Lughnasa College Moon
A friend told me this quote from Nietzsche has been clanging around: “The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is — to live dangerously”. Wondering about context, I located the source, Nietzsche’s book on poetic inspiration, The Gay Science, specifically, section 283.
These lines follow the quote: “Build your cities on the slope of Vesuvius! Send your ships into unexplored seas! Live in war with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and spoilers, you knowing ones, as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors! The time will soon pass when you can be satisfied to live like timorous deer concealed in the forests. Knowledge will finally stretch out her hand for that which belongs to her: she means to rule and possess, and you with her!”
It was in The Gay Science that the following claim appeared for the first time. It would make Nietzsche famous and/or infamous 84 years later when Time magazine ran its cover querying the death of god:
After Buddha was dead, people
showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a
cave,—an immense frightful shadow. God is dead:
but as the human race is constituted, there will
perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which
people will show his shadow.—And we—we have
still to overcome his shadow! —§108
We have lived into that dangerous time which Nietzsche prophesied, when there are those whose knowledge includes the death of the transcendental, but whose lives are under attack by those still living in the caves where the shadow of God persists.
One response to the rising tide of Islamist fundamentalism, of Hindu fundamentalism, to the now receding tide of Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. and to the various nationalisms and xenophobias which mimic them is to follow these folks back into their caves where homosexuality is wrong, where men are right, women subservient and the unbeliever not only heretic but apostate and worthy of death. Where the U.S. is exceptional and for whites only.
But that is not the way to a fruitful and satisfying life. That way lies in continued resistance to the cave dwellers and in continual fealty to knowledge wherever it may take us, no matter how risky, no matter how dangerous.
