—Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans—we know well enough how remote our place is. “Neither by land nor by water will you find the road to the Hyperboreans”: even Pindar, in his day, knew that much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death—our life, our happiness…. We have discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it?—The man of today?—“I don’t know either the way out or the way in; I am whatever doesn’t know either the way out or the way in”—so sighs the man of today…. This is the sort of modernity that made us ill,—we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that “forgives” everything because it “understands” everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such south-winds!… We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding out where to direct our courage. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our fate—it was the fulness, the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happiness of the weakling, from “resignation”… There was thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast—for we had not yet found the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal…” (Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

What I’m curious about is why, where Nietzsche sees happiness, you still seem to perceive danger and frustration. I tied the above quote – specifically “a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal…” – in with your comments on Freud’s death drive in ‘Making it with Death’ (briefly, as a reminder(?), the section beginning):

The death drive is not a desire for death, but rather a hydraulic tendency to the dissipation of intensities. In its primary dynamics it is utterly alien to everything human, not least the three great pettinesses of representation, egoism, and hatred. The death drive is Freud’s beautiful account of how creativity occurs without the least effort, how life is propelled into its extravagances by the blindest and simplest of tendencies, how desire is no more problematic than a river’s search for the sea…

… To read Nietzsche as “Yea (to life/general yea-saying), a Nay (to the modern), a straight line (the evolutionary line that connects), a goal (death in the appropriate way)…

So is the continuing presence of ‘the modern’ your concern? Does it link into where elsewhere you talk about the:

persistence of the Keynesian-flexifascist megastate is a kind of cosmic horror, hideously suggestive of the possibility that certain profound structures of reality are obscurely aligned with crushing tides of triumphant mindlessness.

In other words what Nietzsche took as fleeting is ever more powerful? And how can that be/what does it mean?

P.S. Does Duzsl have a chapter on re-balancing day-to-day life – how it is possible to work (for money), continue to eat, talk to loved ones etc? I’m doing better and all, but some sort of primer/inbetween period coverage, you know?

You are still a philosopher then! OK, you’re building an army at the same time, but you’re teaching ‘method’, no? You could ‘just’ be creating, but you’re teaching it too. So I could go on forever with questions and sleepy thoughts, but I’ll resist. One thing from a wider section (from the whole thing):

I don’t ever want to forget it.

Umm… Wow. Yes.

P.S. I posted something for you on the Death on the Nile thread by the way. If a Madagascar Cat is always a Madagascar Cat, what’s an Egyptian Cat?

“A mentor and close friend of Barker’s, Archaeo-Ethnographer Echidna Stillwell, had built the foundations, or excavated them.” That line by itself is worthy of the blind old Argentine.