Reading Nietzsche at White Castle
...if your life were a dream, how would you interpret it?
How would you interpret your experience if it were a dream?
I often find myself asking that question when people tell me about the various events and experiences in their lives, or when considering the events and experiences of my own.
I sneezed a few minutes ago, loudly. Afterward, I could hear a chord reverberating on the strings of an acoustic guitar that has been hibernating in the corner of our living room for several years. I took it as a hearty good sign that, hidden in the manifold and complex waveforms of my sneeze could be found some tuneful resonances within that instrument. It’s more or less what I’m trying to do here in my writings as the world explodes with its sometimes convulsive presence and the fibers of my own being reverberate in response.
For the last week or so I’ve been thinking about a time I was reading Nietzsche in a White Castle. This must have been in the early or mid-1980s. White Castle had become a kind of a trendy “thing” among a few of my friends, particularly a roommate of mine at the time. By that point in my life I had also built a little history of philosophical pretension that I believe may have perhaps gained a bit of gravitas as it snowballed into something more like a morbid fascination. In both cases, the restaurant and the philosopher, I think I was motivated to see what all the fuss was about. Thus it came to be that I walked into a White Castle carrying a copy of The Portable Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann.
I placed my order, sat down a few minutes later, and this I read:
“Behold this man languishing here! He is but one span from his goal, but out of weariness he has defiantly lain down in the dust — this courageous man.”
And so, here I am thinking about this now, and paying attention to thoughts that take me back. Perhaps I’m thinking back because when forward progress seems impeded or future direction seems uncertain, a review of how one arrived in the present can at times be helpful. At least, that’s the supposition. Backtracking has worked for me more than once when I’ve gotten lost in the woods. Would it work when I was feeling utterly lost sitting on my very own living room couch? We shall see.
A noteworthy sidebar here is that I had a dickens of a time finding the quote above because as part of my online search I entered the word Walter Kaufmann had translated as “defiantly” in the 1966 translation I had been reading. All the versions of the text near the top of my internet search turned out to be the much earlier 1909 translation by Thomas Common, in which Kaufmann’s word ‘defiantly' was rendered instead as ‘obstinately’.
Problem with the Common translation is, I’m so accustomed to the Kaufmann translations that Common’s doesn’t even read as “Nietzschean” to me. And setting such nuances aside, Common’s translation of this particular passage frankly makes very little sense. So I had to wonder why the leading search engine would bury the better translation underneath so many links to this lousy one. Are they trying to keep Nietzsche’s ideas hidden from the English-speaking world?
Be that as it may, I decided the fastest way to find the exact quote was to use the Common translation online to help locate it in the book and then find my preferred translation of the passage in my paperback copy of the text. Yes, I still have the book, although I had to dig it out of a box in attic in the garage. Dogeared, written-in and smelling musty, with pages falling out and packing tape on the spine, overall the thing had very much the look and feel of a relic from a previous age, which in my case it sort of is. I brought it in and opened it. Soon afterward I started sneezing, even though I’m not normally very sensitive to molds and dust. I sneezed so often and so violently that my wife Mary took the volume and put it outside the front door.
She’s sensible that way.
“But what if it rains?” I asked.
“What if it does?” was her reply.
I found no counterargument.
But using that edition, I learned that the line that had come back to me along with the memory of reading it in the White Castle is in Part 3 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in a section titled “On Old and New Tablets,” section 18, in case anyone wants to try looking it up. It might help a little with the reading. In fact, I guarantee it will. You would better understand about the rain and what it means in context. And I totally understand if you don’t bother.
Why I was thinking of defiantly lying down in the dust last week is another story. Going back to the quote, I lay down at several points as the week progressed, perhaps even “defiantly” as Kaufmann translated. And I think I wished that my own lying down had some of the heroic qualities suggested by Nietzsche’s full passage. I was looking for something redemptive in my feelings of dejection and defeat.
In the decades that have passed since the White Castle incident, fair to say I’ve evolved in my fascinations. And even if these fascinations may still at times veer toward morbidity, Nietzsche is no longer among of them. Even if as a writer he does have quite a few useful and inspiring things to say, he can also come across as a misogynistic jerk just a bit more often than I find tolerable these days. That said, apparently I’m still trying to interpret that passage and my reading of it. I’m trying to get a better idea of what it means or at least why that day and that reading showed up again in my thoughts. And the more I write and think and feel into it, the more complete and strange and perfect the contradictions of that event now seem to be. In other words, I’m not just re-reading a passage from a book, I’m reviewing the entire experience through the lens of the passage of the intervening years.
For sure, it seems now that I was largely unconscious of the personal and cultural implications of reading Nietzsche in a White Castle at the time — I’m pretty clear on that, since I recall I had merely picked up a book and walked into a burger place. As I continued my contemplation, the juxtaposition of these elements started to approach a dreamlike intensity, getting more and more real the more I thought and felt into it. It’s shocking to think of myself as a nexus point of these two products of culture: a “slider” in one hand, paperback Nietzsche in the other. It’s even more shocking to realize the I took it for normal. Everything about it seems strange now. And I had no idea back then that the experience would have within it the energy needed to tunnel forward in time 40 years and grab my attention, as it has.
So it was getting huge. Significances can grow, can resonate in their tones and overtones, can start out as apparently simple events and ultimately become symphonic in their complexity. When I started writing this essay, nearly a week before the recent sneeze that shook my guitar strings from their slumber but sometime after the sneezes that led to the banishment of The Portable Nietzsche to the front porch, I could feel the event and my contemplation of it approaching a critical threshold.
Then came the moment last weekend when my family spontaneously decided to have lunch together after a child-focused birthday celebration in a city park chosen for its fabulous playscape. As Mary and I drove to meet the others for lunch afterwards , that self-same White Castle, which by then I had been thinking about for days, came into view as we made our way to our lunch destination.
I could have planned this, but I didn’t.
“Mary!” I said. “It’s the White Castle! Take a photo!”
Total happenstance… by which I mean in this case, taking a stance and seeing what happens. Seems the world is paying attention to us. So I’m tracking that. The universe had apparently sneezed. Something struck a chord in me, and my feeling is, my strings as they sounded connected with a much, much larger instrument, and connected in such a way that I literally found myself at my White Castle intersection, once again.
And so I have to ask myself: If all of this were a dream, how I would I interpret it?