Hans Olde, from “Der kranke Nietzsche” (“The unwell Nietzsche”), June–August 1899. Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv Weimar.
After two vodka tonics and a cosmo, my ninety-year-old grandmother lifts her glass and says, “However you already know that Nietzsche is my boyfriend?”
“He’s?”
“He’s my boyfriend.”
It’s all proper—we’ve shared boyfriends earlier than. The actor Javier Bardem. Errol Louis, anchor at NY1. Her new neighbor. Her many docs. She tells me that Nietzsche is her boyfriend as a result of Nietzsche additionally hates the German composer Richard Wagner. I inform her Nietzsche hates lots of people. She nods. “That’s good in a person.”
Earlier in our dinner I’d talked about I used to be lastly studying Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist—two white-hot texts that serve, partly, because the ecstatic summation of a lot of Nietzsche’s earlier work. Each works glow with particular invective. The same old targets are abused (Socrates, Kant, et cetera). So are George Sand, George Eliot, and, in fact, typically completely satisfied individuals: “Nothing might make us much less envious than … the plump happiness of a clear conscience.” It’s in Twilight that Nietzsche declares, “The person who has renounced battle has renounced a grand life.”
Would he be boyfriend? He’d be a fierce one, usually railing on the “radical and mortal hostility to sensuality.” He’d remind you: “When a person is in love he endures greater than at another time; he submits to something.” Would he wink? In all probability not.
Freud claimed, apparently, that Nietzsche “had a extra penetrating data of himself than any man who ever lived or was more likely to reside.” In these closing writings it’s clearer than ever how Nietzsche’s “hate” evolves out of a protracted annoyance at figuring out individuals—and historical past and philosophical methods—higher than they know themselves. You sense the loneliness of this consciousness. Nietzsche wants his supernatural, self-generating warmth, lest his flame down there wither within the wild pits of intuition. (“Nothing ever succeeds which exuberant spirits haven’t helped to supply.”) If he was your lover, he’d remind you, his torch excessive, that “one should be superior to mankind in pressure, in loftiness of soul—in contempt.” Those that can not obtain this are “merely mankind.”
I have a look at my grandmother, whose consciousness—as Nietzsche would possibly suggest—appears to recede from the surface world because it advances internally. She closes her eyes. I believe she’s slipped below when she factors at me. “First it’s our Spanish fellow. Then that different fellow. Then Nietzsche.”
—Sophie Madeline Dess, writer of “Zalmanovs”
A pal whose style I belief not too long ago really useful Denton Welch’s 1945 novel In Youth Is Pleasure, a fantastic little ebook and one among my favourite discoveries of 2022. Welch’s writing is impressionistic, playful, homoerotic, dreamy, usually hilarious, and at instances ecstatic. What plot there’s facilities on the fifteen-year-old Orvil Pym, who’s spending the summer time vacation together with his father and brothers at a resort in Surrey a number of years earlier than the outbreak of World Struggle II. Orvil’s mom has died; his emotions for his siblings and for his father (who has bestowed upon him the nickname “Microbe”) vary from obscure fondness to infantile terror and loathing. Usually Orvil is left alone. He eats pêche Melba (“‘It’s like a celluloid cupid doll’s behind,’ stated Orvil to himself. ‘This cupid doll has burst open and is pouring out beautiful snow and nice large clots of blood’”); he spies jealously on a schoolmaster studying Jane Eyre to 2 boys, one among whom seems to be taking a selected form of gratification from the expertise; he desecrates a church with libidinal glee, throwing himself on a brass statue and kissing its face “juicily.” On the finish of the day, Orvil at all times appears to be consuming oozing muffins within the resort eating room, wearing mud-stained garments.
It is a lonely ebook, and a outstanding one for the best way wherein its sensuality emerges: from inside this loneliness. Orvil takes an aesthete’s pleasure within the bodily world but additionally within the eruptions of his personal consciousness; a lot of the novel’s eroticism arises from his encounters with a form of different inside the self. Want, enchantment, the delights of reverie and of metaphor—these spring from inside. Floating alone alongside a river, Orvil thinks, “I’m like a kind of Baked Alaskas … a kind of beautiful puddings of ice-cream and sizzling sponge.” Right here, loneliness may be devastating, mischievous, grotesque, monstrous, thrilling—however it’s by no means grim.
—Avigayl Sharp, writer of “Uncontrollable, Irrelevant”
