Time & Perspective Quote by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Two thousand years is a weaponized number here: not history as comfort, but history as a loaded spring. Celine’s point isn’t that Christianity makes people gentler; it makes them unstable in the presence of organized violence. A regiment marching past should be simple - boots, rhythm, discipline. For Celine, it’s a trigger. The spectacle doesn’t merely impress; it detonates a whole archive of inherited images: crusades, martyrdom, holy war, the romance of sacrifice, the ecstatic crowd. Christianity, in his telling, has trained the Western imagination to translate suffering into meaning, and meaning into permission.

The line’s nasty comic engine is that “going off the deep end” sounds like casual modern slang stapled onto civilizational trauma. He collapses grand metaphysics into a psychological tic. That tonal mismatch is the cynicism: you can’t even watch soldiers without your brain compulsively manufacturing narratives - heroism, redemption, apocalypse - the very stories that make marching columns feel noble instead of merely lethal.

Celine wrote out of a Europe where parades were never just parades. Between the trenches of World War I (which he lived) and the mass politics that followed, militarized pageantry became a kind of public liturgy. The subtext is less about private faith than about cultural programming: Christianity as a long-running aesthetic and moral system that teaches people to fetishize discipline, blood, and transcendence. “Far too many ideas” reads like a diagnosis of contagion. The danger isn’t ignorance; it’s imagination - the old religious language still hovering over modern guns, ready to spiritualize them.