[401] it is not originally archaic any more, but it is archaistic, it is a return. And this return gives the religious power back to these figures. They become mostly two-dimensional, i.e., they are taken out of the natural space. Now then from there the new^a real archaic period of the Byzantine^b and early Middle ages^c began. And it might be that our expressionistic art in the large sense of the word, which now is lasting for 50 years, will be an analogy with the return of the archaic in the archaistic art of the later ancient period.

QN: I wonder if you could say something about what these volcanoes were, more specifically. PT: I didn’t want to name them because I have written so often about them. You can read them in The Courage to Be, I meant the great existentialists of the 19th century. I meant Kierkegaard^d in the religious realm, Marx^e in the social realm, Nietzsche^f in the realm of the vital, Schopenhauer^g before him. Then toward the end of the century, Cézanne^h and Van Goghⁱ in painting; people like Rimbaud^j and Beaudelaire in poetry; people like Strindberg^k and, before him, Dostoievsky^l in drama and novel. These are volcanoes in the 19th century. And they were the father of all existentialism^m in the 20th century. QN: You mentioned that the foundations of the present structure were still intact, although blooded by the existentialist attack. How do you account for the fact that they are so fully intact after such a tremendous onslaught of the first half of the century? PT: You mean the foundations of the objectifying structure? This is a very interesting question

and is really a part of my autobiography, namely in the early twenties immediately after the