On the Gay Science
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1974. pp. xviii + 396. eBook.
The Gay Science is, more or less, Nietzsche’s first mature work — markedly different from The Birth of Tragedy and from essays like “Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” or “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life.” Most of it is aphorism, but the aphorisms do real systematic work on the things that preoccupied him: the aesthetic philosophy, here turning on what rhythmic and melodic music meant to the ancient Greeks; the death of God and the crisis of meaning in Europe; an aphorism spoken from Zarathustra’s position; the first sketch of eternal recurrence. Along the way he argues with Socrates, Lucretius, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Wagner.
The line I keep is the one partway through Part 4:
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish only to be a yes-sayer.
That is the book for me — less the systematic engagement than amor fati as a stance. Nietzsche has helped me through some difficult stretches, and this is where the help lives.