Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir

by Werner Herzog

I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis—along with quite a few other mistakes—that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.

the Polish writer and philosopher Ryszard Kapuściński

I was fascinated—and he just as much—with the idea that the future might be one in which we had lost all our technical prowess, just as, after the fall of the Roman Empire, almost every innovation of technology, medicine, science, mathematics, and literature was lost. For the better part of the next thousand years, only scraps of the old knowledge survived, hidden in monasteries or preserved in translations into Arabic. The worst loss of all was the fire that destroyed the library of Alexandria, which housed the entire store of antique knowledge and literature and philosophy.

Reading signs, reading the other team’s tactics in soccer, reading the world, all that never let go of me.

Linear B is a Bronze Age script that was used on baked clay tablets on the island of Crete and on the Greek mainland in Pylos and Mycenae.

To me, the deciphering of Linear B is one of our greatest cultural and intellectual achievements bar none.

Together, Michael Ventris, an architect and classicist who worked on cracking German Luftwaffe codes during World War Two, used logical grids that grew more complete all the time, and John Chadwick, a classicist and expert in early Ancient Greek dialects, came to the compelling conclusion that it must be an archaic form of Ancient Greek that was perhaps current some seven or eight hundred years before Homer. Unfortunately, it transpired that the texts were nothing like Homer or Sophocles, not poems at all, but bookkeeping and inventories—who

Not everything was completely translated and understood, and the earlier Linear A has so far withstood all our efforts to decipher it, presumably because it goes back to a different language that we can’t identify and possibly never will know.

The Phaistos Disc, a burned clay disc also from Crete, with its spiral inscriptions that exist nowhere else except in a few tiny fragments, is the greatest riddle of all. For me, it’s the emblem of our limitations in reading the world, our mysterious world.