The pen scribbles

My pen scribbles: this is hell!
Have I been damned to have to scribble? -
I dip it boldly in the well
and write broad streams of inky drivel.
See how it flows, so full, so pure!
See how each thing I try succeeds!
The text's not lucid, to be sure -
So what? What I write no one reads.


This is a poem from Nietzshe's Gay Science and seems as good a way as any to start my blog. Nietzsche had been a classicist - a brilliant classicist. He could have had a comfortable life and the respect of his colleagues. Instead, he left a prestigious career and decided to pursue his own truth. "I have left the house of scholars and slammed the door shut behind me", as he says in his Zarathustra. Outside of the libraries, he found fresh air and happiness, and, after recovering from what would probably now be called an earlier than expected mid-life crisis, he left the old science (Altertumswissenschaft) far behind and created a new science whose distinctive quality was its joyfulness (frohliche Wissenschaft). Nietzsche went on to become the nineteenth-century's greatest thinker, psychologist and stylist - a blogger avant la lettre.

Is it really necessary to slam the door shut on the the house of scholars in order to discover a science that is joyful? I thought for a while that this might be the case, but now I am more optimistic. Some of the reasons why will doubtless emerge as I write these entries.