There was this one time I was on the phone with John, when I walked through the base­ment hall­way on Daly, past Jonathan’s drum kit, and paused at the frame of his door.

“You’re so mega­lo­maniACal”, I told him.

“No, no, Jeff, it’s mega­lomaNIacal”, he curtly responded.

And I knew. And John knew. And I knew that John knew that I had sim­ply thrown more fuel on the fire, I had some­how added to his lim­it­less ego. I could see the smirk on his face through the phone, as if Anderson him­self was there with one of his close ups in my brain.

When approach­ing any­thing new, as a human, aside from bias, there is always the dan­ger of relat­ing even the fur­thest idea to the self. Everything is sub­ject to inter­pre­ta­tion, of course, and I’ve always strongly believed in the impor­tance of inter­pre­ta­tion. However, when inter­pre­ta­tion stretches too far, the entire learn­ing process can become per­verted, an under­stand­ing based on nothing.

An exam­ple: after the Nietzsche’s death, his sis­ter secured the rights to his pub­li­ca­tions. She later mar­ried a leader of the ger­man anti-Semitic move­ment, and made dis­torted pub­li­ca­tions of his works. The Nazi’s wel­comed his ideas, even­tu­ally build­ing a mon­u­ment for him. Yet Nietzsche him­self wrote about his strong oppo­si­tion to racism, and his con­trast with the German Nationalistic movement.

And such is how we, as humans, see our­selves in almost every­thing. I admit that at times I’m guilty of such a thing myself, when I see my life in the char­ac­ters of movies, when I read my sto­ries in other peo­ples books. So I start Thus Spoke Zarathustra with trep­i­da­tion, with the hope­ful aware­ness that I will be able to be open-minded in what I learn.

It’s ironic that Nietzsche had pare­sis when he wrote his book, and was most likely suf­fer­ing from delu­sions of grandeur at the time, although how much it actu­ally affected him is debatable.

Perhaps the best that one can do is to keep a work in mind as inspi­ra­tion, and not as an influence.