Twenty Years Later, I Met Nietzsche Again

Twenty years ago, I read Nietzsche for the first time.

I remember little of what I understood. Most of it must have passed through me in a haze, leaving only one vivid impression: Nietzsche blazed like the sun—hot, radiant, almost too bright to face. His vision could not have been further from Schopenhauer’s pendulum swinging between pain and boredom, or Camus’s Sisyphus pushing his stone uphill only to watch it tumble down again.

His world was wilder, more imaginative, with a landscape of mountains and valleys, eagles and serpents, suns and lions, children and dancers. Zarathustra could preach solemnly one moment, erupt into mockery and laughter the next, then descend without warning into profound loneliness. He seemed less like a philosopher in his study than a man racing through the mountains—romantic, fierce, unruly, with mischief flashing through everything he touched.

So twenty years ago, I think I only saw the sun from a distance.

Twenty years later, I opened Thus Spoke Zarathustra again, and it felt completely different. This time, I was not there to look at the sun. I came carrying my own questions. I came with my own Spirit of Gravity on my back.

The Questions We Ask

When we are young, we read philosophy for answers: What is life? What is happiness? How should we live? We assume the truth is hidden in a book, waiting to be found. Twenty years later, I care less about what Nietzsche is telling me than why his words speak to me now.

Rereading him, I recognized my own struggles: loneliness, doubt, desire, loss, the collapse of old values, and the need to become someone new. One question felt especially urgent: when the old self can no longer live and the new self has yet to emerge, how do we survive the space between?

Nietzsche offers no answer. Perhaps no one can.

Zarathustra does not ask us to follow his path. A true path cannot be inherited. He offers only a deceptively simple challenge: become who you are.

Desire and Will to Power

I have been thinking about how much of our lives are shaped by desire: to possess, to be seen, to be understood, to hold on.

When I was younger, I thought freedom meant getting what I wanted. Now I think of it more as choosing what my desires become.

Strength is neither fulfillment nor repression. It is the ability to want something deeply without being ruled by it. I get to decide how I pursue it, love it, or let it go.

This is how I understand Nietzsche’s will to power: not simply as mastery over the world, but as the power to shape what moves within me. Desire can become possession or creation, jealousy or admiration, suffering or beauty.

Freedom is not the absence of desire. It is my refusal to let desire decide for me.

Love and Destruction

I have also begun to understand Nietzsche’s idea of love differently.

When we speak of love in ordinary life, we usually think first of cherishing, protecting, preserving. To love something is to want it near, to want to keep it. Because we love, we want what we love to remain as it is.

But Nietzschean love is much stranger than that. At times, it even contains destruction, not to ruin what we love, but to make room for what it might become.

This is how I see self-overcoming now. If I love the person I might become, I must let my present self change. Not because I reject who I am, but because I understand and honor the self that carried me here.

Because I love that possibility, I cannot remain forever where I am.

Perhaps this is why Nietzsche can place love and destruction so close together. We usually imagine them as opposites. Yet sometimes destruction arises from a deeper love: I love what you might become too much to insist that you remain exactly as you are.

Self-overcoming

Rereading Nietzsche, I am beginning to understand that overcoming oneself is not simply a matter of improving or upgrading the existing self. It feels closer to a kind of death: the death of old values, old identities, and even the death of an old answer to the question, “Who am I?”

I feel that I’ve begun to accept my old self. But that acceptance has brought me to an even more painful step: now I have to begin breaking it apart.

From a distance, this may sound romantic. In reality, there is very little romance in it. What we break is not merely a bad habit or a mistaken belief. We are breaking a self we once depended on for survival: the beliefs we held, the sources of security we clung to, and even the ideas through which we defined our existence.

I suddenly understand why Zarathustra keeps climbing mountains and descending into valleys. At times, I feel as though I have followed him up the mountain and looked down, only to discover that I myself have become a ladder—one end reaching upward, the other vanishing into the valley below. I am suspended somewhere in the middle, unable to return to who I was, yet still unable to see where the next step will lead.

Above me, I imagine the eagle circling. At my feet, the serpent moves along the earth. One belongs to the sky, the other to the ground; one suggests pride, the other wisdom; one points toward transcendence, the other reminds me not to abandon the earth.

I used to think transcendence meant simply going higher.

Now I wonder whether real transcendence means learning to bear the tension between sky and earth.

The Spirit of Gravity

While reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I often find myself carried along by Zarathustra’s shifting moods. When he rejoices, I rejoice with him. When he feels lonely, I feel his loneliness. When he grieves, I grieve with him. And sometimes I wonder: Could I ever be as brave as he is?

I am especially drawn to Nietzsche’s image of dancing. A dancer is light, but lightness does not mean the absence of weight. Real lightness means having weight without being crushed by it. It means knowing the abyss is beneath your feet and still finding the courage to move. It means accepting pain as part of life without allowing it to harden you.

I want to become that kind of joyful dancer.

But whenever I try to lift my foot, that damned Spirit of Gravity returns. It coils around my legs and asks: Are you really going to do this? Do you truly dare to become someone else? If the old self disappears, who will take its place? Are you sure you are willing to become that person?

And then I’m forced to face an uncomfortable truth: I am already letting go of my old self, but I do not yet have the courage to fully embrace the person I am becoming. I’m caught between the two. I can no longer go back, but I have not truly moved forward either.

It seems my self-overcoming cannot be achieved through a single act of courage. Sometimes, I have to return all the way to the beginning and accept myself again—including the hesitant self, the frightened self, the self that is not nearly as strong as I would like to believe.

The Shadow

Zarathustra has a shadow. So do I.

A shadow is a strange thing. The more desperately you try to escape it, the more faithfully it follows. I used to think that if I went far enough, I could leave my old self behind. Eventually, I realized I cannot, because it’s part of me.

The weaknesses I do not want to acknowledge, the fears I thought I had already overcome, the attachments, regrets, and losses—none of them disappear simply because I decide to become someone new.

I came to realize that true self-overcoming is not about eliminating one’s shadow. It is about reaching the point where I can finally turn around, face it, and say: “I know you are there. You may come with me. But you do not get to decide where I go.”

The Spirit of Gravity is the same. It will not vanish because I have understood Nietzsche. It will come back—perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the next time desire rises, or fear takes hold, or loneliness settles in. It will perch on my shoulder and whisper: “Do not fly so high, do not desire so much. It’s all meaningless. Turn back.”

But perhaps freedom was never about silencing it. Freedom is continuing forward while it is still there.

The Volume of Life

I used to imagine that life had two separate volume knobs, one for pain and one for joy. If I could turn the pain down, life might become easier. But I’m beginning to realize that both may be controlled by the same dial.

When I turn down the pain, joy grows quieter too.

To prevent from being hurt, I became cautious. To avoid loss, I held back from loving deeply. To escape disappointment, I lowered my expectations before life had the chance to let me down. And to keep desire from controlling me, I sometimes pretended that I wanted nothing at all.

It felt safer that way. But later I realized all the music faded.

The New Self

Now I want to hear the whole piece, not only the pleasant passages. I want desire and restraint, joy and suffering, love and loss. I want to make room for loneliness as well as joy. I want these opposing forces alive within me and discover what I might create from them as a true creator.

This is what power means to me now. It is the strength to bear the tremendous forces within me without becoming enslaved by any one of them. I want to love deeply without needing to possess, to desire without needing to obtain, to suffer without immediately running away. It is the strength to carry the Spirit of Gravity and still, somehow, learn to dance.

I want to laugh as Zarathustra laughs and dance as he dances. I no longer need life to become light before I allow myself to dance.

I know the Spirit of Gravity will return, and I know my shadow will continue to follow.

I do not know whether I will always have the courage to keep moving, or when I will finally become that joyful dancer.

At least I have now seen the mountain and the valley, and I have recognized the ladder that is mine alone to climb.

I have not yet become the new self. I do not even know who that self will be. But I no longer need to ask Nietzsche: Tell me who I should become.

Instead, I ask myself: Do I have the courage to take everything within me - desire, pain, love, loneliness, fear, and joy - and transform it into my own strength?

I want so much from life.

I want desire and restraint.

I want pain and joy.

I want solitude and love.

I want to laugh, and I want to dance.

I want to turn the volume of my life back up.

And if fate should one day come to me and say, you must live all of this again, I hope I will have the courage to answer: Then let it come again.