Friedrich Nietzsche (and me) on the Art of Living
To be free, in my opinion, is to sizzle with life, and to dwell in the intervals between the spectacular occurrence of an event with the utmost longing. Here I will turn to Nietzsche because doing so legitimates my own thoughts, who would take someone like me seriously without paying an homage to another canonical figure, but also because he was a thinker who stood on the shoulders of giants and because of his solitude could see further than an ordinary human going through a humdrum existence. His profound insights are richer than mine simply because he never had to do the dishes, or change diapers, or take out the trash on a Sunday evening because he spent his time scrutinizing Goethe:
“Life consists of rare individual moments of the highest significance and countless intervals in which at best the phantoms of those moments hover about us. Love, spring, a beautiful melody, the mountains, the moon, the sea - they all speak truly to our heart only once: if they ever do in fact truly find speech. For many people never experience these moments at all but are themselves intervals and pauses in the symphony of real life.”[1]
Experiencing the death of a loved one can open up possibilities of living, as Heidegger noted, but it can also create a deep sense of longing in the intervals between the intermittent grieving period. The phantom of the intense experience of grief haunts the living. The phantom haunting us in the interval is the knowledge that as life nears closer to death, living becomes evermore precious[2]. Death is one movement in the symphony of life, and perhaps it is the crescendo, or perhaps it is a whimper, but the fact remains that it is always a coda. We, as spirit-composers may reincarnate and write subsequent symphonies with different instruments for entirely different audiences in some era completely removed from now, or we may cease to exist and fade into the abyss, never to be touched by another note of music again. What happens after death is not as important as how an individual responds to the news that life is a finite resource full of raw materials like reasoning, love, ambition, the brute force of will to power, only to be enjoyed for a few measly decades which can be burned through in the heat of a cataclysmic desire, or can be used up like any other resource drifting through the winds of karma on “the back of a tiger.”[3]
“Life consists of rare individual moments of the highest significance and countless intervals in which at best the phantoms of those moments hover about us. Love, spring, a beautiful melody, the mountains, the moon, the sea - they all speak truly to our heart only once: if they ever do in fact truly find speech. For many people never experience these moments at all but are themselves intervals and pauses in the symphony of real life.”[1]
Experiencing the death of a loved one can open up possibilities of living, as Heidegger noted, but it can also create a deep sense of longing in the intervals between the intermittent grieving period. The phantom of the intense experience of grief haunts the living. The phantom haunting us in the interval is the knowledge that as life nears closer to death, living becomes evermore precious[2]. Death is one movement in the symphony of life, and perhaps it is the crescendo, or perhaps it is a whimper, but the fact remains that it is always a coda. We, as spirit-composers may reincarnate and write subsequent symphonies with different instruments for entirely different audiences in some era completely removed from now, or we may cease to exist and fade into the abyss, never to be touched by another note of music again. What happens after death is not as important as how an individual responds to the news that life is a finite resource full of raw materials like reasoning, love, ambition, the brute force of will to power, only to be enjoyed for a few measly decades which can be burned through in the heat of a cataclysmic desire, or can be used up like any other resource drifting through the winds of karma on “the back of a tiger.”[3]