A friend’s comment to the post of yesterday inspired the choice of these lines. Here a train of thought describes a point of view of life in a society marked by affluence as well as by the violence of extreme poverty. Systemic exploitation amounts to healthcare you cannot afford, and doing without the benefits of education. What about survival of one’s integrity given one’s inevitable share in the injustice? What one can see is all but inevitable, and leverage to bend the course of the future is finite, even infinitesimal…

Genuine honesty,
assuming that this is our virtue
and we cannot get rid of it, we free spirits

– well then,
we will want to work on it
with all the love and malice at our disposal,
and not get tired of “perfecting” ourselves
in our virtue,
the only one we have left:
may its glory
come to rest like a gilded, blue evening glow of mockery
over this aging culture
and its dull and dismal seriousness!

And if our genuine honesty
nevertheless gets tired one day
and sighs and stretches its limbs
and finds us too harsh and would rather things were better,
easier, gentler, like an agreeable vice:

we will stay harsh, we, who are the last of the Stoics!

And we will help it out
with whatever devilishness we have
– our disgust
at clumsiness and approximation, our
“nitimur in vetitum,”*

our adventurer’s courage,
our sly and discriminating curiosity,
our subtlest, most hidden, most spiritual
will to power
and world-overcoming
which greedily rambles and raves over every realm of the future,
– we will bring all of our “devils”
to help out our “god”!

Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Judith Butler, aphorism 227

*“We strive for the forbidden” from Ovid’s Amores III, 4,17