Nietzsche, as I read him, is a model for a very different sort of life than is celebrated as "success" today. It is an outwardly simple and unglamorous life but a life of rich passion and ecstatic enthusiasm, expressed first of all in the privacy of one's notes and writing, a life of exquisite taste, cultivated through listening, looking, and the exercise of elegance in even the simplest things in life.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, February 25, 2019
Model for a Different Sort of Life
Robert C. Solomon (1942-2007), Living with Nietzsche: What the Great "Immoralist" Has to Teach Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 4: