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The best way to think of Nietzsche is as a blogger.

Most of his books are made up of bite-sized sections which are not obviously tied to each other, and which offer no general argument. Sometimes he’s talking about something he saw the other day, sometimes he’s giving his opinion on the world in general, sometimes he’s just ranting. (Like I say, a blogger.) Topics range from the nature of truth to the unattractiveness of small women, and the style is free and personal, full of rhetorical questions and idiosyncratic punctuation. Of all great philosophers, he is surely the king of exclamation marks.

While I write my first novel I often find myself thinking about my second one, a mad habit but one I can’t break (it makes me feel there’s life after number one). I was reading The Gay Spirit and saw this “blogpost”:

I believe that artists often do not know what they can do best because they are too vain and have set their minds on something prouder. Here is a musician who is master at the very small. But he doesn’t want to be! His character likes great walls and bold frescoes! It escapes him that his spirit has a different taste and disposition and likes best of all to sit quietly in the corners of collapsed houses – there, hidden, hidden from himself, he paints his real masterpieces, which are all very short, often only a bar long – only there does he become wholly good, great, and perfect, perhaps only there – But he doesn’t know it! He is too vain to know it.

For me, this describes Ian McEwan perfectly.

The Artist is a film on this topic.

But how do you know what you do best? How can you see yourself except through you character?

ps. While we’re on the subject, here’s a good Nietzsche blog.

Reading Michel Foucault’s superb essay on the uses of history: “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (pdf). I particularly liked these lines:

Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalised; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them.

I have a theory about this. It is: that the tidal waves of passive-aggression that sweep across offices is the result of just the kind of rule perversion that Foucault describes. The rules specify that aggression is bad; so people use these rules to oppress each other. Ever so politely, of course – but, frankly, I’d prefer a punch in the face to an “I’ll let you get back to it…”

[See also: How to apologise]