People should rethink
their ideas about cruelty and open up their eyes;
they should finally learn impatience, so that big, fat, presumptuous mistakes like this will stop wandering virtuously and audaciously about.

We’d like to believe we Americans are of all people the most humane. We want what is best, which we fervently believe is a society organized along the lines of our own, etc., etc., We are conventionally pleasant. We no longer practice bear-baiting. We think that the cruelty of our war-between-the-states is behind us, that uncivil war where 620,000 are estimated to have been slaughtered. The figure should be much higher to include those killed by hunger and disease. We’ve put such cruelty behind us have we not? We are fastidious in our effort to avoid suffering declares the elegant PR person being interviewed.

Nietzsche writes this is a “big, fat, presumptuous mistake.”

We clearly need to drive out
the silly psychology of the past;
the only thing
this psychology was able to teach about cruelty
was that it originated from the sight of another’s suffering.

But there is abundant, overabundant pleasure in your own suffering too,
in making yourself suffer,…

Is there “abundant pleasure” in other words, fulfillment in one’s own suffering? I understand the difficulty in learning to write well. To grasp one’s own mind and then to grant that the mind of another is different, a result of circumstances utterly apart from your own, including parents attempting, trial and error, to do their best or not…  Geography too makes more difference than is credited. To imagine a readers mind, and to write generously, with sufficient clarity… Suffering is required if one writes well.

Finally, people should bear in mind
that even the knower,
by forcing his spirit to know against its own inclination and,
often enough, against the wishes of his heart
(in other words, to say “no” when he would like to affirm, love, worship),
this knower will prevail as
an artist of cruelty… and the agent of its transfiguration.

Cruelty? What price will I pay, how much discipline, rigor of focus, allowing self-transformation to happen involuntarily by indwelling something new? Cruelty? Just a drop.

– there is a drop of cruelty even
in every wanting-to-know.

Beyond Good and Evil, By Friedrich Nietzsche, Trans. by Judith Norman, aphorism 229