A Commonplace Book

And I smiled.

Remember discovering Nietzsche? Remember endlessly quoting Nietzsche? Remember being unabashedly smart and twenty-something and certain that all of the grown-ups were too concerned about the wrong things. Remember quoting Nietzsche to [or about] your parents?

These memories are such fond ones for me. I loved my twenty-something self. My friends and I gobbled up philosphy and literature, the more snotty and inaccessible, the better. We drank cheap red wine or cheaper draft beer from the taps whose hoses we were certain were coated with mold. We swore we could taste it. Our favorite club had fuzzy wallpaper and too-little ventilation. Even the non-smokers were red-eyed by the end of the night, which was at about 3 a.m. most weekends. Nietzsche was an important part of this scene; he even worked his way into our poetry, often written on bar napkins.

There are so many great Nietzsche quotes like “Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule,” and “Fear is the mother of morality,” and “People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.”

So I smiled when I read the Nietzsche quote in Mike’s paper. “Right on time,” I thought, and I penned “love it” in the margin. And I do love it…”The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception. ” It’s a great quote, and I’m glad Mike discovered it.
 
I’m sure he was, as I was, led to Nietzsche by a super-cool friend, a boy who wears too much black, whose hair is too long or who has too many piercings.

That boy was in my classroom a few years ago, quoting both Nietzsche and Jung and peppering his paper with references to the Superman and the Shadow Self that only I understood. He liked it that way. He liked to feel that he was, as Jane Austen would say, “a cut above the company” in the freshman comp classroom. Mike has this air about him too, as I sure did I back in my Nietzsche-quoting days.

But, I later discovered, Nietzsche was also a bit of a dick. He was terribly brutal in his thoughts about women. He said things like, “Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent,” and “Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman,” and “For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.”

He was also somewhat xenophobic: “‘Evil men have no songs.’ How is it that the Russians have songs?” and “An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris .”

And clearly anti-religion: “After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.” and “God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight,” and “In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.”

As I continued to read Mike’s paper, which contained the appropriate amount of 20-year-old philosophizing about what it means to lie and what really constitutes a lie, and what Neitzsche meant, I was brought back to my own 20-year-old brain. And I know that an equally patient freshman comp teacher penned some encouraging comment over my own presumed-brilliant integration of Nietzche into my essay. I strove to impress with my deep thoughts and high brow allusions, and she was probably already well versed enough in Neitzsche to know of his dickishness.

I wonder if she smiled.