Stranger on Earth

In Season 1, Episode 9 of Six Feet Under , carefree prodigal son Nate learns to accept that everyone must die, regardless of their age and status. This may sound banal, but his coming to terms with so self-evident a fact shows that in the mad to-ing and fro-ing of everyday life there is little room for truth. I first became aware of death when I was still in kindergarten, a mere six-year-old whose world hadn’t extended beyond colouring books and plasticine models. Perhaps it was due to how everyone had been going on about a boy killed in an accident occurring on the main road separating my house and the kindergarten; perhaps it was the dead cat I had seen (and poked with a twig) by the pavement on the way to school; perhaps it was time – but I remember sitting in class (the teacher was showing us how to paint faces on eggshells) and having the most horrible premonition that my grandmother, who was the centre of my world at that time, was going to die. This upset me so much th...

Link to Part 1:  http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2012/11/the-thinking-mans-bible-and-messiah.html Of all the accusations Nietzsche hurls at Christianity, it is the sanctification of untruths concerning earthly matters that is the gravest: God is a thought that makes all that is straight crooked and all that stands giddy. What? Would time be gone and all that is transitory only a lie? … I call it evil and misanthropic, all this teaching about the one and the perfect and the unmoved and the sufficient and the intransitory. All that is intransitory – that is but an image! ( On the Blissful Islands , 110-11) Nietzsche claims that Christian belief inculcates the wrong perception of reality in the believer. The belief in an unchanging, perfect God is philosophically false, since nothing in the universe we inhabit is “intransitory.” Everything is always in flux, and divine constancy can be nothing but a deception. For Nietzsche (or Zarathustra), co...

A great many clichés we usually associate with Nietzsche – “God is dead” (often quoted out of context), “Man must be overcome,” “the Übermensch ” – have their origin in the infamous 1883-5 text Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None ( Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen ). It is a “treatise” generally ignored by professional philosophers for being “too artistic”; for the common reader, if he is not religious, it is a trying reading experience due to its cryptic nature, and if he is a believer in God, a full-frontal attack. It is a text many have heard of (and think they can quote from it), but few have seriously read from cover to cover. My aim is to synopsise some its recurring (pun intended) messages and explain why it is essential reading – now more than ever – for any man who strives to rise above himself and others. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a literary/philosophical bulldozer: it attempts to raze to the ground all extant mora...

If the future is indeed “a nest of presents to be,” we can count on familiarity. What has been still is, and what is, will be. The concept of reincarnation is intrinsic in the system of “eternal recurrence,” being the basis of Indian and Buddhist philosophies, which Schopenhauer (and later on Nietzsche) heavily borrowed from. Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche deal with this concept only in its corporeal sense, never in its spiritual, preternatural sense. The philosophers injected it with realism and logic, and the outcome can be observed in some sections of Cloud Atlas . The impression of recurrence is presented for the first time in “Letters from Zedelghem,” where Robert Frobisher is found reading a “curious dismembered volume” he has come across in the guest bedroom. The volume in question is Adam Ewing’s Pacific journal. While reading through it, Frobisher picks up on hints that Adam never did, for example, Dr Goose’s less than honourable intent. He then questions the journal...

The mirror chapter “Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After” paints an utmost pessimistic future for mankind: warfare has decimated most of the world’s population, but destruction will not simply end there. If history is anything to go by, the cycle of bloodshed and butchery will continue turning for as long as the earth is still orbiting the sun. Meronym claims that “fleas ain’t so easy to rid,” referring to humans’ thirst for blood. This claim is proved to be true as we reach the end of the chapter and travel back in time via the second halves of each of the five story-lines. The impression the reader gets while doing so is one of a never-ending cycle. There are instances of déjà vu, of faintly familiar recollections. The reader has been there before. Another aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy, one related to the will to power, now comes into play: eternal recurrence. This concept is not unknown to those well-versed in Hindu or Buddhist teachings. Time is, c...