Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche

“One man runs to his neighbor because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to lose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.”

We all feel the malignant sting of self-realization. Because it’s not always as constructive and rewarding as it’s thought out to be. Anything that involves the Self and its “figuring out” burns like a deep wound. No matter how you treat it, lovingly or frightfully, it does fester and get under your skin.

Nietzsche calls this chaos ‘Amor Fati’ – to harness the love of oneself, one’s fate, to accept the Self as it suffers because it’s meant to just for that purpose. So that everything that happens to you – happiness or suffering – is part of a larger, albeit nameless and unutterable, force.

This force is an assimilation of every thought and act that occupies the bowels of your heart. And it is one’s heart that drives a person to overcome itself. It’s a dangerous going-across – walking on a rope fastened between a banal existence of jealousy, hatred, and stubbornness and a virtuous one of self-trust, solitude, and the will to power.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a blend of nihilistic and moral aphorisms. It contains much wisdom in the way it re-defines the meaning of meaning itself. There is no beauty or necessity in believing that denying the self is synonymous with overcoming the self. The former being a religious blessing while the latter is Neitzsche’s only objective. He writes that there is no soul or spirit in praising the universe. Nor is there any redemption in denying its existence. The universe is “neither perfect nor beautiful nor noble” and it does not possess the “desire to become any of these.” Least of all for the sake of humankind.

Beyond the “God is Dead” philosophy, he wants you to create your own meaning for life and self-affirmation. His words renounce everything humankind prophesizes to be. The generosity of which is contagiously unburdening. His aphorisms are poetic, timeless, and reflective. Every page echoes the staggering complexity of human nature. It also reiterates his famous philosophical assertion that “for unless life is given a meaning it has none.”

The Concept of Anxiety by Soren Kierkegaard

Tapping into self-consciousness means releasing from the steady grip of the immediate, external reality. There is a very specific and concrete truth to this fact. And it is through our anxiety and fear, Kierkegaard writes, that such an undertaking is possible. The rest is misleading because it dims the interiority of life. To fixate on the exteriority breeds dullness and uniformity because our sense of self is acutely tied up with surfaces and appearances. And through the inevitability that surfaces and appearances diminish, our understanding of the self also begins to recede. For Kierkegaard, anxiety is an inescapable human condition. And for someone who is unaware of it, it can give rise to emotional, intellectual, and creative barriers. Some of which seep into a person’s day-to-day living causing false and temporal happiness. Kierkegaard’s fascination with anxiety is nothing new. In The Sickness Unto Death, he writes that the loss of one’s despair is also the loss of one’s self. And so in The Concept of Anxiety, he reiterates this loss of self as something that is profoundly and philosophically tied together with the loss of anxiety. Fear, which is another acute response to reality and our internal presence stationed in that reality, is perpetually tied together with anxiety. Fear of anxiety, the anxiety of fear, and the anxious fear of the infiniteness of human choice. To cope with this dread, Kierkegaard believes, humans desensitize their freedom. They cure existential anxiety by limiting themselves to fewer possibilities. So that ultimately, our choices become our only axis around which we (the hollow shells) continuously revolve. Through that lens, nothing of consciousness can enable us to reflect on our experiences. Nothing of “self” can be identified as self because it exists outside of us. Kierkegaard writes about the psychological state of anxiety but he elevates the concept to a profoundly creative and philosophical narrative. A narrative that anyone can apply to their day-to-day living. And that is a strong reason to want to read this book.

A Short History of Decay by E. M. Cioran

“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.”

It’s a rare thing to find in a loyally-pessimistic writer the bridge that connects wisdom with nothingness. Cioran writes about heroes and hermits alike. He shines the torch on the uncertainty, incompetence, and excesses of both. And the way they breed in humanity a need for religion, organization, and discipline. The book explains why myth and history manifest the ‘us’ of the world. This concept of unity and laboring humanity is the antidote to the ‘I’ that exists innately and primitively. It’s the way that we construct an architecture of calculated despair and suffering. The antidote to which, its medicine, is the hope of Fate; be it hope to overcome the dizzying nothingness of yesterday, today, or tomorrow. Or to hope that the wellspring of words and tears weigh higher against that which we have already lost on the day we were born.

All of existence and existing, being and becoming, life and living is a method to analyze the monstrosity the lies between birth and death. To reclaim what we don’t understand only so that we never have to. To be born and to die are fundamental truths. While the “truths of beauty are fed on exaggerations,” the notion that to resign to happiness, success, and normality is absurd. The evidence of which creates false gods, fabricated fictions, and feverishly grotesque ideals to live up to. A Short History of Decay is the history of imagination, rationality, and myth. Intelligent, intuitive, and melancholic; Cioran penetrates the despair of humanity, anticipates the brutal expectations of it, and finally when all perception is void, and nothingness prevails over the scales of time and fate, he grants us the confidence of possessing an “I.” The loneliness of it and the unburdening of everything else.