Stone Life

This very serious looking gentleman is the reclusive Mr. Stone on a Friday, just hours before being released for the extended Thanksgiving holiday. That’s right, this is him happy. His exuberance is due to the bright pink heat-sustainer known as new thermos that he is holding in his hand. He is a fan of new thermos, though it is a bit gay, because yesterday morning one of his students gave him said heat-control device. Fear not, he washed it prior to its inaugural use (that was his first thought too).

Okay, enough of the obnoxious third person, let me now proceed with the equally (or more-so) obnoxious first-person. I have been noticeably absent (at least I noticed) from blogging these last few weeks for several reasons. First, I have been a little short on free time, though this hardly an excuse in my opinion, but mostly I have not had anything that I felt compelled to publish to blogger. I have started several, but most have been either mindless, without mercy and compassion, or half-hearted attempts at humor. I chose to wait until I could not wait any longer, and now is that time.

My Nietzsche class has wound down slowly, and last night was the last new book that we will read for the class. We read and discussed one of his concluding works, Twilight of the Idols, which reads something like a concluding manifesto.

He writes in his last paragraph:
“...but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming - that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction.

Nietzsche’s great problem with Christianity lies in this pity and terror, or, as he elucidates many times throughout his books, in their will to death. The entire idea of dying to oneself, submitting in weakness to an unseen, unheard power on the basis of faith is repellant. He calls for mankind to flex its proverbial muscles, as evidenced in its instinctual nature that Christianity fights against, and rise up in strength. Pity, fear, death, empathy...etc, lead one only to misery and death - Christianity, in his estimation, looks something like a sickness, and he holds man to be capable of so much more.

Though I am certainly a Nietzsche-apologist, and by that I mean that I would pound the table in defiance of anyone who said his criticisms have no place in the Christian experience, but, for once I am going to resist the tendency to kick my own while down and focus rather on the irony in Nietzsche’s own statements. He sharply criticizes the Christian’s will to death, but what about the same will present in the academician.

It is at this time each semester that I am painfully aware of my mortality. As is often the case, I am falling a bit under the weather, and I blame it entirely upon myself. I eat worse - where I began the semester on a strict and sparse diet, I care less and less now as the weeks progress. I sleep less and work more - I do not suppose this needs further explanation. My alcohol and tobacco intake have increased substantially - call me what you will, but I cannot deny it. I am less happy, less attentive to my wife and job, and generally becoming farther removed from normal in mind and body as the semester progresses. Academics, like the Christ, seem to drive a wedge between loved ones, far more a divider than a uniter.

Sure, one might become an overman, but one might also contract syphilis and slip into madness (see: Nietzsche), become an alcoholic degenerate (see: Fitzgerald...or most any other good writer), fall into irrecoverable drug addiction (see: Burroughs, Kerouac, or other Beat writers), or, my favorite, take one’s own life with shotgun on a sunny Sunday morning (see: Hemingway).

It seems the deeper one crawls inside one’s head, the darker the place seems to be. Is not this the stronger will to death?