Exhausting day. Good Morning Bedlam proved to be a charm, a small venue producing an intimate experience–conversation and fellowship throughout. Three hours kayaking on the Au Sable River in the morning–ten and a half miles of river, and now I am spent. I relate the matter to the ending of the Upper Mississippi River adventure. My quest for fulfilling personal time, including all driving time dedicated to ‘The Enlightenment; The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790’ by Ritchie Robertson–a challenging engagement I feel driven to conclude–all amounts to depletion. It is time for sleep, hopefully enriching rejuvenation. Tomorrow is a day with an academic advisor–the beginning of my quest to complete my bachelor’s degree in order to retire into teaching high school literature/history, aiming for inner-city schools. I ended the day with a Rosary at the Our Lady of the Woods Shrine. The La Salette statue drew me in for prayer. I find the statue unique, insightful, fitting the moment.
God is truly blessing my vacation experiences. Less than two weeks ago the Upper Mississippi adventure and now this birthday weekend the surprises keep coming. I decided to drive to northern Michigan to see the band of highly talented young adults Good Morning Bedlam whom I saw in Marshfield, Wisconsin. The unique musicians/singers are led by a husband/wife powerhouse. The youngsters I knew nothing about fascinated me. I have been listening to them ever since. Investigating online I saw they put together a northern Michigan tour. Instantly, I knew it would be a perfect birthday gift to myself. With very little effort, I threw together a weekend road trip. In experience, it so far has proved stunning.
When I was visiting the Upper Peninsula, participating in a guided tour of Grand Island, the tour guide praised an ‘Old Growth Forest’ park in Grayling, Michigan: Hartwick Pines State Park. The state park is close to the Sunday afternoon concert, so I added it to the itinerary. Now the visit is complete. The park proved majestic as the gentleman mentioned, yet I found something unexpected. There is an impressive logging museum on the site. The historic museum was built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, a depression era federal government project providing jobless impoverished men jobs.
The museum does a thorough job of detailing and providing relics from the lumber industry that swept through Michigan. The intensive lumberjacking effort by a young United States is something marvelous to wrap one’s mind around. Beyond the lumber industry, the museum does an excellent job of allowing visitors to empathize and understand the lives of individuals. Sleeping quarters are on display as well as items of entertainment, the words to lumberjacking songs, details of the hazards, and the various jobs men worked. More than lumberjacks, there were teamsters, land surveyors—plotting and mapping territories, railroad men, river jockeys, blacksmiths, doctors and more. It was western Christian civilization advancing into the wilderness. There could be accusations of exploitation and other critical views, yet I do not like to judge history. It is what it is. We learn from it and grow. We don’t judge and cast dispersion upon those trying to survive, even if some were prospering dramatically beyond others. The lumberjack song pokes fun at the fact the company owners were the only ones getting rich. Hartwick Pines State Park was a thrill.
Then my second surprise enroute to the Good Morning Bedlam concert occurred as I search for a place to attend Mass. I found an intriguing shrine in Mio, Michigan I pursued. I rented a room at the Mio Motel—in fact I am typing right now on its charming balcony. Suffice to say, the Our Lady of the Woods Shrine turned out to be a blessing. Another gem built in previous times—the 1950s. I was able to attend an outdoor vigil Mass, while planning a morning Rosary tomorrow. Humble, friendly, small-town people. God is good. I am exhausted and going to try to organize photo galleries. I am still not pleased, though acknowledging improvement, with my website image offerings.
Maximizing the plenitude of PTO provided by Pfizer, I put together a seven-day vacation centered upon the Upper Mississippi River. It is an area I enjoyed immensely when driving semi-truck over-the-road. I also spent time in the area with Father David Mary and the Franciscans when we visited the seminary at the University of Saint Mary in Winona. Four states: Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin were explored. The cities included: the Quad Cities, Muscatine, Dubuque, Prairie du Chien, La Crosse, and Winona. I know the Great River Road—a route traveling from the origins of the Mississippi in Minnesota down to its eventual end in Louisiana is popular with driving tourists, especially Harley riders, yet I did not stick to the route, following a randomness and highways I vaguely remembered: Illinois Hwy 84, Iowa Hwy 52, Wisconsin Hwy 35, and Minnesota Hwy 14.
Beyond me, this paragraph from Nietzsche’s ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ stimulates many thoughts, feelings, and dissolutions—apophatic tendencies prevailing. Once again, my return to college to complete a bachelor’s degree at sixties years of age motivates my reading pursuit. In comparison, I reflect upon the education of the author. The German world at that time experienced an apotheosis in human thought. Nietzsche, a philologist studying languages concentrating upon literature (ancient texts and the Bible)—a branch of linguistics, personally experienced a scholarly life beyond anything I could imagine as a midwestern United States born and raised man of the late twentieth century moving into the twenty-first. The pursuit of ideas had been elevated in a manner, while reaching back into antiquity, I propose, unfathomable to my mind. I can touch, prod and poke, yet I cannot embrace or properly dissect. I do not possess the abilities. Still, there is something there. I think of the book ‘Nietzsche and the Nazis’ by Stephen Hicks—an exploration on Nietzsche’s philosophical influence upon German National Socialism. Mr. Hick’s puts forth that the German world at that time was the highest educated culture in the world. Nazism was not a populist movement driven by the common mob. It was academic and given birth by highly educated minds. It is important to understand that the infamous Nazi Book Burnings were conducted by student groups–not government officials nor laboring mobs. I do not want to exploit history, exercising an academic curse of our times: Presentism. History, salvation history as I recognize it, is a complex issue better to be studied than used for justifying one’s opinions. The point I am establishing is that Nietzsche was a man possessing an intellect, skills—I marvel that he played piano and wrote music (his legendary friendship with Wagner), and education that far surpass my own. I respect and admire the fact. With the last name Hofbauer, I romantically look back at his time, and the time of other thinkers and artists during the remarkable European and burgeoning United States post-Enlightenment epoch and the onslaught of the industrial revolution. To throw caution more to the wind before posting this paragraph, I think it is important to focus upon the man. What type of life did Nietzsche live? Was he a happy man? I was struck by his harsh criticism, using the word dangerous, in regard to the religious ‘neurosis’ of prescribing solitude. It made me scratch my head as he was a solitary man himself. Raised amongst many, families at that time always possessing numerous members involving husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, nephews, nieces—individuals of all ages and familial interconnectedness were a part of one’s upbringing, yet Nietzsche lived his adult life alone—embracing the very lifestyle he would insult religion for, in his mind, promoting. He had friendships, yet no marriage, no children. Friendships were harshly ended. The most memorable romantic experience ended with the woman partnering off with an acquaintance. Few men were more alone than Nietzsche. The classes he taught were notoriously empty. His later healthy years he lived wandering about Europe, unable to settle into a stationary state. He did not repose into an idyllic home, retiring into his ideas and work as Hermann Hesse and C.J. Jung did. One possibility of a modern thinker who shared his solitary, social misfit, life is Schopenhauer. The superior intellect and advanced education never produced a stable life. He was forced from academia due to poor health in his early thirties. He endured public brutal intellectual confrontations. The scholar Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff academically used the words: ‘rape of historical facts and all historical method’ when criticizing the early writing of Nietzsche. He harshly rebuked Nietzsche as a soothsayer, exaggerator and historically uninformed, one who should “gather tigers and panthers about his knees, but not the youth of Germany.” For myself, reading every word he writes insinuates a viciously critical rage being unleashed, while evoking the spirit of a possessed prophet—something striving for an unnatural brilliant perversion. There is no peace. He was a man who would reason and will his way into a surpassing of everything before him. Dramatically and famously, Nietzsche was forced into an asylum due to a mental breakdown during the end of his life. I think it is important to consider his use of prescribed drugs, notably the sedative Chloral hydrate, also recognized as a hypnotic. The complexities of the man are immense, yet honestly, being one myself, I have always delighted in walking contradictions. I must mention the movie by the remarkable Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr ‘The Turin Horse’ as my romantic, poetic envisioning of the man Nietzsche and his influence upon the world, and then overall the world in comparison to the singular scholar/writer Nietzsche. A lasting effect of Nietzsche is surreally played out in the film. The fierce, wind howling, undefined daily life of common peasants and their horse. The horse that Nietzsche would witness being whipped thus inducing his mental breakdown. Life is brutal. Ultimate victory is a rare thing. I think of my own life, the mistakes, the bad decisions, the curse I have been onto myself in many ways. Experientially, I reflect upon what works and what does not work. I know that I have been blessed with a strong prayer life, the ability to utilize prayer as a strengthening device. It is a gift. I am grateful. I know where I belong within prayer. It is intuitive. It is centered within grace, guided by Catholic teachings, while also influenced by others. Experiencing ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ I found solace in Nietzsche identifying psychology as the most efficacious science. I felt a ‘yes’ being confirmed. The idea that the healing of individuals is of the upmost importance. My dabbling in the arts and reasoning are usurped without the slightest consideration. I am humble regarding my limitations. Reasoning will never be my guiding force. I doubt myself to the extreme. I doubt others in the same regard.
Has it been observed to what extent outward idleness, or semi-idleness, is necessary to a real religious life (alike for its favourite microscopic labour of self-examination, and for its soft placidity called “prayer,” the state of perpetual readiness for the “coming of God”), I mean the idleness with a good conscience, the idleness of olden times and of blood, to which the aristocratic sentiment that work is DISHONOURING—that it vulgarizes body and soul—is not quite unfamiliar? And that consequently the modern, noisy, time-engrossing, conceited, foolishly proud laboriousness educates and prepares for “unbelief” more than anything else? Among these, for instance, who are at present living apart from religion in Germany, I find “free-thinkers” of diversified species and origin, but above all a majority of those in whom laboriousness from generation to generation has dissolved the religious instincts; so that they no longer know what purpose religions serve, and only note their existence in the world with a kind of dull astonishment. They feel themselves already fully occupied, these good people, be it by their business or by their pleasures, not to mention the “Fatherland,” and the newspapers, and their “family duties”; it seems that they have no time whatever left for religion; and above all, it is not obvious to them whether it is a question of a new business or a new pleasure—for it is impossible, they say to themselves, that people should go to church merely to spoil their tempers. They are by no means enemies of religious customs; should certain circumstances, State affairs perhaps, require their participation in such customs, they do what is required, as so many things are done—with a patient and unassuming seriousness, and without much curiosity or discomfort;—they live too much apart and outside to feel even the necessity for a FOR or AGAINST in such matters. Among those indifferent persons may be reckoned nowadays the majority of German Protestants of the middle classes, especially in the great laborious centres of trade and commerce; also the majority of laborious scholars, and the entire University personnel (with the exception of the theologians, whose existence and possibility there always gives psychologists new and more subtle puzzles to solve). On the part of pious, or merely church-going people, there is seldom any idea of HOW MUCH good-will, one might say arbitrary will, is now necessary for a German scholar to take the problem of religion seriously; his whole profession (and as I have said, his whole workmanlike laboriousness, to which he is compelled by his modern conscience) inclines him to a lofty and almost charitable serenity as regards religion, with which is occasionally mingled a slight disdain for the “uncleanliness” of spirit which he takes for granted wherever any one still professes to belong to the Church. It is only with the help of history (NOT through his own personal experience, therefore) that the scholar succeeds in bringing himself to a respectful seriousness, and to a certain timid deference in presence of religions; but even when his sentiments have reached the stage of gratitude towards them, he has not personally advanced one step nearer to that which still maintains itself as Church or as piety; perhaps even the contrary. The practical indifference to religious matters in the midst of which he has been born and brought up, usually sublimates itself in his case into circumspection and cleanliness, which shuns contact with religious men and things; and it may be just the depth of his tolerance and humanity which prompts him to avoid the delicate trouble which tolerance itself brings with it.—Every age has its own divine type of naivete, for the discovery of which other ages may envy it: and how much naivete—adorable, childlike, and boundlessly foolish naivete is involved in this belief of the scholar in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the unsuspecting, simple certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man as a lower and less valuable type, beyond, before, and ABOVE which he himself has developed—he, the little arrogant dwarf and mob-man, the sedulously alert, head-and-hand drudge of “ideas,” of “modern ideas”!
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!
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