Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

In August 1881 a half-blind German man approaching forty walked the shore of Lake Silvaplana in Switzerland. No job. No wife. Barely any readers. Migraines put him in bed several days a week, and his eyes had gone so bad he sometimes had to dictate. Doctors were baffled. For years he had drifted between guesthouses and rented rooms, chasing whatever air was kindest to his head.

That day he stopped at a huge pyramid-shaped block of stone, still standing on that shore, a good ten feet of it. And there something occurred to him that frightened him. He went back, took a sheet of paper, and wrote across the top: "Six thousand feet beyond man and time." Roughly the altitude of the lakeshore itself. Then he wrote the thought down. Then he spent a year and a half not daring to say it to anyone.

The man was Friedrich Nietzsche. What found him at that stone was not a theory but a question. One question you can put to anybody, and the answer tells you whether that person loves their life or merely tolerates it. Two years later it became a book, the one he called his masterpiece, whose hero is a Persian prophet walking down off a mountain.

This is not a textbook and not a treatise. It is novel, sermon and music at once, full of animals, tightrope walkers, dwarfs and midnight bells. It chases three questions. What do we do with ourselves once nobody above us says what is good and what is bad? How does a person stop drifting and start setting their own standard? And the hardest: what would it take for you not merely to get through your life, but to ask for it again?