“Have you read all of Nietzsche?”Hat tip: Dave Haxton, friend and fellow book lover.
He was looking at the bookcase right behind the man. All of Nietzsche’s works, including the famous Thus Spoke Zarathustra, along with collections of his letters, were lined up inside the glass case.
“I like Nietzsche, too,” he added.
“There are people all over the world who claim to like Nietzsche,” replied the man, without lifting his head from his book. “However, there are very few people who say this after having read all his work. They’ve seen the odd quotation or some watered-down, abridged version. They try Nietzsche on for size like some fashionable overcoat. Are you one of those, too?”
"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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Thursday, September 12, 2024
People Who Claim to Like Nietzsche
Sosuke Natsukawa, The Cat Who Saved Books, tr. Louise Heal Kawai (New York: HarperVia, 2021), pp. 31-32: