Stronger, Seasoned, Tougher, Audacious, Gayer
I approached the Fox River this morning on Fayban Parkway, the sky was smoky, a low hanging mix of Canada Wildfire haze and high humidity. I remembered reading the New York Times report that as the climate warms wild fires, storms, floods and extreme heat are going to increase across our country. Some areas are going to be safer places to live, — the upper Midwest, the Great Plains and New England, than other places, but every place will be affected by climate change. And not everyone is in a position to relocate. For many, installing an air conditioner is what can be done.
I gazed at the rising sun blazing through the lingering smoky haze on the horizon, as I turned north on route 31. The planet will continue warming in the coming decades.
The concluding paragraphs to Nietzsche’s Gay Science, seem prescient, germane to the life which we all presently live…
Being new, nameless,
hard to understand,
we premature births of an as yet unproven future
need for a new goal also a new means
–namely, a new health,
stronger, more seasoned, tougher, more audacious,
and gayer than any previous health.
Whoever has a soul
that craves to have experienced
the whole range of values and desiderata to date,
and to
have sailed around all the coasts
of this ideal “mediterranean”;
whoever wants to know
from the adventures of his own most
authentic experience
how a discoverer and conqueror
of the ideal feels,
and also an artist,
a saint,
a legislator,
a sage,
a scholar,
a pious man,
a soothsayer,
and one who stands divinely apart in the old style
–needs one thing above everything else:
the great health
–that one does not merely have
but also acquires continually,
and must acquire because one gives it up,
again and again, and must give it up.
–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 5, Section 382 by Friedrich Nietzsche
