“Some men are born posthumously” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
I came across his name for the first time in my 10th
class Social Studies History textbook, a lesson about the World War II and if I
remember correctly, the sentence was– ‘Hitler was inspired by the writings of
Friedrich Nietzsche’. I underlined the sentence, in the presumption that it
would come as an objective question and like always, I wanted to show my
friends how good I am in Social Studies, especially in History. I did ponder
about him for few seconds as he is one who inspired Adolf Hitler. This happened
approximately 10 years ago.
I came across his name for the second time when I was in my
final year of my Computer Engineering and read Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’, I was remotely fascinated to know her
inspiration, I did some research and eventually discovered that she was
inspired by writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.
I was able to comprehend the intellectual humor of Woody
Allen and after watching all his films, I came across an article ‘Thus Ate Zarathustra’ written by Woody
Allen for ‘The New Yorker’ and thus I came to know about ‘Thus Spoke
Zarathustra’. The admiration for Woody Allen made me look for his books ‘Side Effects, Without Feathers and Getting
Even’ in book stores and luckily in the ‘Classics’ section of the book
store my eye reads the title of a book ‘Thus
Spake Zarathustra’, I was thrilled for an intangible reason, I was not sure
whether I need to buy it or not?, I was holding the book in my hand and decided
to turn few pages, the introduction section had a quote
“A testing and
a questioning hath been all my travelling -- and verily, one must also learn to
answer such questioning! That, however, is my taste --”,
I decided to buy the book – thus started my journey into
Nietzsche’s works.