending off Hellenistic influence, from the Younger, famed for stoical incorruptibility and opposition to Caesar—either Evola or Pareto errs, since the Floralia anecdote belongs to the Younger. The Floralia itself was a spring festival honoring Flora, whose temple rose on the Sibylline Books’ recommendation. An untranslatable Italian pun on gendered nouns is confessed. Plutarch’s De Sera Numinis Vindicta is identified as his inquiry into Providence given that the unjust are not immediately punished. Saint-Martin, the “unknown philosopher,” and his Martinists appear, then Maistre’s St. Petersburg Dialogues: the Count declares all grandeur and order rest on the executioner, “the horror and the bond of human association,” whose removal would plunge society into chaos; in the Seventh Dialogue the Senator calls war divine in itself and in its supernatural consequences.
Papini, Marinetti, and the Last Word
Papini is drawn at length—the prewar essayist who kept solidarity with the fascists while discreetly distancing himself from Nazi racial theories, whose 1921 conversion caused a stir. Sturm und Drang, the journals Leonardo and Lacerba with its motto “Qui non si canta al modo delle rane,” the series Cultura dell’anima and its 163 titles, and the notorious 1913 Costanzi Theater speech against Rome and Croce all receive their context.
Rank, Hierarchy, and the Orders of Decline
The organizing idea behind these essays is recognition in the strict sense: the assignment of rank. Evola’s four-level schema — spiritual masters, warrior aristocracy, propertied burghers, workers — traces a descent from sacred civilization through warrior societies to the Third Estate of democracy and industrialism and then to the Fourth Estate of socialism and communism. He credits Marxist historiography with seeking a guiding directive in history and insists the Right must answer on the same methodological level while rejecting economic determinism. The Fifth Estate, sketched by Guénon and developed by H. Berl, names what comes after: the sub-personal, demonic substratum returning to free state once organization slackens, visible in endemic delinquency and in what Gabriel Marcel described as methods degrading persons to automated puppets. Against this, Evola sets the suum cuique of Aristotle and Cicero against partisan “social justice,” and the aristocratic, qualitative, spiritual reaction from a plane above against every revolt that shifts the center of gravity lower.
The same logic governs his treatment of youth. Biological age means little; in a cycle of civilizations, what stands at the origins is truly young, while the latest generations are senescent. True youth is the will for the unconditional — courage, creative initiative, contempt for one’s own death — and it stabilizes only in a man who has confronted and overcome hard trials. The “generation of the front lines” and the postwar young are recurrences of one another, separated only by those who lost their way when fascism came to power and traded intransigence for semi-bureaucratic appointments.
The Hidden War: Mithras, Masonry, and the Sibylline Books
Evola’s esoteric essays treat myth as a record of interior experience. The Mithras myth dramatizes what the initiate must traverse, identifying himself with the god by repeating his deeds: birth from the stone, the trials by fire and water, the wrestling of the bull whose blood becomes wheat, the alliance with the Sun. The seven grades — Raven, Occult, Soldier, Lion, Persian, Messenger of the Sun, Father — map a graduated transformation, and the ritual of blood baptism in the subterranean mithraeum replaced Christian baptism. Had Mithraism prevailed while keeping its core, a regular initiatory tradition would have survived in the West; instead initiation persisted only as a subterranean vein.
Masonry receives a parallel reading. Speculative Masonry is distinguished from operative Masonry, whose corporative traditions symbolically transposed building onto spiritual work, the rough stone standing for human individuality. Between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, obscure forces infiltrated the lodges and shifted them onto the ideological-revolutionary plane, where the super-personal was distorted into simple human reason as supreme judge. Evola argues that Masonry’s hour has passed: having prepared the Third Estate’s revolution, it fatally opened the ground for the Fourth, and the forces it liberated now pass to other hands. The Sibylline Books serve a similar argument about Rome — an oracle that consistently distanced the city from its traditions, introducing exotic cults and anti-solar divinities, a conduit for the corrosion of the Aryan Roman world.
What the Book Leaves Behind
The essays on the Orient and on Catholicism carry the argument into the present. White racial hegemony is in crisis, and the East awakens — but it rises as antagonist only by assimilating Western ideas, directing outward the spiritual tension once gathered inwardly toward the heights. The Orient’s waking equals its twilight. Catholicism, meanwhile, has set aside true transcendence and contemplation for parishioner moralism, then for politicization and progressivism; Evola reads the pontificate of John XXIII, Pacem in terris, and the Council as the crumbling of the Roman superstructure and the emergence of primitive Christianity’s egalitarian substrate. A truly traditional organization, he insists, would answer with triplicated, inflexible intransigence.
The book’s significance lies in this consistency of measure. Evola applies one standard — hierarchy, initiation, the primacy of the sovereign and the sacred — to Renaissance humanism, the Workers’ State, Masonry, the Sibyls, Jünger’s Worker, Metternich’s Europe, Pareto’s elite theory, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the essays cohere because the standard never shifts. The translator notes that the prose was rendered more Anglo-Saxon while preserving Evola’s idiosyncrasies and his first-person plural, and that difficult passages were left exacting on the premise that reading itself can have an initiatory aspect. Whether or not one accepts the verdicts, the collection is the last testament of a writer who asked his readers to begin with being rather than with chatter.
