Abyss Nausea
Sunday. What to write?
I have read and am mulling over the prospect of “eternal recurrence.” This is the concluding idea from Nietzsche’s writings. I mean that everything that has happened, every human who has ever lived, every word spoken (including a roar of support for a MMA favorite, or a delicate and tentative descriptive metaphor expressed by a candidate being examined for a Phd) culminates in this present moment, – me keyboarding each word on this glowing screen, seated within this Starbucks on Randall Road, Geneva, in the first year of our 47th American President, Donald J. Trump, reality show impresario, our Grifter in Chief. That’s not all. This moment is the nexus for everything that is to come…
Furthermore, time is like a parabolic track. Everything that goes around, will come around, ad infinitum. God is Dead. There is no one (nothing) behind the curtain, directing the show. (However, wait for it, belief-in-God is certain to come around again.)
Such sensibilities as these are in themselves, no comfort. Is reality, nothing other than we can see, as “out of control” as everything appears? Yes.
Well then is self-pity inevitable?
Unaccountably I feel on the verge of a good laugh.
COURAGE strikes dead dizziness
at the edge of the abyss:
and where does the human being not stand at the edge
of the abyss!
Is seeing not itself – seeing the abyss?
COURAGE is the best slayer:
courage slays even pity.
Pity is however the deepest abyss:
as deeply as one looks into life, so deeply
does one also look into suffering.
COURAGE which attacks is the best slayer:
it strikes dead even death, for it says:
“That was life? Well! Then!
Once again please!”
Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Walter Kaufmann
How about a tune, to mitigate, a dilution of this moment of revelation? Take My Breath Away by Berlin will suffice!
4 thoughts on “Abyss Nausea”
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could take a Mulligan on a life gone off the rails? If we hit our egos into the “rough” we could just say, “Do Over!”
Sadly it seems by hindsight that we know that we are in the “rough.” And a majority of us never know as much.
As your friend Socrates is purported to have said, ” The unexamined life is not worth living.” To me this is meant as self-examination, not an outward subjective opinion about those around us. Usually a futile attempt to extricate ourselves from the baggage and the filters acquired over a lifetime so that we might view our environment in the true light of day as best we can. An ongoing process, so let’s keep trying.
Self-examination is what Socrates meant. Even the will to engage with such a difficult quest most always results in exploration to a point and no further. Socrates seems to have been satisfied that the “good life” meant self-examination to the very end. Plato’s account of his death in the Phaedo shows Socrates voluntary ending of his life in company with friends and good conversation.