And now? I account for myself clearly. The project that I put in writing, this book was a frightful challenge. Could I have succeeded? Really? It is apparently a failure; this book resembles tanks abandoned in their essence and through combat, half destroyed in a field. It is…
Sometimes I have no idea what to write. In time an idea develops… “This” piece of writing “sets my hair on fire.” There’s no need for anything of my own but to share this with you. An infantryman’s least favorite weather is a temperature of 35 degrees Fahrenheit and pouring rain, when the trench…
I hesitate to mention an inclination to write-a-book. Why, in god’s name would I want to do that? The bookstore is filled with titles, and on the internet a tidal wave of material, much self published. What portion of those publications, paper or virtual are likely to be read? The question is unanswerable. In…
The question: what to do? Is to give chance to play It is first of all to accept what is given as a game The condition of a difficult fight, to fight on the side on which chance seems to appear The same thing as freedom. –excerpt On Nietzsche Notes by Georges…
The questions that [Nietzsche] posed touch on tragedy, laughter, suffering, and the enjoyment of suffering, wealth, and the freedom of the mind: in general, the extreme states the human mind can reach. …His doctrine of dangerous life, of lucid, unbound, contemptuous humanity, is foreign to public struggles. It concerns solitaries hostile to the universe….
A friend is gone. Al Lykins passed away a few weeks ago. I miss having coffee with Al, swapping stories about life. Al was a teller of stories, an enchanter. I know that Al’s time to go arrived. It is impossible not to wish there had been more time. Al was a Buddhist. I…
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price…
But without the night, without despair, and without the irremediable terror that strikes me would I have known the inaccessible happiness of the summit? …Responding, out of breath, to the moral interrogation that I proposed to myself in anguish, I would be forever separated. By letting the interrogation open within me like a wound,…
…burning desire in search of “communication.” Desire in “communication” bears essentially on the beyond of the being. But this beyond is not only the nothingness that limits us, toward which we throw ourselves, wanting to touch another being; it is at the same time the interrogation of the being that we are. …We can…
A certain non-knowledge must leave me disarmed before what I have to do… so that I have to do it in order for me to feel freely obligated and bound to it… It is necessary to know the most and the best possible, but between the widest, the most refined, the most necessary knowledge,…
