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May 04 More tasty bits, because it's a slow week"How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliest lonliness and say to you 'This life as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you - all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust.'
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more godly.' If this thought were to gain posession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and everything, 'Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?' would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?"
-Friedrich Nietzsche
The Gay Science
1882 May 01 I would like to share a passage with youAs you may or may not know, I'm something of a fan of Nietzsche. I thought my readers might appreciate this passage. I know I did.
"Behind the glorifications of 'work' and the tireless talk of the 'blessings of work' I find the same thought as behind the praise of impersonal activity for the public benefit: the fear of everything individual. At the bottom, one now feels when confronted with work - and what is invariably meant is relentless industry from early till late - that such work is the best police, that it keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love, and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one's eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions. In that way a society in which the members continually work hard will have more security; and security is now adored as the supreme godess. And now - horrors! - it is precisely the 'worker' who has become dangerous. 'Dangerous' individuals are swarming all around. And behind them, danger of dangers: the individual."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
"The Dawn", 1881
Is it possible that we have come full circle? Or is it that 125 years have past and nothing has changed at all. We still worship subjugation to our corporate overlords. Security has again become the "supreme godess". And everywhere I look, I see people shuffling their way into their 4x4 cells in some 75 storey meat grinder, where they will toil away for 40 years, only to be laid off 3 months before pension eligability.
How can man soar with the eagles, when he's shackled to a desk? |
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