Nietzsche and I

Fiction, Essay, Nietzsche and I once more. Another Manifesto.

On a beautiful day like this when an unexpected cold front from the North brought cool fresh air and relief to the scorching South, I feel expansive and uninhibited and thankful to be alive.

Yesterday, the weather was just the opposite. I came home from a long trip and as the twilight began to come on, the sky was turning black and my car hissed into a wall of rain. I put the wipers on full strength and slowed down the car. Cars driven by idiots and maniacs passed me by and sprayed my car and blinded me for a second or so. The rain peppered the windshield and the roof and the tires made a hissing sound as they went through a thin layer of water. I felt strangely relaxed. Water is life. I drove for hundreds of miles and my mind was groping for the meaning of why I kept punishing myself.

Today, the rain was long gone. Everything is crisp and clear, trees and grass are in their luxuriant green, and flowers and butterflies are everywhere. I went for a walk, the morning was awash with sunlight, and I felt every molecule in my body dancing. On the day like this, I feel like writing some fiction, but lying (creation) is an art, and few do it well to the point that the readers are transported and transformed by the words of the creator. It’s much easier to write nonfiction, to state one’s opinions in a straightforward manner without allusions, without a framework of a story.

So, Nam Le got another award for his marvelous book of stories. Every Dick, Tom, and Harry can appreciate popular music and rhapsodize on the transcendental beauty of roses and orchids, but it takes a rare and thus more evolved sensibility to appreciate literature, painting, and sculpture. It is no wonder writers and poets and painters and sculptors feel they are very special, far above the coarse common crowd who make mere noise and nothing else. The more mediocre a person, the more noise he makes. Maybe I am myself one of those guys. Anyway, the following are words mostly taken verbatim from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (I’ve read the book at least 10 times and every time I read it, my mind soars and my heart sings). Occasionally I throw in my own words to confuse the reader as to who is speaking here. [(I believe I once said that N and I shared the same birthday as that of a Prussian king. In fact, N’s first and middle names derived from the king. N’s father was a pastor and for a few years lived in the castle of Altenburg and taught the four princesses there. Sometimes I have an inkling that N lives within me although I am far luckier than he was in the department of love. He lived in a household full of women and so did I (I have six sisters and one brother), but he could not find a wife. Throughout my life, my best friends have always been women and some of them were more than friends]. Without further ado, let us plunge into the world of N, but I do feel obligated to warn those of tender or jealous sensibilities to stay away, because N’s words (and mine, too) are only for the strong and the not jealous. N had a mental breakdown a few months after writing the book. He lingered on for almost twelve years until he died in August 1900 without regaining consciousness of the fact that he once wrote books that he rightly predicted that they would make a big impact for generations, if not centuries, to come. It was poignant to note that the breakdown occurred when he rushed to the street in order to restrain a coach driver from whipping the horse. Walter Kaufmann, the authority on N, surmised that N he suffered from consequences of untreated syphilis contracted during his student days. N was in poor health and was almost blind during most of his adult life; yet in spite of this, he wrote books after books. He celebrated the will to power and advocated a robust approach to life as a revolt against and a sublimation of his own poor health. One only philosophizes from one’s own experiences.

I live on my own credit; it is perhaps a mere prejudice that I live.

Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else. But how could you? My contempt is so transparent; my disgust so palpable; and my disappointment immense. No matter how hard you try to hide, I can see through you. I have keen eyesight and you are not that difficult to read.

Those who can breathe the air of my writings know that it is an air of the heights, a strong air. One must be made for it. Otherwise there is no small danger that one may catch cold from it. The ice is near, the solitude tremendous—but how calmly all things lie in the light! How freely one breathes! How much one feels beneath oneself!

How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? Error (faith in the ideal) is not blindness, error is cowardice.

Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself.

Among my writings my Zarathustra stands to my mind by itself. With that I have given mankind the greatest present that has been made to it so far. Here no “prophet” is speaking, none of those gruesome hybrids of sickness and will to power whom people called founders of religion. Above all, one must hear aright the tone that comes from this mouth, the halcyon tone, lest one should do wretched injustice to the meaning of its wisdom.

It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thought that come on doves’ feet guide the world.
The figs are falling from the trees; they are good and sweet; and, as they fall, their red skin bursts. I am a north wind to ripe figs.
Thus, like figs, these teachings fall to you, my friends: now consume their juice and their sweet meat. It is fall around us, and pure sky and afternoon.

It is no fanatic that speaks here; this is not “preaching”; no faith is demanded here: from an infinite abundance of light and depth of happiness falls drop upon drop, word upon word: the tempo of these speeches is a tender adagio. Such things reach only the most select.

Not only does Zarathustra speak differently, he also is different.

The man of knowledge must not only love his enemies, he must also be able to hate his friends.
One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil. And why do you not want to pluck at my wreath?
Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you

On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of the sun just fell upon my life: I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once. How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?—and I so I tell my life to myself.

All pathological disturbances of the intellect, even that half-numb state that follows fever, have remained entirely foreign to me to this day. A physician who treated me for some time as if my nerves were sick finally said: “It’s not your nerves, it is rather I that am nervous.”

A well-turned-out person pleases our senses, he is carved from wood that is hard, delicate, and at the same time smells good.

I am warlike by nature. Attacking is one of my instincts. I attack falsehood masqueraded as truth and ignorance presented as knowledge; I attack hypocrisy, envy, jealousy, and cowardice; I attack reasoning without sequaciy; and I attack pettiness within myself and of others. Bragging, pride, and arrogance, no matter how distasteful or obnoxious, don’t bother me since they have something to do with truth. A person is allowed to feel good about himself as long as what he feels good about is factual and true.

I have never reflected on questions that are none—I have not wasted myself. “God”, ‘immortality of the soul’, “redemption”, “beyond”—are concepts to which I never devoted any attention or time; not even as a child. Perhaps I have never been childlike enough for them?

I do not by any means know atheism as a result; even less as an event: it is a matter of course with me, from instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. (Ich bin zu neugierig, zu fragwurdig, zu ubermutig, um mir eine faustgrobe Antwort gefallen zu lassen). God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers—at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: thou shall not think!

When I seek another word for music, I always find only the word Venice. I do not know how to distinguish between tears and music—I do not know how to think of happiness, of the south, without shudders of timidity.

At the bridge I stood
lately in the brown night.
From a far came a song:
as a golden drop it welled
over the quivering surface.
Gondolas, lights, and music—
drunken it swam out into the twilight.

My soul, a stringed instrument,
sang to itself, invisibly touched,
a secret gondola song,
quivering with iridescent happiness.
-- Did any one listen to it?

Wissai
June 6, 2009_