Friedrich nietzsche

A few weeks after Friedrich Nietzsche bragged to an admirer that he had completed a ruthless attack on our Lord, he collapsed, had convulsions, shouted like a madman and never recovered his faculties again. It was early 1889. He was 44 years old, his books had just begun to be noticed, and he lived for a decade longer, empty-eyed, silent and entirely unaware of the fame that was about to engulf him. Was his tragic end divine punishment for his sacrilege? My devout Catholic wife begs to differ. Our Lord is not vengeful, she insists. That’s the only thing wrong with him, I reply. Although Darwin’s On the Origin of

Gstaad I thought of Nietzsche while the mayhem and destruction of monuments was going on. Decadent bourgeois society was in the great man’s sights, but then he went bananas. Later on, young Nietzscheans believed that what was needed to save the world was an insurrection of sons against their fathers. But things do change, and mostly for the worse. Imagine if Mr N. and his followers were around today — the past four weeks to be exact. They’d be exhorting fathers to kill their sons. And daughters. My higher thoughts were interrupted by a telephone call from a woman who spoke with what sounded like a parody of a female