My reading now, I’m into several different books. For a couple of days I did without the audiobooks, because the stuff on the player had run out and I had not the inclination to find something to put on it. It doesn’t make sense, even to me – I am compelled to play back the books faster than normal, yet there are times when I don’t bother with it at all because I have nothing else that piques my interest. I could listen to the stuff at the regular speed and maybe get more out of it, but even though this makes sense to me now, it still doesn’t feel right to slow it down.

So, right now I’m still in the middle of A Discourse on Inequality and Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and I just started the next Witch book by Anne Rice. The Discourse is coming along slowly, in fact I’m halfway through the copy I have and most of that is commentary by the translator, and the forward by Rousseau. I am not into the Discourse proper yet. Confessions is much easier to read, I find myself wondering as I read whether he is really confessing, or attempting a positive spin on the actions related. It is fun though.

This morning I picked up The Will To Power, a translation by Walter Kaufman. Until this morning what I knew of Nietzsche was that he has been associated with Hitler. Not that he associated with him, but that they had the same ideals. If one thought of Hitler’s philosophy, Nietzsche came to mind, or vice versa. That has been my impression anyway, which is of course wrong. The translator intros the book, and finishes that with something from Nietzsche himself. It is a draft of a preface to the final Will to Power work which was never realized by him, which is an eye opener, for me anyway…

A book for thinking, nothing else: it belongs to those for whom thinking is a delight, nothing else ---

That it is written in German is untimely, to say the least: I wish I had written it in French so that it might not appear to be a confirmation of the aspirations of the German Reich.

The Germans of today are no thinkers any longer: something else delights and impresses them.

The will to power as a principle might be intelligible to them.

It is precisely among the Germans of today that people think less than anywhere else. But who knows? In two generations one will no longer require the sacrifice involved in any nationalistic squandering of power and in becoming stupid.

(Formerly I wished I had not written my Zarathustra in German.)

The first two lines are obvious, the meaning that is. As for the next several lines I cannot fathom the meaning right off the bat. Perhaps I will once I am done with the book.

Reading on into the ‘notes’ – the book is nothing more than a collection of notes in Nietzsche’s personal notebooks – he spends a lot of time working on the meaning of nihilism. Reading it I get the notion that he has a hard time understanding what he truly believes, or rather putting into words exactly what he has in mind, and he has assigned ‘nihilism’ as the term most likely to fit. To him nihilism isn’t so much a definitive term so much as a progression of conclusions a person has to realize if this person were to be honest in working out for him or herself whether there is meaning in anything that happens. Then again, the notes are probably everything he can think of that might make it simpler for someone to understand what he's trying to say.

Some quotes from the first section of the book…

Values and their changes are related to increases in the power of those positing the values.
The measure of unbelief, of permitted “freedom of the spirit” as an expression of an increase in power.
“Nihilism” an ideal of the highest degree of powerfulness of the spirit, the over-richest life --- partly destructive, partly ironic.