April Porch Reading

King Of All Things

“Your shoulders are made for throwing accurately, with power. Your mind runs to problems, solutions and strategy. Your body is designed to carry you over long distances, ranging overland with speed. You are bigger than women, despite the high cost of making a bigger body. Your spirit seeks to challenge others, to dominate and win. Your purpose is war, son.”

— Clark Savage

Dreaming in the Dark

The return of warm weather means a return to nighttime reading out on the porch. There’s something strangely wonderful about spending the night with a book in the open air, especially when the scent of blossoms hang on the breeze and the eerie sounds of a Southern night liven the dark. With the right book, the whole outdoor ensemble can awaken something deep inside you. Something primordial. A memory, maybe. And if you’re like me, you’ll catch yourself staring into the darkness between pages. Remembering. Dreaming.

Reading Clark Savage’s King of All Things for this month’s Porch Reading had me doing a lot of remembering and dreaming. The book carried me back to my earliest days in the Army, where I learned that great secret—that my body was, in fact, a war machine, and that I’d never be truly content treating it as anything other.

It made me remember the time my commander—a man who had taken a bullet and lost a limb—admonished me to never neglect my war machine.

“Always stay in fighting shape,” he said to me once after an unforgiving 9-mile run, “If you’re fat and you get shot or blown up, you’re probably gonna die. I’ve seen it happen. A strong body will save your life.”

That advice has always lurked in the back of my mind, even as I grapple with the sedentary malaise of civilian life. But now with the world falling apart, those words have started to push their way forward and crowd my thoughts.

King of All Things also took me back to the first time I was seriously injured and the bleeds and breaks that followed. I could smell the sweat, heavy with ammonia, and again I felt the burden of a 90-lb ruck clinging to my back. My mind wandered to the forests and swamps that tried to defeat my war machine in those days, and to the hateful hot summer nights of a godforsaken desert.

I’d never been so beat up and exhausted before, but I’d also never been happier.

Strange, that.

King of All Things

King of All Things is not a self-help book, a manifesto, or a memoir, and Savage makes no grandiose claims or lazy appeals to theory. There is no gimmickry here. Rather, the book presents the reader with a simple guide to understanding and cultivating a “martial purpose.”

Martial purpose? In this bovine age of limitless comforts? Why yes, Savage insists, invoking the same spirit that inspired my commander: every man was made for war, even the most plump and pusillanimous. In fact, recovering your martial purpose may just save your life.

From the outset, Savage avoids any fatty tissue and goes straight for the bone, addressing the reader with the simple frankness of a fighting man. He begins with the tale of Cadmus, son of King of Agethor of Tyre, who was the first mythic hero of Bronze Age Greece. Cadmus was a hero to the Greeks long before they could write, and that his legendary exploits survive to this day testifies to the importance of his story.

According to legend, Cadmus happened upon a dragon while searching the earth for his sister Europa. After slaying the dragon with a spear, Cadmus was visited by the goddess Athena, who instructed the hero to sow the dead dragon’s teeth as if they were seeds. Cadmus did so, and from the scattered teeth arose a terrifying legion of armed men called the Spartoi, who immediately began fighting each other until only five of the bravest remained. These worthy survivors eventually established the first noble families of the Greek civilization, and their memory and strange beginnings endure to this day.

Such a tale is not uncommon in the history of foundation myths. A mighty hero ventures forth into a magical world, and after fearlessly contending against a host of beasts, monsters, and demigods, the hero founds a glorious civilization that honors his name for centuries ever after.

Now why would Savage begin his very pragmatic manual with an ancient myth?

Contrary to what some might think at first glance, this beginning reveals a deeper quality in King of All Things that separates it from other books of its genre. It is why I ultimately selected Savage’s book for this month’s Porch Reading, despite having a sizable library of works by more recognizable authors to choose from.

The cultivation and recovery of man’s martial spirit is a journey into the uncertain and mysterious. It is to venture beyond the tidy borders of a world shaped by words, ideas, and rigid beliefs, and to probe the visceral, the primordial. In this savage terrain man learns to listen to his impulses—perhaps for the first time in his life—and as he transforms physically, his spirit swells also. The wisdom of ages past suddenly becomes accessible to him. He remembers. He dreams again. This is renewal.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that civilizational renewal is so tightly intertwined with heroism and war in our most ancient and enduring stories. For the life of me, I cannot think of a single great civilization in the history of the West where a delegation of enlightened planners and beancounters engineered a nation into existence or pulled a failing one back from the brink. And yet this is the prevailing wisdom of our day, that civilization can rest on an idea alone, and that we can manage and tinker our way through existential challenges. The uncomfortable truth that creeps deep in our hearts, that lurks impatiently in our very DNA, is that war is the king of all things. Violence always has final say. Everything of value in our lives was purchased at a price at one time or another, and civilization as we know it always entails a butcher’s bill.

As we discuss the failures and decline of the American civilization and pine for renewal, we cannot afford to overlook the blood, sweat, and tears baked into the very mortar of this once-great nation. We may be tempted to limit our search for answers to the suffocating rooms of the Pennsylvania State House, or even reach back centuries earlier to interrogate the yellowed parchments of long-dead nobles and clergy who spoke in foreign tongues. We do this because it’s easy and the cost is low. It allows the seduction to continue—that great ideas alone propel us through history. But the truth stares us in the eye, and not necessarily from the pages of books. We only have to remember. When we struggle and strain, when we suffer and bleed, the truth rings out from inside us. It comes to us as a memory: the bloody footprints at Valley Forge, the gruesome sound of a cleaving tomahawk, the groans and cries from a shattered peach orchard—we recall the price. The butcher’s bill.

Given the great civilizational problems we face, I don’t believe renewal is attainable without this wisdom. We cannot manufacture it, and it does not wait for us at the end of a rainbow. This wisdom can only come the old-fashioned way, by contending with those primordial forces that patiently wait inside us all.

Clark Savage’s King of All Things will help you remember. It will also help you to dream again.

I seek in this book to remind men of their eternal purpose and to bring them more in accord with it. To do this, I will first explain the heritage of war that flows through your veins, and continue with inquiries into the martial body, mind and spirit.
…

Your physical form and the contours of your intellect are revealing the truth of Creation. It is obvious that men are designed for contending, for struggle, and, yes, for combat—the greatest and most eternal struggle of all.

…

This is not a book of ideology, a guide to survival, a self-defense manual, or a book relating to today’s politics…Rather, I’d like you to rediscover something of the warlike essence inside all men and to cultivate it. This book serves as a gardener’s guide for such cultivation.

King of All Things weaves history, culture, and practical advice into a compelling narrative accessible to every man. After awakening his audience to their awful situation, Savage begins with fundamental principles of strength and endurance that will transform a man’s body into the war machine God intended.

Then Savage drills down into specific skills, activities, and movements that every man should incorporate into his life and learn to master. These chapters are filled with useful tips and practical wisdom that carry the tone of a patient NCO instructing a freshly-enlisted private. Every reader, regardless of their background, will find something useful here—something they can adopt and improve almost immediately.

Finally, Savage concludes the book with a spiritual discussion; a series of chapters addressing morality and faith, discipline, courage, and perseverance. He does this by drawing from the experiences of heroic figures of the past: Andrew Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Ernst Junger, Porter Halyburton, and John Ripley, among others. Directly connecting important moral and spiritual lessons to key figures and events makes for an inspiring conclusion to a deeply insightful book.

King of All Things is not merely a repository of fun facts and simple lessons for self-improvement. Rather, it contains the wisdom of ages, and a studious reader who incorporates this wisdom into their daily life will discover a key to personal and even cultural and civilizational renewal.

I don’t know what the future will bring, and I abhor the prospect of violence. But I also know that everything of value in our lives today came at a price. Someone somewhere paid that butcher’s bill. If we fail to preserve what was freely given, we will inevitably pay the price ourselves. There is no better time than now to remember that. Your body is war machine, and treating it as such might just save your life—it might just save us all.