David’s answer to “David, Many thanks for your liking my comments on Young's intellectual biography of Nietzsche. You…” > Likes and Comments

I hope you remember that most of my comments on books begin with a disclaimer, namely that my jottings are nothing more than reader-responses that I really should be confiding to a journal. In no sense do I think of my comments as a "review".
It also seems to me that you have imported into my questions assumptions that I do not make. For example, I would never ask the question "Why should any writer dare to write a single word?" But if I did, my answer would be: "because he wants to express what's on his mind." As for "redemptive answers" - perhaps someone is seeking redemption, but I am not one of those persons, and so I respond to suggestions that "redemptive answers" exist [ exist for independent minded persons, I mean. Perhaps they do exist for members of the Southern Baptist Convention.] or that any person can offer "redemption" to another.
A personal disclosure. I think of the universe as a cosmically vast engine of transformation of matter and energy that operates in accordance with physical laws some of which are known or knowable and others which may not be discoverable at all. And I am content, even comfortable, with that perspective. Note carefully the words in that sentence. It makes no claims about anyone or anything beyond my mind and person. My sense is that life and material existence are. Why should there be anything else? I certainly feel no need to any "meaning" or foundational/absolute or transcendent truths. Never have. That's why I am astonished that anyone supposes that there is and makes claims about its content.
Perhaps there's something missing in me. But I've stopped wondering about that as well.

I'm curious about your choice of icon of Thoreau if you feel no need to any transcendent truths. I gather from your response that you have found no meaning in a Samuel Beckett sort of stance, which is, of course, a meaningful position in itself.

I admire Thoreau, the man, ardently - his personality, his mind, his temperament, his passion for investigation and discovery. I don't care a straw for his convictions.
You may not believe this but I have little use for literature - apart from my interest in the persons and the minds that create literature - Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Goethe, Proust, Homer, Milton, Virgil, Melville, and a few others. I have never paid a dime's worth of attention to Beckett - nor have grappled with positions of one sort or another. I am strictly interested in history and biography - the rest is not particularly appealing - unless, of course, the language is superlative.