A Side We Do Not See
Saturday morning, following a few days of warm weather trees in Geneva are flowering. After the austere gray and brown season of winter cold the effect is enchanting. Life is. I do not understand life. The binary operations of my mind suited to simple problem solving makes visible only one side of life’s equation. Are we not drawn inexorably to the blossom’s curvature (a Fibonacci effect), the filigree of spring blossoms? What am I missing? The question turns in my mind.
What is life?
Life -that is: continually shedding something that wants to die.
Life -that is: being cruel and inexorable against everything about us
that is growing old and weak and not only about us.
Life -that is, then: being without reverence
for those who are dying, who are wretched, who are ancient?
Constantly being a murderer?
And yet old Moses said: “Thou shalt not kill.”
–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 1, Section 26 by Friedrich Nietzsche
