"Poor Nietzsche in Turin, eating sausage his mother
Mails to him from Basel."
- Robert Hass, 'A Supple Wreath of Myrtle'
Yes, poor Nietzsche. First his own life let him down, then history. A being betrayed by existence.
All that survives of him now is what survives of any mind - trivia - pieces of evidence the clerks have kept not because they are conclusive, but because they are shiny. The package of sausages, the beaten horse.
Beyond the human, beyond tragedy, beyond good and evil, what remains is anecdote. Like the story of the man who stood at the base of a great mountain, laughing at the shapes of the fallen stones.
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7 comments:
"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field.
I’ll meet you there."
--Rumi.
Not so. There is always the Eternal Return...
"Beyond the human, beyond tragedy, beyond good and evil, what remains is anecdote."
..and then even that disappears in the mist.
~N.
Bhai, har kisi ki life mein yeh oopar-nietzsche to hota rahta hai.
//bada boom.
space bar: If you build it, they will come?
cat: True. Not to mention the Eternal Backspace.
N: Yes
km: Groan.
"It is difficult to be understood, especially when one thinks
and lives gangasrotogati [Footnote: Like the river Ganges:
presto.] among those only who think and live otherwise--namely,
kurmagati [Footnote: Like the tortoise: lento.], or at best
"froglike," mandeikagati [Footnote: Like the frog: staccato.]" thus spake nietzsche anticipating your blog 125 years before the impertinence was actually perpetrated. or were these words meant for the same purpose, "There are truths which are best recognized by mediocre
minds, because they are best adapted for them, there are truths
which only possess charms and seductive power for mediocre
spirits." please enlighten me.
It's very tempting to dismiss Nietzsche on these grounds. To be sure, he was a sick man with a sick body and some of his ideas were sick. However, this doesn't mean we should ignore his contributions to philosophy entirely. He has made us all re-think a lot, whether or not we consider ourselves religious, and I think we should consider ourselves better for it.
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