What does it matter!

October of Zarathustra

People have a choice in life. Right?

They can take the world as it's presented to them or they can ask themselves whether they are really seeing the whole world. Are they really seeing all the possible experiences they could have?

Could there be something greater?

It's a grandiose question! Who are you to even ask! Just live your life! Why do you think you're so special?

But some people do. Or at least some people wonder if they can find something special. There are accounts out there of people who claim to have found more.

Are they all just grifters?

A person can choose to do the normal things you do in their society. Out in the depths of Africa, that might be becoming a hunter or a farmer. Here in the US, that might mean selling insurance. In Europe that might mean sitting around collecting checks and complaining about America.

Normal just depends on where you find yourself.

But the people who suspect that there could be a superior experience to this one path through life take a variety of different courses. Writers. Scientists. Mystics. Dreamers. Wanderers. Leaders. Activists.

But, here's the rub...

There's a good chance all of them will be disappointed too. At the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, our hero has gathered up a bunch of men who thought they had found a path to something better. A pope. A magician. A scientist. A wanderer. Etc.

But they are all old men.

And here, at the end of their lives, unsatisfied, unsated, worried that they might have wasted their allotted time on this earth, what do they all talk themselves into doing?

Worshipping a donkey.

You could go on a quest and just find yourself worshipping a donkey.

That is, in fact, a real risk.

But Zarathustra has an aphorism for that: "What does it matter!"

Because here's the thing: You might also do the normal thing, the expected thing, and find yourself at the end of your life working at Home Depot, helping the millionth customer locate that thing you put in a shower drain to catch hair as it comes out so it doesn't clog the pipes.

That could also be how a person who takes the path more traveled by ends up! It's all a gamble.

I'm not sure that that is the point of the nearly final scenes in the book, but that's what I see. At first, Zarathustra finds them worshipping the donkey and he's mad. His whole point was to give off from worship. No need to worship any longer. Be your own people. God is dead. All that.

But they won't stop.

Nietzsche could see the same thing G.K. Chesterton saw. Chesterton (apocryphally) said, "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything."

To Chesterton then, the best course was to believe in God. To Nietzsche, though, it was just to embrace however it turns out for you. Whatever you find yourself leading yourself to.

And this ending brings me back to what I was writing about the book early on. This book seems like a meditation for those who want to take the road less traveled, but it's a complete meditation. It's not just how to start but it's also how to end. And it's all the ambivalence along the way.

Writing about reading

One more day left on this challenge. It will be a very short chapter tomorrow.

Here at the month's end, still! I'm trying to interpret what Nietzsche says rather than saying anything in particular myself. So I still haven't cracked the book. I have not reached the place I hoped to reach on this reading.

Let me try to explain what I mean. It's hard because I'm not even completely sure what I mean.

There are different kinds of texts in this world. Three come to mind as relevant in particular to this post:

• There are instructions, which is how we usually think about philosophy.

• There are stories, which encode lessons, lessons that maybe we aren't even meant to be able to articulate, but reach us further down in our machinery. The writers may not even know the lessons their stories convey!

• And then there is scripture. Scripture is meant to crack you open. It's less what it says and more what it makes you find yourself saying. But to read scripture I think one has to learn how to read with your generative mind, and not your decoding mind.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is I think the rare scripture that makes no pretense to divine inspiration. But it's still scripture. And I just don't quite think I've learned to read that way (as this penultimate post of the journey illustrates).

The consolation though is that when I started reading this I had some vague sense that there was some other way to read the book, some other lens through which to be open to its words, than the one I am accustomed to. I wasn't able to say much about what it looked like. I just had a feeling I was doing it wrong.

It could be that this morning, writing this post, I was at least a little better able to articulate to myself what a better approach might be. I don't even know that I'm right about this. It's more like I just had my first inkling of what I might need to do differently.

I've listened a lot to the Hermitix podcast. Its host, James Ellis, aka Meta-nomad, often talks about George Gurdjieff, one of the great mystics. As I understand it, a lot of his work with people just came down to getting them to another place in their brain so they could look at their experience of their life in a different way, perhaps with a hope of cracking an awakened way.

That's what I was trying to do with reading though this book this month. Maybe I got a glimmer.

None of this was ever really so much about what I actually wrote so much as it was about the perspective I've been reaching for.

One line

"Pain is also joy, a curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun, — go away! Or you will learn: the wise is also a fool." —Zarathustra

• See what I mean? Straight scripture.
• Let's bow our heads and pray.

—Brady Dale
October 30, 2026

Next Zarathustra: My children are near me