Danger Ahead

Kaufmann's Portable Nietzsche is remarkably generous in terms of just how much of the philosopher it packs into its pages. The whole of Thus Spake Zarathustra being rightfully the centrepiece. I'm now having a good time being battered about the brain with the First Part. Bracing stuff and wonderfully poetic, even in translation. (Must say, I suspect Kaufmann's is brilliant given the fact that others I've encountered over the years didn't sound remotely like actual English.)

My big problem with reading Nietzsche isn't his fault, I suspect. I guess History is to blame. It's just that when I read stuff like Aphorism 283 from The Gay Science - I welcome all signs that a more manly, a warlike, age is about to begin, an age which, above all, will give honor to valor once again - I find myself becoming quite unreasonably angry with FN and sort of wish he'd never written this nonsense. Of course, nobody could know what dangerous nonsense this would prove to be circa 1882, and I've taken the words out of context. But that's the point: it's so fatally easy to strip away the context from a thinker who's discovered that the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously.

I suspect that most of those souls who find themselves living dangerously in a quite involuntary manner - sadly, so many of them - would readily settle for a peaceful, comfortable existence.