What I do or do not do now is as important for everything that is yet to come as is the greatest event of the past: in this tremendous perspective of effectiveness all actions appear equally great and small. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 233 by Friedrich Nietzsche I shared these lines with…
The debt ceiling crisis is over. The idea that our nation could refuse to make good on debts already incurred is surreal, the creation of an insane world. In effect this would destroy the credit of the nation by a single political impasse. Embedded in my mind is image of President Biden and Speaker…
Do we pray anymore? Piety is obsolete in a secular society. Not entirely of course. Always there are remote places that have yet to hear the news. News takes time. “God is dead,” Nietzsche proclaimed as in the “Gay Science” published 1882. A way of life predicated upon reliance upon the technology of the…
At the racetrack on a Saturday afternoon, I feel gratitude for yet another experience of earthly paradise. I am able to be with others, fellow citizens that I know only slightly. That fragment of common ground is enough: the passion for quarter mile competition unites us. Paradise, an ideal condition of experience is always…
“Sin” is a word seldom mentioned, rarely heard now-a-days. The emotion of shame though is all too prevalent. Is it universal to have hidden anxiety that one fails to be “good enough?” No matter the surface appearance due to education, social status, etc., it’s not unusual to wonder if one is a failure. Why…
Prose and poetry— It is noteworthythat the great masters of prosehave almost always been poets, too–if not publicly than at least secretly, in the ”closet.” Good prose is written only face to face with poetry. For it is an uninterrupted,well mannered war with poetry:all of its attractions depend on the way in which poetryis…
Joined with a group of friends last night to exchange ideas about morality. Is morality relative or absolute? The notion of an absolute, something not disposed to many interpretations, a universal standard, — inevitably is linked to the idea of a deity. Absolutes of any kind, morality included, are affairs of divinity, since we…
…if one considers, finally that to the lover himself the whole rest of the world appears indifferent, pale. and worthless, and he is prepared to make any sacrifice, to disturb any order, to subordinate all other interests-then one comes to feel genuine amazement that this wild avarice and injustice of sexual love has been…
The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: ‘—that begins with an M, such as mouse–traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness—you know you say things are…
I anticipate reading The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche. The introduction is written by Walter Kaufmann, the translator. Kaufmann mentions that Nietzsche was greatly influenced by the writings of New England transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Curious to understand the substrate of Nietzsche’s sense of himself and of his world I downloaded a segment of…
