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 quests for truths,
and eventually he conquered
a dressed up lie.
His marriage he calls it.

—Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883

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I am embarking on a new adventure.  Finally I am ready to read Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  My hike along the trail into the high mountains is helped by John Kaag’s book, Hiking with Nietzsche.  I know in my bones this is going to be a worth while venture.  The vistas, the precipitous switchbacks are guaranteed to be soul-deep.

The above featured quotation heads a chapter in Kaag’s book, Zarathustra in Love.  It is the case that while living one is quite unable to take the measure of one’s own life.  After all one is not finished.  The tale is not told.   Unknowns always remain.  Redemption may yet be at hand, or ruin.

My parents passed on a few years ago.  I continue to reflect upon what I know of their lives, to seek a coherent perspective of them, given their time and place, and what they made of the joint effort to find and build a home on this earth.  Like all of us, every single one of us who has ever lived, they chose very little in the course of their life.  There is much I wish could have been different for them, as an adult peer, evaluating what they suffered, their losses.  I conclude at least one thing stands out, one element strikes me as unambiguously right:  their mutual choosing of one another.  I can say to the very end, each cultivated an enduring respect, and deep affection for the other.  I recognize that is no small accomplishment, given the vicissitudes of  circumstance.  And how profoundly one is changed in one’s self by “what happens” over the course of the years.  They chose one another well.  And they were lucky.

I am prompted me to reflect upon the marriage within which I am living.  Assessment is difficult because the dangers are many.

So far, so good.

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