A genuine Nietzsche study would require the psychology of religion that would spotlight the meaning of his being, his suffering, and his self-induced… - Lou Andreas-Salomé

Human life -- ah! life in general -- is poetry. Unconscious of ourselves, we live it -- day but day and piece by piece -- but in its inviolable wholeness it lives, it composes, us. Far from the old phrase: "turn your life into a work of art"; we are not our art work.

"Conflicted creatures, that’s what we [parents] are — we give birth, without knowing to what; we educate, without knowing whom; we must answer for it, without knowing how; and we can give up neither our power nor our fear." -- Anneliese, p. 52

Once upon a time, everything was based on trust, free from worry or care; now everything stands in doubt. One upon a time, the wondrous was taken for granted; now everything that had been taught her -- even the most obvious and certain -- appears gnarled and incomprehensible. In such a moment, a child helplessly gropes for the hand of the adult in order to find guidance and direction; but another type of childlikeness, intimately related to the ideals of life, can rapidly gather strength and masculine force. Far from subduing Nora or attuning her to compromise, the first decisive conflict acts upon her like a battle cry . . . Resistance and bravery harden into armor. She has grasped that the peaks of wonder in life do not appear as readily as the fairies who awaken Sleeping Beauty; in life peaks must be conquered. That insight she is willing to put to the test . . .