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Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say

From Nietzsche’s Unpublished Writings from the period of Unfashionable Observations:

Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say: when we are alone and quiet we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability. The human being evades suffering as best he can, but even
more so he evades the meaning of endured suffering; he seeks to forget what lies behind it by constantly setting new goals.

Coming soon after the much less endearing:

On the contrary, it should be a universal law: every person has the right to speak about his inner experiences if and only if he is able to find his own words with which to describe them. For it goes against all propriety, and in principle even against all honesty, to treat the language of great minds as though it were not someone’s property and were simply found lying around on the street somewhere.

Therein lies the challenge of reading Nietzsche from the left I think. Can we still learn from his grappling with what Lesley Chamberlain calls “the beautiful problem” given how tied up it is an aristocratic account of who really can deal with that problem?

I think we clearly can because so much of the philosophical, poetic and literary culture of the twentieth cenutry is prefigured by that 1874 statement: “Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say”.

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