The fisherman. “The vocation of an American fisherman begets a careless soul, almost equal to that of the woodcutter. His affections, his interests, his life are on the side of that society to which it is thought that he belongs. But it would be a prejudice to suppose that he is a very useful member of it. For we must not compare these fishermen to those of Europe, and think that the fisheries here are, like them, a nursery for sailors, for creating strong and sturdy men of the sea. In America, with the exception of the inhabitants of Nantucket, who fish for whales, fishing is an idle employment. Two leagues from the coast, when they have no dread of foul weather, a single mile when the weather is uncertain, is the sum of the courage which they display; and the line is the only instrument with whose use they are practically acquainted. Thus their knowledge is but a trifling trick; and their action, which consists of constantly hanging one arm over the side of the boat, is little short of idleness.

“They are attached to no place; their only connection with land is by means of a wretched house which they inhabit. It is the sea that affords them nourishment: hence a few codfish, more or less, determine their country. If the number of these seems to diminish in any particular quarter, they emigrate, in search of another country, where they are more abundant.

“When it was remarked, by some political writers, that fishing was a sort of agriculture, the remark was brilliant, but not solid.¹⁶⁰ All the qualities, all the virtues, which are attached to agriculture, are wanting in the man who lives by fishing. Agriculture produces a patriot in the truest acceptation of the word; fishing can alone succeed in forming a cosmopolite.”

The person talking in these terms to members of the Institut is not a new La Bruyère writing about barbarism but a sociologist in the age of inflation and paramilitary groups. Around him sound the echoes of Walther Rathenau and Adolf Hitler, hoboes clambering onto freight cars and police on horseback. We don’t see majestic tree trunks, but waste paper blowing about Wall Street on a silent Sunday. We remove Talleyrand’s Woodcutter from his exotic woodland setting and we find Jünger’s Worker: we can already see him in the uniform of a soldier and a factory worker, with no need even for the roar of steel. This man is a focal point for technical violence: his place can be any place, because his mind has lost the mnemotechnical loci in which to record images (“he retains no recollection of any place”). His shadow is the parasite, the Fisherman, the man whom society inadvertently includes among its members, but who doesn’t belong to society. His passivity is malevolent and hostile, he is one of the migrant Lumpen, one of the proletarian jellyfish.

Woodcutter and Fisherman will one day find that they are enemies: for now, in the American wilderness, they are united in their hatred for the land that still generously embraces them. It is a hatred for all that grows and, in growing, mellows and fades. Their rhythm is another: the stroke, the thrust, a metaphor for the gambler who rolls the dice. And their cosmopolite mission is to be found in this devotion to striking: the stroke is the same in every place (“he is a destroyer wherever he goes: so every place is equally good in his eyes”), the tree is the flavor of a single place. The garrulous citoyens whom Talleyrand had left in Paris were still good, slow-witted rural patriots, but they now seemed archaic and outmoded in the face of these two new characters beyond the frontier, who were experimenting with history in the making.