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Set for yourself goals, high and noble goals, and perish in pursuit of them! I know of no better life purpose than to perish in pursuing the great and the impossible: animae magnae prodigus.
The Birth of Tragedy, in which he argued that the allure of tragedy was its ability to harmonize the two competing urges of being human: the desire for order and the strange but undeniable longing for chaos.
“The educated classes,” Nietzsche explained, “are being swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy.” The prospects for life in modern capitalist society were lucrative but nonetheless bleak: “The world has never been so worldly, never poorer in love and goodness.”
“It is only as an aesthetic experience,” Nietzsche insists in The Birth of Tragedy, “that existence and the world are eternally justified.”
If agony and death could not be escaped, perhaps instead it was possible to embrace them, even joyfully.
“What was once done ‘for the love of God,’” Nietzsche suggests, “is now done for the love of money.”
Of course, exchanging affections is exactly as fulfilling as exchanging goods and services—which is to say not at all—but this does not keep one from trying, constantly, to trade up. The utter bankruptcy of love’s conditions keeps everything in frenetic motion.
According to Nietzsche and Emerson, modernity had fallen out of rhythm with life. It was out of tune with the basic impulses that once animated human existence. Animals naturally love to play, to race, to climb—to expend energy and relish power. But in our efforts to become civilized and pious, Nietzsche maintained, we moderns had managed to kill or cage the animal within us.
Walking is among the most life-affirming of human activities. It is the way we organize space and orient ourselves to the world at large. It is the living proof that repetition—placing one foot in front of the other—can in fact allow a person to make meaningful progress.
The control that one has over the pain is strangely affirming:
A man’s maturity—consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886
“I used to be happy,” one of my students informed me halfway through the term, “then I started reading Nietzsche.”
Becoming who you are meant, at least at first, becoming deeply depressed.
According to Nietzsche, there are two forms of health: the futile type that tries to keep death at bay as long as possible, and the affirming type that embraces life, even its deficiencies and excesses.
our deep desires for beauty and affection often stem from deprivation, melancholy, and pain.
The question in each and every thing, “Do you want this again and innumerable times again?”
What child would not have cause to weep over its parents? Worthy I deemed this man and ripe for the sense of the earth: but when I saw his wife, the earth seemed to me a house for the senseless … This one went out like a hero in quest of truths, and eventually he conquered a little dressed up lie. His marriage he calls it.
“I and me are always too deeply in conversation,” he admitted, “how could I endure it if there were not a friend?” The friend of the hermit, Nietzsche tells his reader, is always the third one, a bobber that keeps I and me from “sinking into the depths.”
To love in spite of appearances can be one of the signs of true affection.
“The best friend is most likely to be the best wife, since a good marriage is based on a talent for friendship.”
Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes that he “left his cave, glowing and strong like a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains.” This triumphalism was hopeful, wishful, but I knew there were other, more precipitous ways to come down those mountains.
Sometimes one must be careful not to accidentally take the upper path.
To die at the right time: this is what Zarathustra instructs. He knows it’s not easy. It frequently involves intentionally choosing the upper path.
We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption; but how near or distant that is, nobody knows—not even God.
“greater part of conscious thinking must be counted among the instinctive functions, and it is so even in the case of philosophical thinking…” One’s attraction to manifest certainty is not the outcome of reasonable argumentation but rather the outgrowth of primal fear.
“Fulfillment is reached by responding wisely to difficulties that could tear one apart. Squeamish spirits may be tempted to pull out the molar at once or come off Piz Corvatsch on the lower slopes. Nietzsche urged us to endure.”
“TO BE IGNORANT OF WHAT OCCURRED before you were born is to remain always a child.”
That Augustus is regarded as a jerk in contemporary Western society is unsurprising, according to Nietzsche. What is surprising is the story of how this came to pass. In the three hundred years between the death of Augustus and the reign of Constantine in the fourth century, Romans went from worshipping a masterly man-god to venerating an emaciated Jew hung unceremoniously on a cross.
The triumph of slave morality is, by its very nature, surreptitious and subterranean. It flourishes under pressure. Repression and agony, the engines of ressentiment, only make it stronger and more durable.
“The individual,” Nietzsche writes, “has always struggled to keep from being overwhelmed by the group. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened.”
“no price is too high for the privilege of owning yourself.”
We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge—and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves—how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?
Why do we put limits on our children? Of course, virtually all fathers think they are operating in their child’s best interests, but I am slowly realizing that most of us protect our children, at least in part, because we are either avoiding or coming to grips with our own anxiety. The more we argue that it is about the child’s safety, the more obvious it is that it is all about us. Children remind us, in delightful and painful ways, what it is to be a person.
