The Socrates Express
- Автор: Вейнер Эрик
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
- Жанр: География, путевые заметки
Электронная книга - «The Socrates Express». Краткое содержание книги:
We contemplate for the same reasons we travel: to see the world from a different perspective, to unearth hidden beauty and find new ways of being. We want to learn how to embrace wonder. Face regrets. Sustain hope.
Eric Weiner, *New York Times* bestselling author of *The Geography of Bliss* , combines his twin passions for philosophy and global travel in a pilgrimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from philosophers around the world, from Marcus Aurelius to Arthur Schopenhauer, Confucius to Montaigne. Traveling by train (the most thoughtful mode of transport) he traversed thousands of miles, making stops in Athens, Delhi,...
I am pleased though not surprised when I learn how closely the movie parallels an enthralling, mind-boggling theory posited more than a century ago by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is the bad boy of Western philosophy. The delinquent too smart and prescient to ignore. Much as we’d like to dismiss him as crazy or anti-Semitic or misguided, Nietzsche was none of these. He was, and is, the most seductive, the most inevitable, of philosophers.
I arrive in Sils-Maria 124 years after Nietzsche. I see why he liked it. The gingerbread houses, authentic as they are adorable; the air, sharp and clear; and, everywhere I look, the Alps, stretching skyward. If there is such a thing as Swiss dirt, I see no evidence of it. Even the trash cans are spotless.
I walk the few yards from my hotel to the small house where Nietzsche lived. At the time, a shop selling tea and spices and other staples occupied the ground floor. Nietzsche rented a room on the second floor. It’s been faithfully preserved, furnished simply, as it was in Nietzsche’s day, with a narrow bed, a small writing desk, an Oriental rug, a kerosene lamp.
Simple, as I learned in Japan, need not mean lacking. Simple can be beautiful, and there’s an elegant, aesthetically pleasing quality to the room. Nietzsche chose the wallpaper himself. Like Sei Shōnagon, he found beauty in the small. “We want to be the poets of our life—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters,” he wrote.
Nietzsche craved routine. He woke early, took a cold bath, and then sat down for a monkish breakfast: raw eggs, tea, an aniseed biscuit. During the day, he wrote and walked. In the evening, between seven and nine, he sat still in the dark. An admirably rigid routine, but hardly heroic. Where, I wonder, is the philosophical daredevil, the aeronaut of the spirit?
Physically, Nietzsche was no superhero, as the black-and-white photos on display here attest. They portray a wisp of a person, more mustache than man. He had large, dark eyes that made an impression on people—none more so than Lou Salomé, the alluring Russian writer and iconoclast who broke Nietzsche’s heart. His eyes, she recalled, “had none of the searching, blinking quality which make so many short-sighted persons look unconsciously intrusive.” Instead, she says, his defective eyesight “lent his features a very special kind of magic, for instead of reflecting changing impressions from outside, all they rendered was what was going on deep down within him.” The mustache, bushy and Bismarckian, enhanced the opacity Nietzsche cultivated. It tricked people into thinking he was someone he was not.
One of the few philosophers to celebrate health as a virtue, Nietzsche enjoyed precious little himself. From age thirteen, Nietzsche suffered from migraine headaches that, along with a panoply of other ailments, plagued him throughout life. His terrible eyesight worsened over the years. He suffered fits of vomiting that lasted hours. Some days he couldn’t get out of bed at all.
He tried many medical interventions and, for someone otherwise so skeptical, was remarkably susceptible to quackery. One doctor prescribed a regiment of nothingness: “no water, no soup, no vegetables, no bread.” Nothing, that is, except the leeches he applied to Nietzsche’s earlobes.
Nietzsche felt death’s shadow keenly. His father died at age thirty-six. “Softening of the brain,” the doctors said. (Cancer, most likely.) Nietzsche feared a similar fate awaited him. References to impending doom pepper his correspondence. His books are written in the urgent prose of a man who knew his days were numbered.
He was almost superhumanly prolific, publishing fourteen books from 1872 to 1889. Without exception, the books sold poorly. Nietzsche paid the printing costs of some himself. The world was not ready to hear what the “hermit of Sils” had to say.
Personally, I would have quit after the third flop. Not Nietzsche. He persisted, not even slowing down, despite the rejection and the physical ailments. How did he do it? What did he know?
The house contains a small library, books by and about Nietzsche, and a few scores, testimony to his aborted musical ambitions. What intrigues me most are the letters. He wrote a lot about the weather and was extremely sensitive to meteorological nuances. Wherever he went, he noted temperature and barometric pressure, recorded rainfall and dew points. Cloudy days depressed him. He craved “a sky that is eternally cheerful.”
He found it in Sils-Maria. If it’s possible for a place to save a life, Sils-Maria saved Nietzsche’s. Yes, he still experienced headaches and stomach upset but these bouts were far milder. The Alpine air calmed his nerves, too. He could breathe again.
He birthed his biggest ideas here. It was in Sils-Maria that he pronounced, “God is dead,” one of philosophy’s most brazen assertions. It was in Sils-Maria that he conjured his dancing prophet and alter ego, Zarathustra, a fictionalized version of the Persian prophet who descends from the mountain to share wisdom with humanity. And it was in Sils-Maria that his greatest thought—“the thought of thoughts”—struck him with a ferocity he did not think possible.
It was August 1881. Nietzsche was on one of his usual walks along the shores of Lake Silvaplana, high above sea level, “6,000 feet beyond man and time.” He had just come across “a mighty pyramidal block of stone” when the thought of thoughts arrived unbidden—an earthquake of an idea that led to a rethinking of the universe and our place in it, as well as a major motion picture starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. The idea hit him hard and fast, heated and expanded to unimaginable size. Only later did it cool and congeal into these words.
Imagine you are visited in the dead of night by a demon, who says to you: “This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence—and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again—and you with it, you dust of dust!
Nietzsche is not speaking of reincarnation. You do not return as the same soul in a different body. It is the “self-same you” that returns, again and again. You do not, like Phil Connors of Groundhog Day, recall your previous iterations. You cannot, like Phil, edit your recurring life. Everything has happened before, and it will happen again, exactly the same way, forever. All of it. Even seventh grade.
How would you respond to the demon? asks Nietzsche. Would you “gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? Or would you bow down before the demon and say, ‘You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine!’ ”
Nietzsche called his idea Eternal Recurrence of the Same. It enthralled him. It terrified him. He walked, practically ran, back to his simple room in Sils-Maria, and for the next few months, despite excruciating head and eye pain, he could think of little else.
I wake to another day in Sils-Maria. I brush my teeth, just like yesterday, and splash cold water on my face. I shave, nicking my cheek, again, and tumble downstairs to the breakfast room—the same room where Nietzsche dined regularly. I see the same hostess as yesterday and the day before and who, once again, tolerates my garbled guten morgen and seats me at the same table by the same window.
At the buffet station, I find the same choices: the same hunks of Jarlsberg, the same flaky croissants, and the same fruit salad arranged in the same perfect semicircle. I order a coffee just as I did yesterday and the day before and pour precisely the same amount of milk. As I stand to leave, the hostess says, “Have a nice day,” just as she did yesterday and the day before and, once again, I think but do not say, Yes, but not too nice.