Jesse Hilson > Recent Status Updates

Slow going but it’s a thin book.

A real Ballardian laff riot.

It’s almost over. I tried to skim off as much of the cream as possible, but alas, I don’t know philosophy, and I don’t know German, and I don’t know German philosophy. A lot of this is still murky, and a lot of myself is still murky.

The Antichrist section feels like a wandering argument, not sure where it’s going.

I never got the gist of eternal recurrence before. Kaufmann links it to Kant’s Categorical Imperative in a provocative and shocking manner that opens certain mental floodgates. Very interesting. I’m about to embark on the “Antichrist” section and bracing myself…

Rereading this banger. It’s making me dream.

Certain things coming together, fibers of light. And myths banished. In reading this book, light is shed on other philosophers: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Spinoza. A lot to read. You grow sick of reading about “will to power” and then refreshed again, then sick again, and on and on…

The “will to power” concept is central and yet I tire of reading about it. I want to go back to the crispy, plucky aphoristic diversity of thought shown elsewhere by Nietzsche and leave the big central ideas alone. But that’s not what this book purports to be, it seems.

Reading the 1968 vintage edition from a library. The pages are so fragile and are literally covered with underlinings and notes. So, I ordered what will hopefully be a cleaner used copy. I’m going further into being a book nerd, a bookworm. This book is feeling like a good next step after reading some of Nietzsche’s works.

Sections on Nihilism and Anti-Nihilism finished. I’m noticing that over the past several months I have been reading the usual suspects: Sartre, Beckett, Nietzsche…I have on deck, Cioran. I went through much of Dostoevsky and Kafka last year or so. It all feels somewhat adolescent but I must burn through these prerequisite candles…

The section on religion, quoting liberally from The Antichrist, is scorching

I’d read both Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals before this book, so to reread those sections under “Morality” here felt simultaneously like good review and also rather boring because it was going over well-trod ground. The section on Morality here in this book is quite lengthy; of course it was one of Nietzsche’s preoccupations.

This might be a better way to initially approach Nietzsche: in a reader arranged according to theme, where one can read in a relatively light, mobile fashion, as opposed to in one of his works where the tendency may be to become stranded, with no help, no relief

Not easy reading but I’m doing it. I’m determined to try to get something from this, and I am.

It’s an easy, entertaining, even humorous read that is full of examples of good (and bad) quantitative graphic design. The most interesting so far, was the graphic showing Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the size of the army, how it dwindled, their direction, the retreat, the plunging temperature during the retreat, and the time frame. So cool. These numbers were based upon multiple sources from the French army.

Fascinating. Always with an eye on how graphs, maps, and charts can be manipulated for distortions and misinformation.

I’m in the home stretch of this book and eager to be away from dear old Friedrich. The twentieth century interposes itself between us and colors and shades him too unfavorably for me to really absorb this and take it to heart. A lot of thr end is about nationalism and “European values”

I can’t catch all of the meanings in this book. I can only hope that its subtle divisions and distinctions teaches my mind to sharpen and refine its thought, for the purposes of writing

Burning through this. The thing that stands out to me, and that spurs on some of my own thinking and writing, is the style above all. I know it’s translated from German, but I feel that Nietzsche excels in his sinuosity and mockery