Reading Nietzsche is like having a guide show you round your home town—perhaps your own street. He takes you to a familiar blank wall, and shows you cracks in the smooth surface. “So what?” you think and then he takes your hand and you go through each crack to an unfamiliar vista on the other side. In this way, you realize that your thoughts had hitherto never strayed from the highways; but now you see that there are other places, hidden to most, where thought can go. I’m not talking about believing “six impossible things before breakfast” like Lewis Carroll’s White Queen; but some very believable things, that will certainly blow your mind. Mixed up with these (in Nietzsche’s writings) are old-fashioned ways of talking about women and Jews, for it was the thing then to generalize in merry abandon. So you have to read him in a particular way, realizing that he is not thinking for you, like some demagogue, but making you think. He remains “Human, All Too Human”—title of another book of his, that I aim to read next.
I walked round to the ironmonger’s, on an errand. The fresh air triggered a mystical moment. Oh Muse, help me distil it in words! The moment was infinitely wide, till it surrendered to time, and faded. The best I could do at the time was try and capture it in wordless memory. The feeling started in my cheeks: a sense of power and pride, like a belief in my own elegance. When I stole a glance at my reflection in a shop window, I saw nothing to support such a notion. No passer-by acknowledged it: indeed I was invisible to them. Groups came the other way, spread across the narrow sidewalk as if I didn’t exist. If I held my ground, someone ‘s sleeve would brush mine, so slight was their accommodation to my presence. Thus age gets scant respect from youth, despite the spring in one’s step, or failing that the sense of Spring in one’s heart, and an an inner conviction that one’s a graceful dandy.
Perhaps this feeling, and especially my desire to express it, owes something to a reading of Nietzsche. I had no intention to quote him at all, conceiving his work as built on the grand scale, like a cathedral. A single detail, a small carving on its surface, could hardly stand for the whole. On the wild surmise that one reader might get something from it, here’s a fragment of Beyond Good and Evil:
Need I say expressly after all this that they will be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the future—as certainly also they will not be merely free spirits, but something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different, which does not wish to be misunderstood and mistaken?
Questions are left hanging in the air. How shall we recognize such a free spirit? How shall we know that such a future has arrived? I visualize Nietzsche confronting his own limits, prophesying a vision of what lies beyond his own reach. For a single lifetime may be not enough. I think of him hoping a reader will seize the flaming torch he’s lit, and run on, expanding his thought, ensuring it will never die.
Beyond Good and Evil is not an easy read, not for everyone. It’s a barbed polemic, firing in multiple directions, often in a single sentence. Among its principal targets are other philosophers.
It makes me think of another book, shorter, more accessible, a tale with vivid characters: Mister God, This is Anna, by Fynn, written in 1974, nearly forty years after the events it describes.
At five years old Anna knew absolutely the purpose of being, knew the meaning of love and was a personal friend and helper of Mister God. At six Anna was a theologian, mathematician, philosopher, poet and gardener . . . She never made eight years, she died by accident.
Anna is a homeless five-year-old girl found on the streets by young Fynn and taken home to his mother who promptly adopts him. Fynn’s is an earthy Cockney world of the nineteen-thirties, where carthorses are used to deliver loads, and policemen have time to reprimand children chalking on paving-stones. When they go out on adventures, Fynn and Anna converse sagely with prostitutes, carters and the “night-time people”—homeless dropouts passing a bottle of Red Biddy round a fire under the stars. It’s a rough-and-ready world. But there’s something about Anna: an old head on young shoulders. One of her specialisations, as hinted in the book’s title, is theology. To solve the most profound problems, she has her special methodology.
… Finally the whole thing came to a head.
She turned to me. ‘Can I come to bed with you tonight?’ she asked.
I nodded.
‘Now,’ she replied.
She hopped off my lap, took my hand, and pulled me to the door. I went.
I haven’t told you of Anna’s way of solving problems, have I? If Anna was confronted with a situation that didn’t come out easily, there was only one thing to do — take your clothes off. So there we were in bed, the street lamp lighting up the room, her head cupped in her hands, and both elbows firmly planted on my chest. I waited. She chose to remain like that for about ten minutes, getting her argument in its proper order, and then she launched forth.
‘Mister God made everything, didn’t he?’
There was no point in saying I didn’t really know. I said ‘Yes’.
‘Even the dirt and the stars and the animals and the people and the trees and everything, and the pollywogs?’ The pollywogs were those little creatures that we had seen under the microscope.
I said, ‘Yes, he made everything.’
She nodded her agreement. ‘Does Mister God love us truly?’
‘Sure thing,’ I said. ‘Mister God loves everything.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well then, why does he let things get hurt and dead?’ Her voice sounded as if she felt she had betrayed a sacred trust, but the question had been thought and it had to be spoken.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘There’s a great many things about God that we don’t know about.’
‘Well then,’ she continued, ‘if we don’t know many things about God, how do we know he loves us?’
…
‘Fynn, Mister God doesn’t love us.’ She hesitated. ‘He doesn’t really, you know, only people can love. I love Bossy, but Bossy don’t love me. I love the pollywogs, but they don’t love me. I love you, Fynn, and you love me, don’t you?’
I tightened my arm about her.
‘You love me because you are people. I love Mister God truly, but he don’t love me.’
It sounded to me like a death-knell. ‘Damn and blast,’ I thought. ‘Why does this have to happen to people? Now she’s lost everything.’ But I was wrong. She had got both feet planted firmly on the next stepping-stone.
…
Perhaps Anna is one of those free spirits. Of course she is not a real person. Fynn’s book is a novel based on real events, augmented by his own searchings in later life. Surely wisdom is wherever we find it.
Seven years later, editing this piece, I’m reminded of another novel, in several ways similar to Mister God. It’s called Shosha, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. This author’s name came to me in a dream. I was restlessly wandering, getting lost. I kept repeating the name till I woke up, as if it were a precious key I must not forget. When I woke up I recognized the name. I’m sure I’ve come across it several times from those short quotes you encounter surfing the net. I bought the cheapest thing I could find written by him, to see if it was an angel-sent gift.
Shosha was about my age, but while I was considered a prodigy, knew several pages of the Gemara and chapters of the Mishnah by heart, could write in Yiddish as well as in Hebrew, and had already begun to ponder God, providence, time, space and infinity, Shosha was considered a little fool in our building. At nine, she spoke like a child of six.
The narrator can have any woman he wants, he’s tempted by offers from all sides and often yields. But when he finds his childhood sweetheart again, this fragile creature, he forsakes all, including safety, for her sake. A love story, stuffed with philosophical ideas.
Free spirits can be found anywhere, in any guise. It takes one to know one.
a wayfarer’s notes 
The illustrations are by William Papas, scanned from my copy of Mister God, This is Anna. I can’t tell you what edition it is because the title page has been torn out.
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I thought Nietzche's antisemitism was a misnomer, propagated by the Nazis later on or something. Maybe I've been misinformed. I never really encountered it in his writing, though, but I certainly haven't read everything of his…so I don't know. At any rate, Nietzche is definitely unique in his approach and his ideas.
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You are right, Bryan. I just responded to you in detail, but due to a quirk in my Firefox installation lost it all.
The prejudice I was referring to was his use of generalization in referring to women, Jews, Orientals and Europeans, but that was the style of those days, and his style too, to be intemperate in his polemic – especially in The Antichrist, where he puts in the boot against the Christians, not the Jews, whom he admires, often for what we might consider ‘the wrong reasons’ – for example the smiting Old Testament Lord of the Children of Israel.
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However he also says things which the Nazis may well have seized on out of context as support for their pogroms. Here’s one I found in The Antichrist, translated by H L Mencken:
“The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.”
But the words immediately following tell us what he is referring to:
“What is more harmful than any vice?——Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak——Christianity….” (ibid., dots as in the source)
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A lot of people's comments are getting lost lately. I wonder is it's a bug in the Blogger site itself. I've had it happen to me a few times. On longer comments now I usually highlight the text and click “copy”, just in case. It's usually when I forget that the glitch happens, though. Such is my luck.
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“The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.”
Yes, definitely taken out of context. If one is more familiar with Nietzche's overall tone and style, I think that one would realize that he's being…maybe “clever” might be the word for it. He's turning the concept of charity on its head. I doubt that he would ever dream that the passage would be taken as advocacy of genocide. Besides, I would think that anyone assuming a reference to the Jews in those isolated words, has a bit of a problem themselves. They see the words “weak” and “botched” and go, “Oh, that must be the Jews.” That itself is disturbing.
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Thank you.
i got this book Mister God, This is Anna for free. it came to us for review. alas! i didnt take it. probably it has been recycled by now with other papers and books that we dispose off.
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Vincent, You’ve given me enough to want to learn more about Nietzche and you’ve made me curious about Mister God, This is Anna.
You bring to mind a book that I have not finished: Herman Hesse’s Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game). I began it several times over the year to absorb the introduction and acquaint myself with the characters. The idea of the book sounds like quite a brilliant feat of imagination and synthesis of knowledge and great thinkers. According to the introduction one of the characters is based on how Hesse interpreted Nietache’s character. It also goes on to say that “his spiritual opponent in the novel, Father Jacobus, borrows some of his words and most of his ideas from Nietzche’s antagonist, the historian Jakob Burckhardt. The reader who fails to catch these sometimes obscure references is not only missing much of the fun of the book, he is also unaware of its implications in the realm of cultural history and criticism.” I think this is why I have been apprehensive about finishing the book, even though there are other layers. I wanted to get the most out of this novel and felt that I needed to at least familiarize myself a little bit with the characters and place that Hesse has infused in his novel before proceeding. I suppose that’s were the internet comes in when I’m ready. I also think this is one of those books that I want to save for last, so to speak—like a last meal.
One other book that comes to mind, which I more or less skimmed, that you may appreciate if you have not already come across it is: Milan Kundera’s The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts about his perspective on the history of the novel.
Here is an older review of this work in case you’re interested:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/01/AR2007020101754.html
Always enjoy your thought provoking blogs!
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I once started to read The Glass Bead Game. I don’t think I was ready for it then. But if Hesse based one of his characters on Nietzsche, I shall add it to my list, and perhaps it will teach me something of the relationship between Jakob Burckhardt & Nietzsche. Steppenwolf, on the other hand, I’ve read several times. I enjoyed the article about Kundera. I love to get deeply immersed in something when it is deep enough. You don’t get any deeper than Nietzsche. You have to enter his level and then he introduces you to lots of other levels too, sometimes all in one paragraph. But he doesn’t tell you answers, he hints at their existence.
There’s a wonderful introduction to Nietzsche here. I've converted it to Kindle format, so if you send me your kindle email, Rebb (or any other reader with Kindle who’s interested) I could send it to you.
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Ghetu, it’s a pity that the book has been recycled (if it has). I would like to have heard what you thought of it. What I especially like, above the discussions about ‘Mister God’ and Anna’s hunger for learning, is its evocation of the East End of London in the nineteen-thirties – a place of great kindness, tolerance and good humour.
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Yes, Bryan, I wish I had not trivialised Nietzsche by mentioning the Jews at all, now having got deeper into his thought and seeing that he spares no one from his critical barbs. This is his method, to take us away from all the stereotyped thinking we take for granted as the only way. And it works just as well today as when he wrote in the late nineteenth century, though his immediate targets were rather different than they would be today.
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Exactly. Quotes like the one above definitely have to be considered in light of his quirky and strange sense of humor. A lot of tongue in cheek involved.
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Vincent, Thank you for posting the introduction to Nietzsche.
I have been enjoying using a service called “SENDtoREADER,” so I clicked on the link and had the article sent to my Kindle. You may have heard of this program (and it appears there are many others), but if not, here is an article that talks about it. Something I didn’t know about is in using this program, we can have our email like this for this service: @free.kindle.com address in order to connect via our Wi-Fi and not get charged.
http://ilmk.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/new-free-service-sendtoreader-sends-webpages-to-your-kindle/
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Thanks for the information, Rebb. You and I have different Kindles. Yours, as I understand it, has 3g Wi-Fi, which means that you can connect to internet from anywhere, but have to be careful about charges. Mine can only connect by logging on to a Wi-Fi network, such as the one I have at home, or in a library or pub. Such a connection is free. In addition, I have software & techniques to convert any document to Kindle format, and transfer it to my Kindle using a USB cable from my computer.
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At the age of 10 I won a free book for some reading program at school. I looked through all the display books offered, but didn't care for any. “You can pick from this box, too”, I was told, and started rummaging. At the very bottom was Mister God, This is Anna. I have read thousands of books now in my life. I have a degree in literature. Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, The Sound and the Fury, Middlemarch, Les Miserables…these are the greatest novels I've ever read. Still, if you asked me the one book that thrilled me the most as I read it, I go back to Anna. I thank her, the little prophetess, for saving a great portion of my soul.
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I'm glad we have this in common, Sgian; and looking through your blog, I find other things too!
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