These are severe, almost serrated words. The writer observes how profoundly we are marked, shaped by attitudes, habitual behaviors of our immediate, even of ancestors not proximate to our memory. I hardly knew my grandfather. Nevertheless what he loved lives and and is expressed in me. This endowment, a tendency for benefit or for misfortune is inescapable. How deep? Soul deep.

And what about education you might ask… Shouldn’t good schools, even a graduate degree from a prestigious institution reorient an individual, remaking one’s soul? Shouldn’t I expect my past to be behind me, a landscape receding in a review mirror?

Not exactly. Education is nothing to be disdained, and is useful for many purposes.  Not the least of which is to more skillfully deceive oneself, and others too about the kinds things I truly love, fear, and desire…

What a man’s forefathers liked
doing the most, and the most often,
cannot be wiped from his soul:

whether
they were diligent savers
and accessories of some writing desk or cash box,
modest and middle-class in their wants
and modest in their virtues as well;

or whether
they lived their lives
giving orders from morning to night,
fond of rough pleasures and perhaps
of even rougher duties and responsibilities;

or whether
they finally sacrificed
old privileges of birth and belongings
in order to live entirely for their faith – their “god,”
being people of a tender and unyielding conscience,
embarrassed by any compromise.

It is utterly impossible
that a person might fail to have
the qualities and propensities of his [her] elders and ancestors
in his [her] body:
however much appearances might speak against it.
This is the problem of race.

And something like this
will be passed on to the child
just as certainly as contaminated blood.

With the help of
the best education and culture,
people will only just reach the point
of being able to lie about a bequest like this.

And what else are education and culture for these days!

Beyond Good And Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, Trans. by Judith Norman, aphorism 264

The weekend promises beauty, delight to be alive. This tune by Meatloaf, Objects In The Rearview Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are,  seems just right to conclude our meditation.  Rest in peace my friend, September 27, 1947 –  January 20, 2022.