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