A Ray of Hope In a World Where People Are Strangers to Themselves

Linda and I, on the subway in NYC

Last weekend Linda, I, Dan, and Allie took the subway from Queens to Manhattan. As we arrived at Times Square Station, we departed the train and walked towards the turnstile. I saw a young man reading a book. I looked. He was reading Nietzsche's On the Geneology of Morals. My heart leapt for joy. Why?

1. Here was a young man who was reading. That is encouraging, any way you look at it.
2. Here was a young man who was reading a book. This is, for the most part, better than reading a magazine. To read a book rather than a magazine implies an ability to focus, to endure. It suggests a non-linking, non-tweeting brain. That is rare. This kid has a chance to actually learn something.
3. Here was a young man who was reading a challenging book. "Best-sellers" are not challenging. If they are, they remain mostly unread, even though they sell well. Like, e.g., the best-selling but mostly unread The Closing of the American Mind. (Bought that, read that.)
4. Here was a young man reading a philosophically challenging book. He was reading a "Big Picture, Big Questions" book. He has an expanding mind. He's taking in deep ideas. He is a ponderer. One can't read Nietzsche and multitask.
5. Here was a young man reading a philosophically challenging book who has obviously not succumbed to the death trap of neural-shallowness. (See here, here, here, here, and here.)

But Niezsche is an atheist, right? Correct (probably).

Better that someone think deeply about important issues, even contrary issues, than someone who never thinks about what they believe. (WARNING: The dangers of thoughtless religion. The Real Jesus, among other things, caused people to examine their own hearts. WARNING: The danger of "lukewarm religion.")

I now open my Kindle-copy of A Geneology of Morals and re-read the first sentences from Nietzsche's Preface. He writes:

"We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this has its own good reason. We have never searched for ourselves - how should it then come to pass, that we should ever find ourselves? Rightly has it been said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Our treasure is there, where stand the hives of our knowledge. It is to those hives that we are always striving; as born creatures of flight, and as the honey-gatherers of the spirit, we care really in our hearts only for one thing - to bring something "home to the hive!"

As far as the rest of life with its so-called "experiences" is concerned, which of us has even sufficient serious interest? or sufficient time? In our dealings with such points of life, we are, I fear, never properly to the point; to be precise, our heart is not there, and certainly not our ear. Rather like one who, delighting in a divine distraction, or sunken in the seas of his own soul, in whose ear the clock has just thundered with all its force its twelve strokes of noon, suddenly wakes up, and asks himself, "What has in point of fact just struck?" so do we at times rub afterwards, as it were, our puzzled ears, and ask in complete astonishment and complete embarrassment, "Through what have we in point of fact just lived?" further, "Who are we in point of fact?" and count, after they have struck, as I have explained, all the twelve throbbing beats of the clock of our experience, of our life, of our being - ah! - and count wrong in the endeavour. Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in ourselves we are bound to be mistaken, for of us holds good to all eternity the motto, "Each one is the farthest away from himself" - as far as ourselves are concerned we are not "knowers."" (K 143-150)

I love the thought of someone, anyone, reading stuff like this.

Search yourself out, and be searched-out by God. Examine youself, and be-examined.

Know, and be known.

This is precisely the kind of pre-thinking that, eventually, led me to Christ.