At 19, Kaag shared Nietzsche’s distaste for the “scripted” routines and glib gratifications that make modern life so deplorably easy. When he arrived in Basel on a research trip, he recoiled at his surroundings: The train station was “a model of Swiss precision,” and the streets were “too straight, too quiet, too mundane.” He quickly abandoned his plans to ruminate on Nietzsche from the confines of Basel’s library and instead decided to follow his idol’s grueling alpine route to “Splügen, then to Grindelwald at the foot of the Eiger, then to the San Bernardino Pass, to Sils-Maria, and finally to the towns of Northern Italy.” He wanted, he writes, “to feel something, to break through the anesthesia, to prove to myself that I wasn’t just asleep
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How to Live Better, According to Nietzsche to the next. As he grappled with the specter of decadence, his austere and itinerant life represented a rejection of the indulgent spirit dulling the haute bourgeoisie of fin de siècle Europe. <span>At 19, Kaag shared Nietzsche’s distaste for the “scripted” routines and glib gratifications that make modern life so deplorably easy. When he arrived in Basel on a research trip, he recoiled at his surroundings: The train station was “a model of Swiss precision,” and the streets were “too straight, too quiet, too mundane.” He quickly abandoned his plans to ruminate on Nietzsche from the confines of Basel’s library and instead decided to follow his idol’s grueling alpine route to “Splügen, then to Grindelwald at the foot of the Eiger, then to the San Bernardino Pass, to Sils-Maria, and finally to the towns of Northern Italy.” He wanted, he writes, “to feel something, to break through the anesthesia, to prove to myself that I wasn’t just asleep.” How did “Nietzsche cultivate the existential defiance or courage that led [him] up the mountain?” Kaag asks. It probably started something like this—in a very simple refusal to act on Summary
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