A Philosophic Friend

Friedrich Nietzsche. Always there when we want him. 

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We know the difference between the creation of a plot and the growth of the artist’s sensibility, with its tendency to coil itself around a core idea, like a snake around a pole. Patiently we explain these differences. We have our fun with an academic who has lost his way, sitting at the side of the road shaking his fist at the men of letters driving by. How we laugh! Roger and Perry and Martin begin a sea shanty, but it is blown away in a gust of giggles when I mention Lot’s wife and her pillar of pedantry. Yet, when we stop to reflect, it is only for a few moments, we know we are missing something. We had talked about the unconscious and went on and on about growth and themes and obsessions, we quoted scholarly authorities, delivered the clinching argument with a fantastic wallop; shaking Graham Robb’s hand we congratulated ourselves on a job well done and yet, still, we feel we have missed some small important thing. It nags at us, and we become mournful. We read John Banville. He confirms us in our view, although the piece is somewhat vapid, then we recall an old interview: he doesn't put his art into his journalism; tut-tut you silly boy, no writer should ever waste his words. We leave Banville behind. He cannot help us. Still we are looking for one small vital thing. We wander around the stacks of books, kick a few across the floor. Drifting before the shelves we hear a voice; it is calling us: I know what you are looking for, it says, the invite a seductive whisper, a caress, a soft kiss. We are shocked, then recover, then go and refuse his gift. He insists. Now we remember him from former days. He is the master. An old friend and zimmer frame. 

For the most part, I take up the same thoughts in these present essays—let us hope that they have thrived since then, that they have matured, grown brighter, stronger, more complete! But that I still hold to the ideas today, and that they themselves have since become increasingly inseparable, indeed have even grown into one another and become intertwined—all this strengthens my happy assurance that, far from emerging as isolated, random, or sporadic phenomena, these ideas grew from a common root, from a fundamental will of knowledge, a will which issued its imperatives from the depths, speaking in increasingly definite terms and demanding increasingly definite answers. For nothing else befits a philosopher. We have no right to any isolated act whatsoever: to make isolated errors and to discover isolated truths are equally forbidden us. Rather, our thoughts, our values our yeses and noes and ifs and whethers grow out of us with the same necessity with which a tree bears its fruits—all related and connected to one another and evidence of a single will, a single health, a single earth, a single sun.—And as to whether these fruits of ours are to your taste?—But what is that to the trees! What is that to us, the philosophers!… (On the Genealogy of Morals)