A friend reached out to me, inquiring of my thoughts on treatment options he had been presented for a recurrence of cancer.  I briefly awakened at 3AM thinking about what I would say.  Cancer is a serious illness, terminal if not treated.  The overture for a philosophical response could not have been more pragmatic and serious.

I was reminded after waking later of the lines that I wish to include in my post today, words penned by Nietzsche in September of 1888.  When one is faced with a momentous, irrevocable decision, would one not take comfort in Nietzsche’s point of view?  My answer at this point in my life would have to be yes, absolutely yes. 

Can one not find repose in the thought that there is no one right answer,  — that past lives lived, entailed in our our conditioning, will be irrepressibly expressed in the decision, a life and death decision that must be made?  There is no moral universe, no pre-inscribed morally correct answers to the dilemmas which life presents us.

We, you and I, are our ancestor’s future, and they are present within every deliberation and act, of our ‘yes’ and our ‘no’.  Each of us is an expressive-leading-edge of a matrix of competing cause and effect…  We are linked backward through the generations to the beginning of time.  Fortunate to be alive, we are held, embedded in the arms of Nature, and of history.

---

6
Let us finally consider how naive it is altogether to say: “Man ought to be such and such!” Reality shows us an enchanting wealth of types, the abundance of a lavish play and change of forms — and some wretched loafer of a moralist comments:

“No! Man ought to be different.”

He even knows what man should be like, this wretched bigot: he paints himself on the wall and comments, “Ecce homo!”*

But even when the moralist addresses himself only to the single human being and says to him, “You ought to be such and such!” he does not cease to make himself ridiculous. The single human being is a piece of fate, in his future and in his past, one law more, one necessity more for all that is yet to come and to be. To say to him, “Change yourself!” is to demand that everything be changed, even retroactively.

And indeed there have been consistent moralists who wanted man to be different, that is, virtuous — they wanted him remade in their own image, as a bigot: to that end, they negated the world! No small madness! No modest kind of presumption!

Morality, insofar as it condemns for its own sake, and not out of regard for the concerns, considerations, and contrivances of life, is a specific error with which one ought to have no pity — an idiosyncrasy of degenerates which has caused an unspeakable amount of harm.

We others, we immoralists, have, on the contrary, made room in our hearts for every kind of understanding, comprehending, and approval. We do not readily deny; we make it a point of honor to be affirmers. More and more, our eyes have opened to that economy which needs and knows how to utilize everything that the holy witlessness of the priest, the diseased reason in the priest, rejects — that economy in the law of life which finds an advantage even in the disgusting species of the bigot, the priests, the virtuous man. What advantage?

But we ourselves, we immoralists, are the answer.

*Behold the man!

Excerpt, Twilight of the Idols by Friedrich Nietzsche, Morality and Anti-Nature page 16

---

Music, Music !  Bring on the music! 

Wheel In The Sky

By Journey

Winter is here again oh Lord
Haven’t been home in a year or more
I hope she holds on a little longer

Sent a letter on a long summer day
Made of silver, not of clay
Ooh, I’ve been runnin’ down this dusty road

Ooh, the wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’
I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’

I’ve been trying to make it home
Got to make it before too long
Ooh, I can’t take this very much longer, no

I’m stranded in the sleet and rain
Don’t think I’m ever gonna make it home again
The mornin’ sun is risin’, it’s kissing the day

Ooh, the wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’
I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’

My, my, my, my, my
For tomorrow

Oh, the wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’
Ooh, I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow
Wheel in the sky keeps me yearning
Ooh, I don’t know, I don’t know

Oh, the wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’
Ooh, I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’
Ooh, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know

Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’
Don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow
Ooh, the wheel in the sky keeps turnin’
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’