Attempting to wrap my mind around this insight – I inwardly shiver. To become well educated in the contemporary sense means a grasp of cause and effect, of a mechanical notion of reality, that events, even occasions of unspeakable enormity, of power so destructive that ordinary words cannot serve, – are no longer divine…
My quest for insight from Nietzsche continues. Today I began reading The Dawn of Day written in 1881. Beginning with The Dawn of Day Nietzsche’s ideas began to coalesce into a unified vision. As usual reading Nietzsche is like running full-out into the cold ocean surf. There is the shock of difference, the comfort…
Living is narrating. The human being is an animal narrans, and differs from animals to the extent that, through narrative, new forms of life are brought about. A narrative contains the power of a new beginning. Every action that changes the world presupposes a narrative. The crisis of narration, by Byung-chul Han, page 68…
Rising from the evening’s rest I was in a surly frame of mind. I felt haunted by the spectre of college football. You know that fall season of televised spectacle where many millions of dollars are marshaled to fill magnificent stadiums with students, alumni arrayed in team apparel, some with painted faces, immersed in…
A Thursday morning, and I have an appointment with my lawnmower. Fallen leaves wait to be harvested. The mulch will not be wasted. The dying and the life-to-come are intimately linked, – mulch to new life. Just thinking about the infinite supply of shock material, so many videos from the political right and left…
This is what I thought: for the most banal event to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he[she] lives surrounded by his[her] stories, and stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him…
Happiness for us is thinkableonly in the air that we have breathed,among the people who have lived with us.In other words, there vibratesin the idea of happiness…the idea of salvation. …Our life it can be said,is a muscle strong enough to contract the whole of historical time. Or, to put it differently, the genuine…
These are the concluding words, the wrap-up of Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche takes his measure of a comprehensive philosophy which he has offered, not unlike a master-work painting of detail and subtlety. The author declares what he has said/written is already showing decrepitude, the dissolution inevitable to everything that is time bound. I…
So this is where we are! Nothing to do, nothing but to recognize and embrace what is before us. What we had established, our words steadfast-in-print on paper, at one time attractive, compelling, emulated around the world… (I remember a story by a professor teaching a course in American business practices, recounting that we…
A friend read the ‘hidden god’ quotation of yesterday. He responded by text that he wanted to think more about the quotation. We plan to talk by phone this afternoon. Nietzsche reveals in subsequent lines that he is referring to Dionysus, the god of reverie, of wine, of inadvertent discovery. The thought of such…
