“There is properly no history; only biography” ~ Emerson
My first choice of reading material has always been biography. The biography holds everything: entertainment, knowledge, history, story-telling, insight, and possibly even wisdom. As best I can recall, the first biography I ever read was of Mark Twain. I was in elementary school and I recall it took forever–I’m a slow reader. It was a big book written for grown-ups. And I wasn’t, grown-up, that is. I remember I had to write a book report and my teacher checked everyday on my progress, the book being thick and me being slow and the report not coming when due, and the pressure, oh the pressure…
So now I’m grown up and still a slow reader and still a reader who loves biography (probably) first among the literary disciplines. So it was that I saved up my pennies and sprang for the first new book (“new”: not a used book, or a library sale book, or a freebie review book) in quite some time: Friedrich Nietzsche, A Philosophical Biography by Julian Young. Young is Professor of Philosophy, University of Auckland, and the book is published by Cambridge University Press. I was turned onto the book by a glowing review by Francis Fukuyam in the New York Times Book Review. Fukuyam includes this line: “Whether we acknowledge it or not, we continue to live within the intellectual shadow cast by Nietzsche. Postmodernism, deconstructionism, cultural relativism, the “free spirit” scorning bourgeois morality, even New Age festivals like Burning Man can all ultimately be traced to him.”
I have always been fascinated by this enigmatic thinker. Here’s how the biography opens:
“Nietzsche’s greatest inspiration, he believed, was the idea that if one is in a state of perfect mental health one should be able to survey one’s entire life and then, rising ecstatically to one’s feet, shout ‘Da capo!–Once more! Once More! Back to the beginning!–to ‘the whole play and performance’. In perfect health one would ‘crave nothing more fervently’ than the ‘eternal return’ of one’s life throughout infinite time–not the expurgated version with the bad bits left out, but exactly the same life, down to the very last detail, however painful or shameful.”
