I love reading letters written by people I admire like this example written by Friedrich Nietzsche to his good friend Peter Gast; it humanizes these people from who you normally only read the best they can produce and not about their daily lives. This comes out of a book written in 1921 by Oscar Levy, who translated a lot of Nietzsche’s work when it first got known outside Germany. You can read the book on archive.org, this letters starts on on page 139.
NIETZSCHE TO PETER GAST.
Sils-MaIaria, end of August, 1881.
But this is splendid news, my dear friend! Above all that you should have finished! At the thought of· this first great achievement of your life, I feel indescribably happy and solemn ; I shall not fail to remember August 24, 1881 ! How things are progressing ! But as soon as I think of your work I am overcome by a
The world is slowly turning, but I can still see the remainder of this beautiful sunset when I look over my shoulder.
Essays, Of custom, and that we should not easily change a law received.
“My perfumed doublet gratifies my own smelling at first; but after I have worn it three days together, ’tis only pleasing to the bystanders. This is yet more strange, that custom, notwithstanding long intermissions and intervals, should yet have the power to unite and establish the effect of its impressions upon our senses, as is manifest in such as live near unto steeples and the frequent noise of the bells. I myself lie at home in a tower, where every morning and evening a very great bell rings out the Ave Maria: the noise shakes my very tower, and at first seemed insupportable to me; but I am so used to it, that I hear it without any manner of offense, and often without awaking at it.”
Michel de Montaigne
Most people’s inner lives are hidden behind a mist, like the trees in this picture. We all have lost people we love in our lives, and for me, it has always been emotional, not only for the fact that you can never speak with them again but more so for all the stories that are gone, buried with them.
Because life to me is a relatively predictable event, I like to embellish my own history and spin a propper story for me to remember and give life some ground and meaning. We probably all do that one way or another. When my grandmother died, she took with her a whole life of experiences, and we were left with only hints to them; her life story was gone. It made me sad that life made her keep all these stories to herself and sad that I never properly tried to talk to her about it. Because, I ask you: what is life but just a few great moments and emotions you experience. My grandmother’s most significant moments and wisdom are forever gone, and I wished she had shared them so they could live on in me and others.
I see value in a life that makes sense and does not just pass by, as Socrates said years ago: “an unexamined life is not worth living.” An “examined” life can be told in a few sentences and given as a gift to your loved ones when your time has come.
The camera used as an art tool can make the dark darker and the light lighter. Is it more interesting than the real world? Or true?
“As I work at my drawings, day after day, what seemed unattainable before is now gradually becoming possible. Slowly, I’m learning to observe and measure. I don’t stand quite so helpless before nature any longer.”
Vincent van Gogh
I had this picture of ice on a lake and the bed underneath, and both are not in focus, but it leaves enough to my imagination. I wanted to write something clever about it, but I lost my appetite. I just read a news article about some right-wing nutcases in America with a picture of four guys fully dressed in army fatigues and weapons everywhere. I look at their faces, and I just don’t understand these people; they obviously take themselves really serious. Personally, I believe that you always have to be critical of the answers you give yourself and the ones others give you. Doubt is not easy, but a militiaman or anti-vaxxer will have never take their stance if they question themselves.
There are billions of opinions, and my only conclusion out of that is that they cannot all be true. Claiming that yours is true is not enough; even a majority can be wrong. God and his claims are also not enough; there are thousands of God’s and even more religions.
For the same reason that we all agree that one plus one is two, we should also search for other truths that fit in that same category. Think about all your opinions; could they be universal, or are they just particular to your situation?
There is a crack in my window, and I know it distorts my view when looking outside, and some warmth is escaping through the tiny hole. On the other hand, I always forget to ventilate enough when warming the house with a fire, and when I want to look outside, I have many other windows to look through undisturbed. The crack should off course, not be there; it’s not meant to be like that. But I also like the crack and the form it took after the impact from the little rock I threw to get your attention; it’s a memory, one I will never forget, with or without the crack. I like the crack.
Book Four: St. Januarius
331- Better deaf than deafened – Formerly one wanted to be talked about; that is no longer enough, since the market has grown too large – only a shout will do. As a result, even good voices shout themselves down, and the best goods are offered by hoarse voices; without the vendors’ cry and hoarseness there is no longer any genius. That is, to be sure, a bad epoch for a thinker; he must learn how to find his own quietude even between two noises, and pretend he is deaf until he really is. As long as he has not learned this, he runs the risk of going to pieces from impatience and headaches.
On the uses and disadvantages of history for life
Excerpt of part 3
History thus belongs in the second place to him who preserves and reveres – to him who looks back to whence he has come, to where he came into being, with love and loyalty; with this piety he as it were gives thanks for his existence. By tending with care that which has existed from of old, he wants to preserve for those who shall come into existence after him the conditions under which he himself came into existence – and thus he serves life…
…Sometimes this clinging to one’s own environment and companions, one’s own toilsome customs, one’s own bare mountainside, looks like obstinacy and ignorance -yet it is a very salutary ignorance and one most calculated to further the interests of the community: a fact of which anyone must be aware who knows the dreadful consequences of the desire for expeditions and adventures, especially when it seizes whole hordes of nations, and who has seen from close up the condition a nation gets into when it has ceased to be faithful to its own origins and is given over to a restless, cosmopolitan hunting after new and ever newer things. The feeling antithetical to this, the contentment of the tree in its roots, the happiness of knowing that one is not wholly accidental and arbitrary but grown out of a past as its heir, flower and fruit, and that one’s existence is thus excused and, indeed, justified – it is this which is today usually designated as the real sense of history…
…The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and inplant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away. It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate…
Nochrisis 