Reading Nietzsche ranks with the most difficult of duties within memory. I categorize my inclination, my taste for his fevered commentary, the excavation of language in the only way possible, with language, – as a duty. I am reminded of being taken as a sick child to the family doctor by my parents. Then I was totally dependent upon my parents and the physician. He was another adult authority in a white lab coat. Dr. McBride usually added to my pain. My duty was to be taken by my parents. They were my parents, after all.

Nietzsche in like manner causes considerable discomfort, more pain that I expected.

Still one way or another I continue to be alive, on account of a remembered, long dead family doctor. Do Nietzsche’s words keep me alive in spirit, more attuned to myself? I certainly need assistance. A democratic republic is apparently disintegrating, an individual promising cruelty which I couldn’t imagine has just been elected for a four year term. Also climate disruption can be counted upon. When I look around, on the internet or watch television, I am within a funhouse maze.

As I said, I’ll hold to a lifeline, even though the treatment itself induces pain.

TO TRANQUILLISE THE SCEPTIC.

—“I don’t know at all what I am doing.
I don’t know in the least what I ought to do!”

—You are right,
but be sure of this:
you are being done at every moment!

Mankind has at all times
mistaken the active for the passive:
   it is
      its eternal grammatical blunder.

The Dawn Of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 120