I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
I’ve only briefly surveyed Alexander Nehamas’ ideas in his book Nietsche, Life as Literature. To understand it better, I reviewed parts of this video interview with Nehamas, starting at 1:29:10, “Nietzsche on Seeing Life as a Literary Work.”
Nehamas suggests that Nietzsche views life not as a text to be read objectively, but as a narrative to be constructed. He draws an analogy to Marcel Proust’s work. With Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, you are reading a book which tells you how this person has wasted his whole life. But at the very end he writes, “Maybe I will be able to write this book.” And you realize that he has — it is the book you are reading. This is a kind of instantiation of Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, says Nehamas.
What counts, to Nietzsche, is if your life accomplishes something unique, something that no one else has done. He raises aesthetic values alongside the moral, without entirely dispensing with morality. Nietzsche suggests that traditional moral values can be a hindrance to greatness.
Nehamas uses the example of Gauguin, who left his wife and five children in Denmark to move to Tahiti in pursuit of his art. Then he went on to paint masterpieces inspired by Tahiti. Was it okay for him to abandon his family because of dedication to his painting practice? Would it have been okay if he hadn’t produce masterpieces?
Nehamas says, “Great men have their virtues and their vices.” He says that when you’re trying to establish a new state, you’re revolting against the old one. You may need to cheat and lie. But once you have established a new regime, such actions are destabilizing. This is too close to home with the current U.S. leadership, where grift, crime, lies, and crudeness are deployed in the effort to ostensibly make this country great, although the real impetus seems to be to enrich the president and his family and cronies.
Nehamas suggests most people want to be average, and that is the safest way to live. It is the weak and the strong who are in danger. The weak get left behind and consumed by predators, but the strong often lead into dangerous territory.
Nietzsche called for active construction of your identity, with attention not just to being a good person (morality) but to aesthetic style and individual uniqueness.
Actively constructing my own identity
I’m weary of rehashing other people’s ideas.
In Unmortifying oneself, Jessica Dore writes of French literary theorist Roland Barthes:
Reading others’ descriptions of how Barthes taught, it feels possible to work in a way that is rigorous, that honors the aesthetic beauty in the texts that one loves, that respects those who’ve come before, that is not overly precious about referencing and cross-referencing without expertise, that is driven by “no motor other than desire” and that aligns with the vow Barthes himself took, of “‘always placing a fantasy’ at the origin of his teaching.” Which I think was to say that the work must be and stay personal.
I find it difficult not to become “overly precious about referencing and cross-referencing without expertise.” I quote famous thinkers at length, rather than developing my own frameworks of thought. I’m careful not to ever misrepresent a thinker, careful not to share ideas without studying them at length first.
I want to put some fantasy at the center of my own work, the fantasy that I, like Nietzsche or L.A. Paul or Iris Murdoch, have something unique and important to say, something that doesn’t depend on more study and more rehashing of dead people’s thoughts. The fantasy I want to put at the center: what midlife transformation really involves, in my case, transforming into someone who has something surprising, new, and insightful to say.
Curiously, this is somewhat what Nietzsche, interpreted by Nehamas, is recommending: don’t rehash what other people have done. Find new ground to tread on, to plow, to cultivate.
I can take the work of Nietzsche, of Paul, of Murdoch as inspiration, but take my own intellectual journey.
A small project
In A project will save you: How to respond to the AI job apocalypse, Rosie Spinks writes of her husband’s reaction to being laid off, the second time in a period of twelve months:
In the days immediately following, my husband instinctively did something I now see as kind of miraculous: He went to the garage and started woodworking….
In between a futile job search, he spent all of January making a beautiful record cabinet out of some leftover walnut wood he’d been hanging onto for four years. It was only once he’d finished it, with Abbey Road spinning in our living room, that I realized what he’d really done: He found a reason to get up everyday in the midst of all the other bullshit we were dealing with.
Spinks writes that “A project will save you,” is her husband’s line, and something he’s said to her about writing through the years. She writes, “If you have something to come back to, something that’s yours, you can put up with a lot of other bullshit.”
A creative person needs a project. I have this 1000-day project but I need another project, something less sprawling in time, with a focus on producing value that I deliberately share.
I keep thinking, “I want to write a book,” and I wrote the draft of a book about romance and dating at midlife, before deciding I didn’t want to publish it. Instead, I’d like to write a book about midlife transformation.
But that’s too grand a vision. Instead, I’m going to write a short downloadable ebook with 11 things I’ve learned about midlife transformation.
Here’s my working list of those eleven things:
- It takes a lot longer than you think it should. It plays out on its own timeline.
- You might come out the other side unrecognizable to yourself (and others).
- It’s ok if you only have the vaguest notion of who you want to become, who you might become.
- Don’t expect the transformation to be comfortable. Welcome the discomfort. Relish the discomfort.
- Be willing to question societal demands on you.
- Grieve your losses, then move on, leaving them in the past.
- It’s ok to do something weird.
- Move in the direction of your imperfections.
- Affirm your life in its beauty and its mud.
- You have to deconstruct and disintegrate before something new can be built.
- Live life as though you are the protagonist of a great story.