new comments on old posts

It's been a while since I answered email related to my blogger account and I was happy to see a couple legitimate comments come by within the sea of spam.

Someone gave some followup advice on how to read Borges and another left this alternate interpretation of Nietzsche's Mask --

Allan Innes said...

This is really late, but here is my impression - sad that all of these are merely our impressions, although I think this may be part of what Nietzsche was saying:

To wear the mask is deliberate for someone who has discovered something profound, who is on a dark path to greatness - a place where no one else dares to go - that very few will ever understand. Isolation, resulting from one's own rigorous thought experiments (genealogy - discovering truth and uprooting "truths"), from one's actual living of these experiments, is central to Nietzsche.

The mask is that which allows the profound individual to walk in public. It allows him / her to remain sane while standing within the herd. One must journey there masked if one is profound.

The mask also serves as a filter for the proper audience to greatness. When one masks their greatness (i.e., great thoughts, concepts, discoveries), one weeds out the stupid (to put it bluntly) - those literally undeserving of profundity.

Good that many should confuse your greatness with something horrible. Good that they should mistake it for something else entirely. For they are not your audience, they are not your equals. Insofar as your thought is akin to something utterly beautiful, there are some (in fact, there are many) who deserve only what is proper for their rank: mediocrity.