There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them. —Friedrich Nietzsche
If history is mankind’s silver bullet for apocalyptic anxiety, and I believe it is, then writing and reading are most certainly its best delivery methods. It seems as if the exercise provided for our minds when we compose literature or engage with it in a book helps to bring us out of a gray world of loss to a light of possibility. Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Recurrence is not new to us, and most of us would agree that while our mistakes are clearly repeated, so too our triumphs are just as obviously recurring. Friedrich Nietzsche’s creation of the historical test of one’s attitude toward life, the proposal to live fully, taking all of the bad along with the good is exactly what one must do when exploring lives in worlds that came before. And that’s why writing and reading stories of our history can give us the map to lead us out of despair when we’re lost. Continue Reading
