One afternoon in the second month of covid, after the period of freaking out but before everyone stopped giving a shit and started doing whatever they wanted, I ran out of books. I’d been quarantining with a friend on the Upper West Side to avoid my roommates in Brooklyn and so I’d brought a passel of books uptown, selected at semi-random with no real clue as to how long I’d need to keep myself entertained. Having exhausted my own supply of novels I began working my way through my friend’s family’s bookshelves at random, much in the way goats are employed by farmers to eat through brush and dry leaves because they’ll clear away anything in their path.
“Hm,” I thought, picking up Ecce Homo by Nietzsche, a book I’d pretended many times to have read in full. “What a classic.”
I figured it was time to finally get down to the bottom of things, beyond the mandated passages and canned explanations of literature seminars. I opened to chapter one, “Why I am so wise,” then chapters two and three, “Why I am so clever, Why I write such good books.” Was this guy kidding?
Well, yes, I realized. He sort of was. And his work had nothing to do with what a lot of boring people had been trying to tell me it was about the whole time. You’d think, oh here I am reading Nietzche during the plague because I’ve given up on life. But that’s exactly what the my wrong understanding of Nietzche was all about. He thought the opposite–
“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things;” he wrote, in The Gay Science. “Then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”
—Zoe Dubno