What Demon Leads Me..
Starbucks on a Saturday morning, a background buzz of conversation, hubub from behind the serving counter, as baristas furiously compose drinks, microwaving breakfast treats, –and I reading my new book, Hiking With Nietzsche, by John Kaag. What am I thinking, as I close in on my 70th birthday, day to day working through the difficult logistics of closing down my company so that I can retire and I am drawn to plunge once again into Nietzsche…. Nietzsche’s work skirts the edge of madness. For my entire life I’ve been drawn to Nietzsche. I have file folders of notes written in the margins of The Antichrist, Beyond Good and Evil, and other works, notes like so many bread crumbs dropped by the mind to mark the trail that I traveled.
I have not yet read, Thus Spake Zarathustra, which is regarded his greatest work. Perhaps I was not ready. I’ll order a copy from Amazon.
Here are two quotations on marriage from Nietzsche’s writings that are offered in John Kaag’s fine book:
Nietzsche suggests that marriage could be just “one long stupidity,” in which two desperate people mask their neediness with all the trappings of a conventional life. “Alas, this filth of the soul in pair!” Nietzsche cries, “Alas, this wretched contentment in pair.”
And by contrast:
“[T]he will of two to create the one that is more than those who created it. Reverence for each other, as for those willing with such a will, is what I [Nietzsche] name marriage.”
