Loving concepts over prose
Writing style vs. topic
I love Nietzsche as a thinker, but not so much as a writer. I love to read about him, but not necessarily the stuff by him. I love his ideas and they have actually helped me much in my life, but sometimes I struggle to even find the central insights in his writing. I love his concepts but not his prose.
I also love David Foster Wallace. Especially Infinite Jest. I love his way of thinking and the world that he created, but I have to confess, Infinite Jest is a hard task to read. I return to it briefly, every once in a while, but I don't think I'd have the energy to actually re-read it again in a while. I still enjoy the lore of the book and love reading about the motifs, themes and philosophy of the book, but once again the prose part of it is demanding.
I abso-LUTELY love H.P. Lovecraft lore, but I'm bored to DEATH after picking up any of his books. Sorry to say. I’m more into Cthulhu mythos and his world building. If there ever is an open university lecture about Ctulhu, I'm the first one to sign up. Or if they ever open The First Church of the Great Old Ones near me, I'm converting to faith immediately and attending services every Sunday. How ever, I don't even own any Lovecraft books, so I think I’m failing as a fan boy.
I love Kafka and everything kafkaesque. I love him as a philosopher and as an artist. I own his collected works. Two copies in fact. I've tried to read it. Both copies, actually, but both lay in the bookshelf unfinished. This summer I fathomed the strength to half-listen it as an audiobook (which felt like cheating) only to realise, that I didn't enjoy the experience. Some of that was almost certainly due to the fact, that it doesn't necessarily translate that well into an audiobook format, but I was none the less, much less thrilled than expected. I was shocked.
Worlds to explore, not just stories to follow
You might say that I’m not only a reader of certain authors, but a reader of ideas and concepts. I’m attracted to mythologies and intellectual architectures and sometimes the author is separated due to a language barrier.
Nietzsche’s brilliance is in the ideas (eternal recurrence, will to power, critiques of morality etc.) but his style is dense, elliptical and even bombastic. Thus Spoke Zarathustra was the first book I ever read from him and it was, in fact, a rather smooth reading by Nietzsche’s standards. Enjoyable too.
I then went ahead and bought Human all too human, which I failed completely. I then ordered a really fancy copy of Beyond Good and Evil and it should have came with an instruction manual (or a translator) because it was way too much for me. It is written in aphorisms, some just sentence or two long. I had to admit, that I was way over my head by jumping straight onto it cold. Halfway through it started to feel like a slippery bar of soap in a book form. Nothing sticked. I decided to further educate myself first before giving it another go.
I’m still fascinated by Nietzsche’s philosophy and interested of him as a thinker. It might seem like an odd thing to say, but I rather read about him than directly through him.
The concept of the Kafkaesque grips me, the existential bureaucracy, the alienation, but in practice, a whole novel of it, is harder to sustain. It kills me to admit it and it really makes me feel like I’m failing as a reader too. Both Kafka and Nietzsche created interpretive universes, more than just books. Maybe some people just wants worlds to explore, not just stories to follow.
Same with Lovecraft. The lore is magnetic, but his prose (archaic, stiff, adjective-heavy) drags me slightly down. Cthulhu isn’t interesting because of the short stories about it, but because it seeded a mythos.
I’ve found that I thrive in the afterlife of certain books rather than the books themselves. I enjoy what these authors have spawned, the gravity wells of ideas they left behind. That’s a valid kind of reading too and it might actually be where their influence is strongest.
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest works just as much as a universe as a narrative… a lore to inhabit, with themes, characters, footnotes, strange organizations, and a sense of excess. Even though a demanding thing to read, it is one of my favourite books and I wish I’d be able to muster the strength to read it again and again. Instead, after one and a half times, I find myself quite often scouring through Infinite Jest Wiki.
Companion material
Whenever I find myself obsessing over a book, I always tend to dive into secondary sources, commentaries and adaptations too. Complex books seems to demand companion material to go along with them.
Reading Nietzsche is a very different experience, compared to a detective story. It isn’t just a linear story that you simply read from start to finish. It requires you to become a student. (Or something like that.) I takes effort to understand. Much like reading the bible doesn’t necessarily lead you anywhere unless you commit yourself to the faith while you’re at it. You might find yourself listening to sermons in addition to the actual reading. It probably doesn’t open up to you unless it’s density is decoded and the world expanded. You might find yourself being sucked into the world hidden between the covers.
When you’re a student, you don’t just read. Sure, you have the text books, but you also attend lectures, which is part of the decoding.
I got the inspiration to write about this, after picking a book called “Nietzsche — A Philosophical Biography“ by Rüdiger Safranski. Hands trembling, cold sweat on my forehead and slightly pooping my pants, I opened the cover and started to read. My fear was instantly erased after realising that the experience was the polar opposite to Nietzsche. In fact, it was like my grandfather reading Nietzsche for dummies to me with a grandfatherly voice, by the fireplace, while sipping a cup of hot choccolate in a rocking chair, in a cozy log cabin on a christmas evening, with a rug on the wall, wearing wool socks and slippers, reading glasses lowered to the bridge of his nose, accompanied with a gentle, grandfatherly smile.
I’d also like to make a comparison to popular science too, which was for the longest time, my absolute favourite literary genre, because I’ve always been fascinated by theoretical physics, astronomy, natural history etc. There is just one big problem. They’re all hard sciences. Luckily though, in 2008 my friend gave me Bill Bryson’s Short History of nearly Everything as a present. It was a pivotal moment. I learned that there were authors and science communicators who actually take the time to translate hard topics into digestable forms. Trying to understand a hard science publication would be a futile task for a feeble brain, much like trying to consume Beyond Good and Evil like it was a Harry Potter book. Popular science brings the concepts closer to a general audience. I think the problem is quite similar. I don’t know whether Nietzsche’s philosophical biography is intended as popular philosphy, but I gladly approach it as such.
I think the next step for me would be to see a puppet show about Cthulhu.
