We are each other.
“If my story can remind you of anything, let it remind you that when you believe in someone, you can change their world,” Ortiz said.
The same is of course true if you don't believe in someone. This is how so much potential is lost, so many people ruined.
The ravens of night sweep the screen of the sky over the edge of the world.
It folds away in the ocean sway.
Darkness hides the waves and discovers the infinity of galaxies and stars,
A noiseless crashing of waves on the shore of your eyes.
The bright birds of morning recover the sky.
Light reveals the waves and hides the stars.
The whole time I was reading, I couldn't help but think of Kundera's superior "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." This is an imaginative, alternative, plausible history in which Nietzsche creates Freud's Talking Cure (Freud is a character in this book, but he never meets Nietzsche). The book is written by a psychotherapist, not a professional novelist. And that shows. He's not concerned with creating a work of literature as such. And that's the weakness of the book as a book. In Kundera, Nietzschean ideas are manifest in the very form of the book. They have an affecting role to play in the experience of "Eternal Return" (the most obvious example). This novel is in the realist tradition of the Victorian novel. It's interesting and thought provoking--though I will say the most interesting part to me was the Afterward, but one does have to read the entire novel to get the full effect out of that. Anyone with any interest in Nietzsche's life and thought and the whole, bizarre story, that connects Nietzsche to Freud via Lou Andreas Salome will find this story worth the time it takes to read it. The emphasis in the end is more on the Freudian legacy than the Nietzschean philosophy, which I find disappointing personally, for whatever that's worth. Still very glad I read the book. But if it's a choice between this or Kundera, read Kundera.
