“Man a little, eccentric species of animal, which–fortunately–has its day; all on earth a mere moment, an incident, an exception without consequences, something of no importance to the general character of the earth; the earth itself, like every star, a hiatus between two nothingnesses, an event without plan, reason, will, self-consciousness, the worst kind of necessity, stupid necessity— Something in us rebels against this view; the serpent vanity says to us: ‘all that must be false, for it arouses indignation— Could all that not be merely appearance? And man, in spite of all, as Kant says—‘”

—Will to Power–more of Nietzsche’s “because I say so” insistence that man is a sufficient value-giver who can and will paint the world with value generated from his own wonderfulness. Anyway, I really liked the phrase “a hiatus between two nothingnesses,” which, if it can be translated as “two nothings,” is extremely Shakespearean.

“A virtuous man is a lower species because he is not a ‘person’ but acquires his value by conforming to a pattern of man that is fixed once and for all.”

—WTP–a truly dangerous untruth, the belief that heaven will be boring because everyone will be the same, that virtue means whitewashing one’s own uniqueness and sanding down one’s spikier edges. Here I wrote about how the lives of the saints ought to disabuse us of this view.

In general, WTP is not as rewarding as other Nietzsche–I mean, it’s just notes, and so there are lots of internal contradictions and false starts as Nietzsche tries to figure out what he really wants to say. However, there are some bits of wheat among the chaff, and at any rate I will be glad to have read it just so I can know what is in it.