A Harvest Moon With Some Nietzsche

I sat along the lake just before sunset yesterday to watch the harvest moon rise over the water. The waves had recently thrown up a dank grassy detritus on the concrete shore. I like that smell better than the smell of pure concrete.

The moon escaped a narrow band of clouds along the horizon shortly after moonrise. One of my favorite things is the full moon rising in a clear sky at sunset. I get a sort of mystical feeling that I am at home even though I know I am not at home.

My conscious mind hovered around some of the Nietzsche I'd been reading during the day. I started the day by reading his On the Genealogy of Morals, but it quickly drove me to reading his Beyond Good and Evil. That is odd in itself since I've read it twice, the last time only a few months ago. Upon starting to reread Beyond Good and Evil the book seemed entirely new to me. I suppose it was because when I read it before I was not specifically thinking about the nature of certainty and what Nietzsche had to say about it. Don't laugh. I can be that stupid.

I could cite almost every page of Beyond Good and Evil but I'll settle for this passage:

After having looked long enough between the philosopher's lines and fingers, I say to myself: by far the greater part of conscious thinking must still be included among instinctive activities, and that goes even for philosophical thinking. We have to relearn here, as one has had to relearn about heredity and what is "innate." As the act of birth deserves no consideration in the whole process and procedure of heredity, so "being conscious" is not in any decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive: most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts.

Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life. For example, that the definite should be worth more than the indefinite, and mere appearance worth less than "truth"--such estimates might be, in spite of their regulative importance for us, nevertheless mere foreground estimates, a certain kind of niaiserie which may be necessary for the preservation of just such beings as we are. Supposing, that is, that not just man is the "measure of things"-

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part One, 3, translated by Walter Kaufmann.

A lone sailboat passed below the moon riding low above the horizon when I rose to go from the lake. I felt as if I could sail to the horizon to touch the orange disk hanging in the sky.

Later on, I was writing at my table with nothing but the glow of the computer screen and the city lights illuminating my apartment. The moon snuck between the tall buildings, and bathed me in its light. For a few moments, I felt certain I was someone better and more holy than who I am.