The Cost for Love We Are Not Willing to Pay

<p>In the last weeks preceding the collapse of his rational powers, Nietzsche wrote, “I am a rendezvous of experiences”; the word is indeed rendezvous. He meant that he had spent his life running toward the world and that the world had been running toward him.This double attraction, this movement, had been central. The immense generosity of his mind had made him the meeting point of cosmic forces, of the social currents of his time, and of the ideas that he seemed so often more to capture than to create. This generosity was a form of love. He showed us in a radical way not the love solely of Being but also of more apparently menial things, of everything that touched his mind—and his heart.That is why there’s no system, no hard center to his work, but a series of fundamental intuitions.</p> <p>Strangely enough, Nietzsche brings to my mind the memory of al-Hallaj, though the (Islamic) mysticism of the latter can appear to be at the opposite end of Nietzsche’s views…</p>