![]() The book mixes cultural argument with confessional bathos, as well as intriguing asides on writers’ hairstyles. Reminiscent of Walter Benjamin in his intellectual flâneurship is Mark O’Connell, whose Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back (Granta) is a wryly gonzo travelogue around the culture of “preppers” – people stocking bunkers in the certainty that some form of armageddon is nigh – with visits also to an eco-warrior camp and the Instagram-friendly wasteland of Chernobyl. ![]() A shabby and probably malodorous Wittgenstein once showed up in a hotel lobby for a conference, only for one academic to tell him: “I’m afraid there is a gathering of philosophers going on in here.” The genius replied: “So am I.” ![]() One might not be persuaded by the attempt at intellectual synthesis, but the details are often very funny. That is still in the future, though, in Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians: The Invention of Modern Thought 1919-29 (Allen Lane), which tells with gossipy verve the stories of Heidegger along with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Cassirer, and the intersections and contradictions of their respective thinking. ![]() The philosopher Martin Heidegger also considered boredom an important existential mood, since it plunges us into authentic grappling with the nature of being and time, although he was presumably less bored after he became a member of the Nazi party in 1933.
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