Nietzsche
“One thing is needful.—-To “give style” to one’s character—-a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye.”
October 25, 2004
Do pale girls with dyed black hair and oversized mugs of coffee really read Nietzsche in coffee shops? Yup, they sure do, and I met one earlier tonight.
I was sick of editing at home, so I packed up my laptop and lugged it down the street to continue my work in the local coffee shop. I ordered a coffee and took the only empty seat at the end of a big, wooden table, directly across from a quasi-goth waif with stylish, oversized glasses. We sat facing each other for at least an hour, maybe longer, before we both stopped to stretch and caught each other's eye.
"Doing a little light reading, I see," I said, nodding to the Nietzsche book.
"Yeah," she laughed, waving her hand over the book as if to shoo it away.
"You reading that for a class?" I asked, assuming she must've been.
She nodded.
"What's the class?"
She mentioned the professor, as if it were someone I should know, and said it was a class about Nietzsche's influence on literature.
"That sounds interesting.”
She thought I was making a joke. “No, really. What are you going to school for?"
"My Master's Degree."
"In what, though?"
"Humanities," she said, looking slightly embarrassed.
"I hear there's good money in that racket."
She smiled and laughed knowingly.
"I'm sure you get asked this a lot, but what are you hoping to do? Teach?"
"I'm not sure. I'm hoping to eventually get my PhD."
Putting off real life for as long as possible. I don't blame her.
She asked what I was working on, and I told her. Strangely enough, she didn't ask what my novel was about, but rather asked how long it was.
"In words? It’s not finished yet. I have close to a hundred thousand right now, but I’m shooting for around seventy-five.”
"How many pages is that?"
"Hard to say, really, since there are so many ways to format a book — tricks to make it longer or shorter. But figure it's somewhere around three hundred.”
"I bet that feels good," she said.
“What?”
“Cutting it down.”
“It does, actually.”
“I wish it were as easy to do with real life as it is with a book. To cut out entire episodes of my life, not that would feel good.”
“Yeah, well, in the words of our pal, Nietzsche, ‘To live is to suffer.’ At least I think that was Nietzsche. If not, it may as well have been.”
She laughed and nodded.
“But here’s the thing, it's hard to tell what's worthwhile and what's not. I’m finding that if I cut something out, then something that happens later doesn’t make sense, and I have to put it back in. Besides, if you cut out all the embarrassing and painful parts, you’d be left with a boring story. Or a boring life.”
“True.”
After a short, somewhat awkward silence, we both went back to the work we’d been doing. Gradually, the coffeeshop got too loud for me to think and I oacked up.
“Good luck with school,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said. “Good luck with your book. And with life.”
“Ha, thanks, you too.”
