September 2019

[Originally published Dec. 1, 2010.]

So, I’ve been reading Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of His Contemporaries, which is, as you can guess, a bunch of recollections from his friends and acquaintances. It’s easily been one of my favorite books I’ve read this year, just because it’s such an interesting change of pace from all the usual books about his philosophy itself. Even the collections of his letters haven’t been quite as revealing of what he was really like as an everyday person as this book has been. This was one of my favorite stories of the whole book, told by a student named Sebastian Hausmann, who encountered Nietzsche on a walk in the countryside of Switzerland during the mid-1880s, a few years before his final collapse. He saw a letter lying on the ground and hurried to ask the man ahead of him on the path if it was his. It was, and the man expressed his profuse thanks for its return and invited the youngster to accompany him on the rest of his walk:

Now all of a sudden I knew why the man’s face had so struck me; it had a certain unmistakable similarity with the pictures of the famous philosopher which I vaguely remembered. I was not one of that philosopher’s admirers and had never read his works to the end, because I ran into too many difficulties I could not easily solve with my simple common sense. Somewhat suspiciously I asked the gentleman: “Are you perhaps a relative of the famous philosopher Nietzsche?” He looked at me sharply for a moment then answered: “No, I’m not related to him.” Involuntarily I remarked: “Well, thank God!” I immediately regretted this remark, I had merely been thinking somewhat too loudly. Again he flashed a look at me from the side and asked: “So you don’t like the philosopher?” To which I answered candidly: “No.” He then asked further: “What has the man done to you?” I looked pensively for a few moments, then I said: “Well, of course the man has done me no harm. But it annoys me that he always writes as if the whole world consisted of professors of philosophy. Why can’t a philosophy professor also write so that an average person with no special philosophical schooling can understand too?”

After a few paces the man suddenly stopped and turned toward me with a good-humored, gentle smile: “Let us not play hide-and-seek. You were quite right to think of the philosopher Nietzsche at sight of me. I am really not related to your Nietzsche, for I am the man himself, whom you chose to call a famous philosopher.”

It’s funny, because aside from the sort of dense, serious subject matter he chose to write about, Nietzsche isn’t really difficult to understand as a prose stylist; he himself scorned the types of intellectuals who purposely muddied up their writing to intimidate people into assuming profundity where none existed. But he told Hausmann something interesting about why some things can’t be expressed colloquially:

“When one writes a book and thus steps into the public light, that is always a significant act deserving of a certain solemnity, so that one has to put aside everyday language. You have a good example in Catholicism, toward which, as you perhaps know, I am not exactly friendly, but this does not prevent me from recognizing the great worldly wisdom with which Rome has been conducting its business over the ages. Why does Rome still have the Mass read in Latin? To give the solemn act, veiled in mystery, a special solemnity even externally. But that must not be at the expense of clarity or intelligibility. If thoughts were thereby hidden, if the real meaning became hard to understand, that would of course be false, that would no longer be solemn, that would be foolish. So give me a particular example that caused you difficulty. Perhaps you have one in mind?”

Bus-ted! Hausmann really hasn’t read much of him at all, and has to scramble to come up with some material to talk about. But they have an illuminating discussion anyway:

In an equally amiable manner he discussed the various other points which came to my mind little by little, and I noticed with great delight how simple, how very clear and easily understandable all his oral remarks were. Yet his conversation had something erratic about it; I constantly had the feeling that his thoughts spouted forth in an astonishing excess, literally crowding one another out.

…During the whole conversation I did not know what I should admire more, the tremendous scope of his positive knowledge, the high flight of his lines of thought, or the brilliant, almost poetically beautiful language. That he bothered with me, a green, insignificant young man, who of course had absolutely nothing to offer him, and spoke with me in such an amiable, friendly manner, gave me the impression that at the bottom of his soul he must have been an unusually kind and loving person, and I was filled with deep gratitude toward him.

I knew from other readings that he was personally nothing like his fire-breathing literary persona, but even I was surprised to see how unanimous this theme was of people remarking on his unfailingly polite, soft-spoken mannerisms, considerate patience with people far less intellectual than him, and general kindheartedness. Walking with one female friend in the country, they were surprised by a herd of cows, which triggered a phobic reaction in her, related to a childhood experience of being chased by a bull. He comically made as if to fend them off with his umbrella until she was too busy laughing at the absurd spectacle to be afraid anymore. In another story, he heard of a mentally ill woman who refused to leave her hotel room to go get treatment despite all her friends’ efforts. He asked to be allowed to talk with her, and shortly afterward emerged with her following calmly along behind him, where he escorted her to the waiting carriage; no one ever found out how he coaxed her out of her shell.

Another favorite passage is from a friend named Reinhardt von Seydlitz:

For he lacked one thing which will always accompany the great man in the customary sense: he had no dark, ignoble sides to his nature, not even sensory crudity. For great men are seldom, in the noblest sense, decent men. A part of “being great”—of becoming and staying great—is a stupid belief in oneself. That is also why great men in their “decent” moments often seem so small. Our Nietzsche was far from all this. I have never known a more genteel person than he—not one! He could be inconsiderate only toward ideas; not toward the persons who had the ideas. And these bearers of ideas—some with crude mentalities—soon discovered this: they knew there was nothing to fear from him. They were silent about him, for he was silent about them even from an innate inner purity.

Inconsiderate toward ideas, not toward the people who hold them. A worthy ideal to strive for, if you ask me.

[Originally published Feb. 23, 2014.]

Kevin Dettmar:

But passion alone, divorced from the thrilling intellectual work of real analysis, is empty, even dangerous. When we simply “feel” a poem, carried away by the sound of words, rather than actually reading it, we’re rather likely to get it wrong. We see Mr. Keating, in fact, making just this kind of mistake during one of his stirring orations to the boys of Welton. In a hackneyed speech about resisting conformity that he seems to have delivered many times before, Keating invokes that oft-invoked but rarely understood chestnut, “The Road Not Taken”: “Robert Frost said, ‘Two roads diverged in a wood and I / I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference.’”

Wha—? Has Keating actually read the poem from which he so blithely samples? For Robert Frost said no such thing: a character in his poem says it. And we’re meant to learn, over the course of that poem, that he’s wrong—that he’s both congratulating and kidding himself. He chooses his road ostensibly because “it was grassy and wanted wear”; but this description is contradicted in the very next lines—“Though as for that, the passing there / Had worn them really about the same,” and—more incredibly still—“both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.” He wants to claim to have taken the exceptional road, if not the spiritual high road; but he knows on some level that it’s a hollow boast.

Keating hasn’t actually read “The Road Not Taken” in any meaningful sense; rather, he’s adopted it, adapted it, made it his own—made it say what he wants it to say. His use of those closing lines, wrenched from their context, isn’t just wrong—it’s completely wrong, and Keating uses them to point a moral entirely different from that of Frost’s poem. (In a like manner, how often has Frost’s “The Mending Wall” been quoted out of context in debates about immigration reform? “Good fences make good neighbors,” indeed.)

So this dude really hates the movie Dead Poets Society. Some of his complaints seem rather uncharitable, but stewing over a movie for a quarter-century can curdle a fellow’s spirit, I suppose. At any rate, I can see one of his points. If I read a poem that grabs me, even if only a certain section of it, I consider it, well, almost a courtesy to find out what the author intended to convey. I’ve long thought that it was a shady dodge when, say, lyricists are deliberately ambiguous about a song’s meaning, saying that it’s more important what the listener makes of it. Goddammit, I already know what I think; that’s not interesting to me at all. I want to know what you were thinking when that came out, I want to be possibly surprised with a different perspective. You were the master craftsman who created that phrase, so I feel like I owe it to you to take a moment and try to inhabit your worldview. This has been a constant theme in my criticism of the SNR phenomenon — look to occasionally challenge what you think; don’t just reinforce it. Whether you’re reading a book or studying an exotic belief, don’t just look for the parts that echo what you already think.

But this pedantic table-pounding over how wrong, completely wrong it is to take a phrase out of context and thereby change the implications of it, well, isn’t that just another form of linguistic prescriptivism? Is that essentially any different than grammar and vocabulary snobs pursing their lips and clenching their buttocks every time popular usage plucks a word away from its roots and pins it upon a lapel? Not to get all postmodernist up in here, but isn’t language and meaning a bit more unstable and free-flowing than that? Granted, it can be annoying to hear a bastardization of meaning due to lack of effort and attention (as a Nietzsche fan, I know this all too well), but on the bright side, doesn’t that just open up an opportunity for a scholar to present an in-depth, soon-to-be-viral article about how “Everything You Think You Know About Whitman And Frost Is Wrong”? And isn’t that spark of passion for the way words can move you the necessary precursor to caring enough to study poems and literature more in-depth?

Besides, the movie, as I remember it, was more broadly about the idealism and romanticism of youth on the brink of conflict with “the way things really are” (possibly about the romanticism of “golden age” myths, too, e.g. “kids today don’t know or care about poetry the way we did in my day…”). Poetry was more proximate than ultimate subject. Keating was attempting to get these high school kids to passionately care about something before the responsibilities of adulthood smothered the opportunity, and poetry happened to be the vehicle he used in this setting. Knox, for instance, is inspired to pursue the girl he thinks is out of his league. Neil is inspired to defy his father and indulge his passion for theater. Todd, the meek wallflower, is inspired to simply assert himself for once. None of that required scholarly precision about a poem’s meaning. In fact, we can just go ahead and connect that final dot and note that Dettmar is actually doing exactly what he’s complaining about — reading his own perspective into the movie, making it say what he wants it to say. The story was about, as Rilke said, how

We see the brightness of a new page
where everything yet can happen.

Unmoved by us, the fates take its measure
and look at one another, saying nothing.

Oh, wait, Rilke was specifically talking about the beginning of the 20th century, with an ominous hint that suggests an uncanny prescience about what tremendous upheavals were to come. Ye gads, what have I done? What sin have I committed against original context? What if, by giving a misleading impression of Rilke’s subject matter, I have set some poor reader up for eventual disillusionment? I can hear Dettmar’s buttocks furiously clenching from here.