Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.
-from On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense by Friedrich Nietzsche
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July 19, 2009
I am listening to a podcast lecture from Berkeley and the professor is using this text and quoted this passage and broke it down beat by beat. Were I to make another blog I would call it 'clever beast', I love that.
one of my favorite texts of Nietzsche's is the Use and Abuse of History, which I read a long time ago, lost my copy, and have since never seen it published again… I assume it is in readers, but it was some hundred pages of the most perfect rhetorical sting I have encountered.