We should reconsider cruelty and open our eyes… Almost everything we call “higher culture” is based upon the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty: This is my proposition. That wild beast has not really been killed; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become — divine. What constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty;…
A real man wants two things:danger and play. Therefore he wants womanas the most dangerous plaything. –excerpt Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pt. 1, On Little Old and Young Woman, by Friedrich Nietzsche Nietzsche, a prolific writer throughout his professional life, said many outrageous things, a challenge to life-as-we-know-it. Reading Nietzsche, I have learned to be…
January 28 at 9AM is showing 19 degrees F outside and snow is coming. Starbucks is filled with the “Saturday crowd,” the atmosphere infused with the babble of voices. Life goes on — until it doesn’t. I read this in the New York Times summary of the news which is received by email daily:…
We are not thinking frogs, nor objectifying and registering mechanisms with their innards removed: ceaselessly we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain, and maternally, endow them with all that we have of blood, heart, fire, joy, passion, torment, conscience, and fate. –Excerpt, The Gay Science, Preface §3, by Friedrich…
…there can be no doubtthat mankind is more changeable, uncertain, inconsistent than any other animal —he is the sick animal:how has this come about? Certainly he has also dared more,done more things, braved more and challenged fatemore than all the other animals put together;he, the great experimenter with himself,discontented and insatiable, wrestling with animals,nature…
LITTLE GIDDING By T. S. Eliot (No. 4 of ‘Four Quartets’) II Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense Without enchantment, offering no promise But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit As body and soul begin to fall asunder….
“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall…
Have you not heard of that madmanwho lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did…
Monday brings sunshine. “The world” continues. The myriad outworking of cause and effect: today was inscribed in yesterday, and while we do not know what tomorrow will bring, all of it is etched faintly or deeply into this present. It is “Coming of Age Day” (Seijin no Hi) in Japan for all females of…
In other words, a moment of revolt inherent in the will-to-understand beyond practical ends cannot be prolonged indefinitely: to be the whole of the universe man/woman must let go of his/her principles: accepting nothing that he/she is other than the tendency to go beyond what he/she is. This being that I am is the…
