I have been doing a lot of reading, studying, conducting an online course through Hillsdale College on Western Philosophy, preparing myself to return to school at sixty years old. The goal is to complete a Bachelor’s degree in order to retire into a position as a high school teacher. I feel it is a call from God. A lifetime of pursuing ideas, the arts, travel, and persevering though self-inflicted suffering, I am confident God is endowing me with a message to share with young minds. In the current process, trudging through Nietzsche’s ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, ideas of the philologist of complex reputation made me sit up in my seat and take serious notice—forcing me, as many of his sentences do, to reread the thoughts over and over.

In our youthful years we still venerate and despise without the art of NUANCE, which is the best gain of life, and we have rightly to do hard penance for having fallen upon men and things with Yea and Nay. Everything is so arranged that the worst of all tastes, THE TASTE FOR THE UNCONDITIONAL, is cruelly befooled and abused, until a man learns to introduce a little art into his sentiments, and prefers to try conclusions with the artificial, as do the real artists of life. The angry and reverent spirit peculiar to youth appears to allow itself no peace, until it has suitably falsified men and things, to be able to vent its passion upon them: youth in itself even, is something falsifying and deceptive. Later on, when the young soul, tortured by continual disillusions, finally turns suspiciously against itself—still ardent and savage even in its suspicion and remorse of conscience: how it upbraids itself, how impatiently it tears itself, how it revenges itself for its long self-blinding, as though it had been a voluntary blindness! In this transition one punishes oneself by distrust of one’s sentiments; one tortures one’s enthusiasm with doubt, one feels even the good conscience to be a danger, as if it were the self-concealment and lassitude of a more refined uprightness; and above all, one espouses upon principle the cause AGAINST “youth.”—A decade later, and one comprehends that all this was also still—youth!