Monday, October 15, 2007

Happy Nietzsche's Birthday

NIETZSCHE CARD, 10-15-2007

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Of course this year our special guest must be Marcel Proust:

. . we have to rediscover, to reapprehend, to make ourselves fully aware of that reality, remote from our daily preoccupations, from which we separate ourselves by an even greater gulf as the conventional knowledge which we substitute for it grows thicker and more impermeable, that reality which it is very easy for us to die without ever having known and which is, quite simply, our life (vi, 298) ... This work of the artist, this struggle to is a process exactly the reverse of that which, in those everyday lives which we live with our gaze averted from ourselves, is at every moment being accomplished by vanity and passion and the intellect, and habit too, when they smother our true impressions, so as entirely to conceal them from us, beneath a whole heap of verbal concepts and practical goals which we falsely call life… Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs . . .

--IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME vi, 298, 299-300


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