Your wake up call

“He who cannot obey himself will be commanded.” In this episode of Becoming Übermensch, we share two practical exercises that build strength, self-control, and embodied awareness, including a simple but potent practice from Nietzsche’s philosophy that will hone your self-control. 

Most self-improvement advice tells you to accept yourself. Nietzsche challenges you to become yourself. Subscribe and get on board for an extraordinary journey.

This week's track: If We Don’t Make It, by UNKLE, the Ronin Throwdown version

https://youtu.be/5WfvrmDL0Us?si=iUswe1YFjA6vXgbO

https://open.spotify.com/track/3wjDrbipwo9dB9Ewt9gqEI?si=8b9491e2fd9a41de

https://music.apple.com/gb/album/r%C5%8Dnin-i/1655379682 

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Transcript

‘he who cannot obey himself will be commanded.’ That’s from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra—the chapter entitled: Of self overcoming.

We discussed self-overcoming last time and we are going to begin today with a simple exercise you can carry out routinely everyday that will gradually strengthen your own power of self-control. Consider this push-ups for your will power, but it’s not nearly as hard as push-ups—or rather, you can make it as easy or hard as you please. Let’s start easy though because this exercise is called small gymnastics. This, in fact, will be the first of two practices I will share with you today—how’s that for value!?

Small gymnastics is based on the following passage from The Wanderer and his shadow, no 305.

“The Most Necessary Gymnastic. —Through deficiency in self-control in small matters a similar deficiency on great occasions slowly arises. Every day on which we have not at least once denied ourselves some trifle is turned to bad use and a danger to the next day. This gymnastic is indispensable if we wish to maintain the joy of being our own master.”

So, starting nice and easy, in the normal course of your day, when you want something, some treat: food, rest, entertainment, a beer, anything you enjoy, whatever it is, make yourself wait a little. Let’s say you feel hungry, so you want lunch. Just make yourself hold out a while before you indulge the impulse. By resisting it, you are asserting conscious control over yourself; you are acting as master of your impulses rather than being their puppet. 

If this sounds a little like training a dog, it is. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche refers to these impulses as the “fierce dogs in your cellar”. They are fierce, because they are uncompromising in their demand for satisfaction. They are not bad, quite the opposite, they are absolutely good, we could say they have your best interests at heart—it’s just that they evolved over millions of years to promote survival in a harsh wilderness environment, not in the environment of urban modernity which has only been our living situation for a few thousand years. That means that they are, at times, the right tool in the wrong place.

So these dogs must be brought to heel, taught to obey their master rather than running amok at their own whims, but they are not to be repressed entirely. Their energy is an asset that can be directed productively. But for now, we must teach the dogs to serve their master. In the end, Nietzsche writes, they can be changed at last into “birds and sweet singers.”

So make yourself endure a trivial wait for things you enjoy. Even just for ten minutes, at first. You can up the ante by waiting with your lunch right in front of you when you are really hungry. At a later stage you may wish to push things further by denying yourself things altogether. But remember that these austerities are not punishments, quite the opposite, these disciplines should be viewed as an expression of high self-regard, they are preparatory exercises that help develop the kind of self-control that will grant you the joy of being your own master, as Nietzsche puts it. 

In the same manner, with things you don’t enjoy, make yourself bear with them a little longer, 10 minutes, an hour, it’s up to you. This is how you strengthen your conscious control of yourself. 

What is really important is to consciously feel the tension these small gymnastics create—the sense of wanting two different things at once—to eat versus to wait, to indulge versus to abstain, to stop versus to keep going. This is an uncomfortable feeling, which is why we tend to capitulate to temptations. Here, I am suggesting you observe these tensions instead, and watch what they do to your thoughts—you might experience a little argument in your head, with reasons for and against flying back and forth. Don’t yield to any arguments. Just let them occur.

It’s like that old image of the person with the devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other— a feeling of being in two minds about something. For Nietzsche, much of our frustration and disappointment with ourselves comes from our misconception of ourselves as a unity. In his psychology, each of us is a multiplicity with a horde of different impulses jostling and competing for expression. Knowing that this is the case, enables you to understand your otherwise inexplicably inconsistent behaviour, and to be able to manage it more effectively. 

“Peoples were the creators at first; only later were individuals creators. Indeed, the individual himself is still the latest creation.”

Zarathustra

It is commonly held that Nietzsche’s philosophy endorses and elevates untrammelled individualism. This, I have to tell you, is an oversimplification. The Becoming Übermensch project exists to interpret Nietzsche’s philosophy for the benefit of the individual, but, in fact, the concept of the individual, as we understand it, is problematic for Nietzsche and he certainly does not advocate individualism for everyone. This puts him at odds with our contemporary western culture, where individualism is celebrated as a universal good (if a somewhat ill-matched bedfellow of those other universal goods: equality and democracy). 

Nietzsche’s conception of the individual is a great deal more demanding than ours—ours seems to be mainly focused around individual identity as constituted by the various demographic and cultural pigeon holes we choose to slot ourselves into and the choices we make as consumers. To be an individual in the Nietzschean sense, it is not enough to affirm your membership of a particular community, or to attach yourself to some subculture, or to have the latest gadgets and status symbols, or to contrive an arresting appearance (actually, these might all be more reliable indicators of a lack of individuality)—no, the most essential characteristic of the Nietzschean individual is a rich, engaging, productive, and unique personality. But for Nietzsche, a personality is simply not a given; it is something you develop through good fortune or have to earn through dedication and work—you actually have to grow or craft yourself into a personality. He writes in WP.886, ‘We should on no account jump to the conclusion that there are many people who are personalities. Some men are but conglomerations of personalities, whilst the majority are not even one.' 

Ouch! What can he mean by this? How can he deny that we are individual personalities? Well, it is really a matter both of degree and of definition. In the Nietzschean view, most people are nothing more (or not much more) than an arbitrary product of their life conditions. Who they are, what their (quote-unquote) personality is like, is merely a reflection of their genetically inherited traits, their gender, their race, their health, their upbringing, their social class, the culture into which they were born, their environmental circumstances, the accumulated weight of general life experience, and so on—what we might call situational determinants because they are determining causes arising from our personal situations. For each of us, all these factors add up to what passes for our personalities which, as far as Nietzsche is concerned, don’t pass for personalities. To really have a personality would, ‘involve unnecessary expense, it would be a luxury in fact, it would be foolish to demand of anybody that he should be a personality. In such circumstances everybody is a channel or a transmitting vessel.’ That too is from WP.886. So, in his account, we ordinary folk are just channels or transmitting vessels for our situational determinants; all we are is their sum or confluence or consequence and nothing else! Nietzsche calls such people, ‘bound spirits’, because they are bound by their situational determinants. If, for Nietzsche, this hardly counts as a personality, it certainly does not grant us the status of being real ‘individuals’. For him, it is only a small number that have a shot at transcending their situational determinants and becoming ‘human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves’. That’s from GS.335. Only these exceptional candidates, the ones he calls ‘free spirits’, have a chance of becoming human beings worthy of the name. We shall meet these free spirits shortly.

We might ask how one can become more than one’s situational determinants if one’s situational determinants are all one is? How do you become more than the sum of your parts? This looks like an instance of that logical absurdity called pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. How is this magic trick pulled off? The answer to this question is, in a way that is not as obvious as you might at first think, right in front of you. 

At risk of being even more cryptic, here’s a further clue: in JS.270 Nietzsche encourages you to ‘become who you are.’ Your response to this bit of advice might be something like: ‘What the Hell does that even mean?! Aren’t I already who I am? Job done, right?’ Well, not for Nietzsche. It is crucial that you understand that this injunction to become who you are is not some piece of general life wisdom for the masses; it is so much more intimate, so much more specific than that—it is instead an intensely personal and private exhortation especially aimed at you.

Do you understand?… 

Let us leave this puzzle for the time being. 

Nietzsche’s fascination with exceptional individuals can be off-putting. What about us? Hasn’t he got anything valuable to teach us ordinary folk? We can’t all be geniuses, right? Perhaps not, but Nietzsche believed latent genius is far more common than we imagine. ‘Perhaps genius is not so very rare’, he muses in BGE.274—and this is from a man who had several years of intimate acquaintance with a bona fide artistic genius: the hugely influential classical composer, Richard Wagner. Of course, by any reasonable standard, Nietzsche was a genius himself too.

The problem with genius, Nietzsche thinks, is that we find it convenient to kid ourselves that it is something extraordinary, heaven-sent, an inexplicable marvel, a freak of nature—that it is born into the world full-formed rather than developed by way of effort and contingency and circumstance. This belief makes us feel better about neglecting to actively pursue our own greatness. It is the need to protect our own limited store of self-esteem that demands that we look upon the genius as a different order of human being: He writes in HH 162-163, ‘Because we think well of ourselves, but in no way expect that we could ever make the sketch to a painting by Raphael or a scene like one in a play by Shakespeare, we convince ourselves that the ability to do so is quite excessively wonderful, a quite uncommon accident, or, if we still have a religious sensibility, a grace from above’. But Nietzsche sees genius more as the product of fortuitous events than the inherent capabilities of an extraordinary individual—not just genes then, but environment, education, upbringing, expectations, experience, and—not to be underestimated—sheer bloody luck! In fact, all of genius’s contributing factors are quite obviously matters of luck. 

The healthy plant starts with a good seed, but it is where the seed falls that really determines its fate. To germinate and thrive it needs the right balance of water, nutrients, air, sunlight and often a little privation and struggle to realise its maximal vigour, health, hardiness—to be able to bear the sweetest fruit. More often than not, this delicate balance of lucky conditions is lacking, resulting in a stunted or weak plant. Just like the development of the healthy plant, the emergence of genius is decided by passive and accidental conditions (or ‘situational determinants’ as we have called them) married with latent potential. But though we have some idea of what the most conducive conditions for genius might be in a general sense, it is not at all obvious what the optimal conditions might be for any particular person. However, what is clear is that, beyond three meals a day and time and space to put in the work, there is a further indispensable ingredient: it is the activating opportunity; the fateful opening (or closing) of a door; the propitious moment when one hears what Joseph Campbell described as ‘the call to adventure’—and acts on it! 

From BGE.274:

‘It requires luck and much that is incalculable if a higher human being in whom there slumbers the solution of a problem is to act – ‘break out’ one might say – at the right time. Usually it does not happen […] Sometimes the awakening call, that chance event which gives ‘permission’ to act, comes but too late’. 

Many, and indeed most, that have the potential for some variety or semblance of genius just never get that wake-up call. 

Well, this is your wake-up call.

And yeah, sure—maybe we can’t all be geniuses in the end, but there are degrees of excellence. Better to make it half-way up the golden ladder of fulfillment than remain stuck on the ground watching the hourglass of your life run down. The only real question for you to reflect on is this: do you want to discover and realise your latent potential during your lifetime? If you never try to kindle the fire, you will never really know if there was a spark smouldering away inside you just waiting to be gently blown upon. Nietzsche, meanwhile, puts it bluntly:

‘There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius’

That’s from GS.III.1.

So that’s the good news—you have far greater potential than you realise, maybe even genius, it just requires appropriate activation. The bad news is that, according to Nietzsche, you are starting out as a meek, docile ‘herd animal’ and what’s worse, you have the mind of slave. Not just you, of course, all of us have slave-minds. We are all broken, and we are broken by design. At the heart of this pathology lies an astonishing tale—a forgotten history of the world that has been gradually buried under sand and silt and which has become lost from all memory. We will begin its careful excavation in due course. 

In this podcast series you are not going to find any comforting assurances that you are good enough as you are; that you should learn to accept yourself—to love yourself. Instead, the assumption is that you are, in large part, a pathetic creature—weak, pitiable, decadent, tame—yet something immeasurably superior can be made of you. Nietzsche doesn’t preach self-love, he advocates self-contempt. If this sounds unhealthy to the modern sensibility, one hyper-sensitised to any thought or utterance that might bruise tender feelings, one so degenerate that it describes even the most trifling of life’s trials as a ‘trauma’, consider that it is only by scorning what is flawed in you that you are able to muster the motivation to change. One must necessarily be dissatisfied in order to strive for betterment. On these terms, it is actually a higher self-love that demands that you purge those aspects of yourself that compromise your sense of your own value. You may feel that low self esteem is part of the problem you are trying to fix, and so disparaging yourself further is not the solution. I tell you that the parts of yourself that cause your low self-esteem can be considered invaders, infections, and bad programming that are not essential to you. They are accretions that can be purged from your otherwise natural and healthy organism. 

That you commit to such a goal  demonstrates that there is something in you that aspires to be worthy of your own self-respect. In Nietzsche’s words from BGE.287, ‘The noble soul has reverence for itself.’ And it is out of reverence for yourself that you refuse to abide with that within you which encumbers and frustrates you.

To be emphatic: you are not okay. Don’t listen to people who tell you that you are; although they may feel that their intentions are entirely beneficent, they are spreading a poisonous contagion—a tainted lotus that we are all compelled to consume. And yet, I feel I needn’t push this point, because I’ll wager you already know that you are not okay, that you are inadequate. How do I know this?—because, as has been said, you have the mind of a slave. Inadequacy has been carefully bred into you along with a propensity for self-doubt and shame. Do you feel it?

You are entitled to dispute this and it is certainly not impossible that you have somehow evaded this deep and pervasive social programming, in which case one wonders how it is that you’ve even managed to develop the ability to understand the words I am saying. Our culture and even our language embed the pathologies I am alluding to here. 

Even if you are able to accept that you are broken, Nietzsche’s philosophy maintains that this is not your fault and so you should feel no guilt or self-recrimination. Regardless of what you believe about yourself, how you feel about yourself, you did not choose to be what you are. Despite what the world will tell you, you are not responsible for your self as you are now constituted. You have no reason to feel ashamed. In Nietzsche’s view, shame is the greatest blight on humanity. He writes in JS.273-275:

‘Whom Do You Call Bad? 

Those who always want to put others to shame. 

What Is Most Humane? 

To spare someone shame. 

What Is the Seal of Liberation? 

To no longer be ashamed of oneself.’

And what is shame?—consider: what could be more perverse than incarcerating and torturing an innocent animal? Answer: training an innocent animal to incarcerate and torture itself.

So you are not responsible for what you are—but Nietzsche presents you with a chance to take responsibility for what you yet may be. He writes of ‘the seal of liberation’ because his is the path to the greatest freedom any human being can experience in this world. Achieving this incomparable responsibility and the freedom it guarantees is not easy or simple and a majority of us will just not be up to the challenge. 

Who are these ones then who can take responsibility? How are they identified? The Becoming Übermensch project provides the selection test: only by attempting to pull the sword from the stone can you know if it is your fate to wield it. However, even for those who find that they cannot bear this burden fully, there are still enormous benefits to be gained from sincerely making the attempt. Nietzsche offers you the chance to become worthy of your highest self.

So you can see that this is a hard road you find yourself at the start of. You will become discouraged, you will want to quit, you will question the wisdom of such a journey. To make things worse, pursuing this path may lead you through the fires of public contempt. He writes in HH.619: ‘It is a new step towards independence, once a man dares to express opinions that bring disgrace on him if he entertains them; then even his friends and acquaintances begin to grow anxious. The man of talent must pass through this fire, too; afterwards he is much more his own person.’ To immerse yourself in this new Nietzschean world, is to slough off the comforts and comforting illusions that keep the safe, everyday world together. You must endure what St. John of the Cross called ‘the dark night of the soul’. Make no mistake, this is an ordeal, a trial by fire. But Nietzsche traces us a path through and beyond the darkness of this labyrinth to a fresh, rosy-fingered dawn. 

Certainly, to unmoor oneself from the comfortable and the familiar demands courage but it brings its compensations too: in HH.Pref.4 he writes that the free spirit enjoys ‘the privilege of being permitted to live experimentally and to offer himself to adventure’. What is lost is certainty, but what is gained is liberation. Indeed, one realises that what appeared to be certain was not so at all. Only now is any kind of certainty possible! The horizon broadens, the world becomes deep again, existence is re-enchanted so that ‘we have an as yet undiscovered country ahead of us, the boundaries of which no one has ever seen, a world beyond all previous countries and corners of the ideal, a world so lavish in the beautiful, the strange, the questionable, the terrible and the divine that our curiosity about it as well as our craving to possess it has gotten carried away with itself’. That’s from JS.382.

I hope that the material we cover in this podcast over the coming weeks and months—a distillation, clarification and practical extension of Nietzsche’s work—has some of the same effects for you as it has had for me. If you follow engage with Nietzsche’s practical philosophy wholeheartedly, experimenting in a committed way, I am confident you will soon see the world very differently; it may even be turned upside down for you. In the end, I hope you will have a cheerful answer to that crucial question: can you affirm your existence eternally? 

Nietzsche puts a question to us as a species: will we continue to cling to that which we now have—the pathological, the self-defeating, a fetishisation of guilt and shame, and self-abnegation as an impossible moral injunction? Or will we aim for something higher, more edifying, more life affirming, more naïve, more beautiful? When Nietzsche writes in BGE 94 that ‘Maturity consists in having rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play’, this is as valid a sentiment for a civilisation as it is for an individual. The means to this higher life is a re-communion with a deified nature. We might concede that there are no gods, but through art we personify and sanctify all man’s life-promoting appetites and instincts, just as the ancient Greeks did. ‘I am convinced that art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life’ writes Nietzsche in BT.Pref.To Richard Wagner, and the most appropriate artistic eidolon for a new, natural, healthy ‘spiritual’ orientation is the polychromatic nature god, Dionysus—the horned Greek deity of wine, intoxication, fertility, frenzy, ecstasy! Dionysus, in all its androgynous ambiguity, its lustfulness, its prodigiousness, its fruitfulness, its ravening, its dangerousness, its violence, its profundity, its pride, its madness, its disintegration of all boundaries, its astonishing irrepressible creativity, its inexhaustible capacity for renewal. A young, naked and shameless god, dancing wildly, festooned with flowers and fruit and splattered with blood, Dionysus personifies the world itself in both its creative and destructive phases. In the Dionysian temple of nature, sex is a sacrament, laughter is pronounced holy, dancing is divine invocation, life is music—can you hear it?, art is the proper purpose of human existence, and the earth itself is inviolably sacred. Nietzsche asks—‘Will you remain faithful to the earth?’

Time for this week’s music recommendation. Nietzsche is the philosopher of music, of dancing, of the aesthetic, of feeling, and so I’m going to recommend you a track every week that reflects the emotional states I encountered during the development of this Becoming Übermensch project—tracks that have some significance. Remember, sometimes the lyrics are relevant, sometimes not so much, it’s more the feeling that’s important. 

I can invite you to have your own feeling experience, framed within the project we are exploring, making use of your own digital music platform subscription or other sources. So, reflect on what we’ve discussed today while listening to If we don’t make it, by UNKLE, and its specifically the Ronin Throwdown version . Link in the show’s description. 

Do share your thoughts on how this track made you feel—I’d be really interested in hearing about them. 

“I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance. And when I beheld my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: it was the Spirit of Gravity–through him all things are ruined.”—That’s from Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Recall from the first show that we talked about Nietzsche’s preoccupation with dancing. It’s one of the things that really sets him apart from other philosophers. That passage again from The Joyful Science: ‘to my knowledge, there is nothing to which the spirit of a philosopher more aspires than to be a good dancer’. For Nietzsche philosophy is an activity of the body, not just the brain. It’s such a wild and crazy departure from what we think of as philosophy and it’s one of the most exciting aspects of his thought. He advocates ‘…dancing in every form, being able to dance with your feet, with concepts, with words’ (TI.G,7) ; In good time, we will be unfolding Nietzsche’s philosophy of the body, but now I share with you details of a practice that is a fantastic preparation for connecting with our embodied natures—so yeah, two practicals today. It is, of course, to dance.

A word of caution first. Importantly: as with any and all experiments, exercises, or practices I share with you, it’s crucial that you take full responsibility for your choices and your experiences. I don’t recommend these things to you because I don’t know you, so if you decide to try these things, that is a decision you must take for yourself and accept full responsibility for.  If you can’t take full responsibility for yourself then I strongly recommend you don’t try them. If you can’t take full responsibility for yourself, then the truth is you are not ready for Nietzsche’s teachings. Taking responsibility for yourself is an essential step on this journey. Without it, you should expect no progress.

Dancing. For some people this will be the most natural thing in the world. For many, it will be very challenging to act in such an uninhibited way. So, the practice can be done in private behind closed doors. This may be especially important to you, because it is best done completely naked. This practice connects us with our pre-civilised, pre-conscious, animal nature, and so clothing is an encumbrance that should be eschewed. You want to feel the ground beneath your feet and the air on your skin. 

Put on a piece of music that appeals to you, the genre doesn’t matter, take a few deep breaths and just let the music take you. Explore the space. Let your body express itself. Pull some faces. It doesn’t have to be elegant and you don’t even need to keep time with the music. Don’t worry about what you look like; don’t visualise the perspective of some third party; dance like nobody is watching because nobody is watching. Stay in the moment, don’t try and choreograph yourself, just surrender your mind to the body. Feel all the movements and the physical sensations right out to your extremities. Fast or slow, wild or gentle, there is no wrong way to do this provided you prevent your mind trying to take control, which of course it will. 

With time, you will find it easier to let your consciousness go into abeyance, and your body with find its own primal way of expressing itself. This is a moving mediation. If you can do this outdoors in nature, even better. That might be something to aim for. 

Some of you may feel ridiculous dancing naked, alone. If so, lucky you. It means you are pushing yourself outside your comfort zone.

In time, with consistent practice, those inhibitions might fall away, and you will become less and less self-conscious, maybe even getting to the point where you couldn’t give a damn who is watching you. That is a good place to get to. Nietzsche talks about modern consciousness being so acute that it’s practically a disease. If you feel embarrassed performing this exercise, be assured that the more embarrassment you feel, the greater the potential benefits you can gain.

Do comment on your experiences with this practice if you try it, and let me know what music you choose.

Indulge me for a moment, esteemed listener, while I amuse myself with a Nietzschean topographical metaphor: imagine a mountain like a great craggy fang, wreathed in mist, erupting from an otherwise tranquil plain. The mountain beckons you. To reach its summit would be a truly Herculean task, but do not be intimidated—there are benefits to be won even from scaling only its lowest, gently sloping flanks. Demands on the traveller only begin to escalate with increased altitude. 

In the lowest, wooded foothills that skirt the mountain, progress will not tax you unduly. One barely notices the upward gradient. Among the fragrant pines, reflection and conversation yields insights into questions concerning all-too-human frailties including our shared propensity for sadness, self-doubt and self-sabotage. These insights can help explain and undo painful and limiting inner tensions. So at this altitude, the journey is an opportunity for coming to understand oneself better, for freeing that which is stuck, and for mending that which is broken.

Venturing further up the mountain, the trees thin out, the ground becomes steeper, the footing is less certain—care is essential now. Walking becomes scrambling. This is terrain that tests you; you experience a little vertigo as you peer back over your shoulder down at the sweep of the valley far, far below. Boldness is necessary. Higher still and you encounter that dread shade that haunts these narrow goat tracks, the Spirit of Gravity, a crippled and crippling dwarf that makes limbs heavier, breathing more laboured, who pours drops of lead into your ear and leaden thoughts into your brain. Determination is required if you are to continue; a disregard for fatigue and vertigo and the encroaching solitude. This is where you begin to find out what you are capable of. This is where your hidden potential makes itself known.

Only the most courageous and resolute continue their ascent up to the highest peaks. Up here the daylight wanes and the atmosphere becomes thin and cold. This is no longer a slog on treacherous paths because there are no paths for you now. Instead of scrambling, you must climb, ever higher, ever steeper. Your hands and feet trace the cracks in sheer rock faces, leaping from ledge to ledge, traversing knife-edge ridges where a misplaced foot means tumbling into a black, yawning abyss. Your heart pumps, as much from trepidation as from exertion. The world below is not even visible anymore. You are climbing among the clouds now. There is ice, there is snow. Sudden violent storms are liable to lash the face of the mountain without warning. The sense of loneliness is tremendous. Turning back now is no longer an option: dangerous to go back, dangerous to proceed, dangerous even to stop. At such an elevation, one begins to explore the furthest bounds of human potential. 

And yet, still an impossible distance above, you can now clearly see the summit of the mountain, free of cloud, piercing the blackness of the firmament, encircled by stars, ancient constellations whirling slowly about its axis. You discern light up there, on the summit itself, golden illumination, as if the mountain top were crowned with a fiery beacon. There dwells the human animal in its highest expression; there can be found humanity’s apotheosis.

Go as far as you will. Go as high as you dare.

But all that lies ahead of us. Let us imagine instead we are seated, you and I, at a rough-hewn table outside a weathered but welcoming lodge, a place where travellers might find a bed or buy provisions. We take some refreshment together and enjoy the morning sun on our faces before we set out. There is the smell of woodsmoke and the tumbling melody of a meltwater stream close by. Looming over this green vale and everything in it are the craggy battlements of our vast snow-crested mountain, formidable, forbidding, its spire lost in the clouds. We can just about make out our chosen path winding upwards through the wooded lower slopes, ascending sharply, finding harsh refuge in the bosom of the mountain’s ice-clad escarpments. With abundant good will and just a little apprehension, we share a simple breakfast of bread and a few pieces of cheese. 

Now then, let us gather ourselves and each take up a cup of the local wine, purple and coarse, and let us raise a toast to our divine patron, though he be utterly indifferent to all human endeavour—and then let us make a second toast before we depart: this one, to you and to your success.