(Up to: Philosophy )

The introduction tells us that this book originally came out in four separate parts, the first three of which took just ten days each to write, and were published when Nietzsche was almost 40, from 1883 onwards. It also claims that "...the most important single clue to Zarathustra is that it is the work of an utterly lonely man.".

It seems strange, then, that so much of it seems to be so relevant, both personally and historicaly. The theme to Zarathustra is of enlightenment, of a true sense of discovery of oneself - not in a religiously over-emphasised kind of way, not in terms of higher states of mind or anything, but as a pure form of realism, an understanding of what it is to be alive.

At the same time, this is matched with a frustration and a disdain for all that seeks to detract and distract from this realism - all that pretends to be something that it is not, all that keeps people from realising themselves. Through this, Nietzsche manages to attack much of what we take for granted, many of the things that we today believe are "good" or "truthful", and casts his distaste upon them. It is a shame that the irony of the teachings of Zarathustra within the book, and the way in which those most in need of them always ignore them, is still prevalent. Nothing has progresses in the last 100 years.

All this ties in with much of my own, personal philosphies, and it is admittedly comforting to come across such encouraging similarity here. The stripping away of all that we are bombarded with, the dismantling of everything that we are told we must believe, and yet that simply serves to hold us in our own purgatory for the purposefulness of others - all this is so overwhelmingly appropriate to the world we live in today. And I guess that in this respect, Zarathustra shares much in common with Orwell's 1984, in that both delve in to issues universal to any kind of humanisation. For Orwell, it was how we should live as a society. For Nietzsche, it was how we should live as individuals. I ruminate, though, that while Nietzsche would have simply nodded at the inevitability of the decline of the individual after his death, Orwell would have seen far too much optimism in our systems.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is not to be read lightly. It should, as with all philosophy books, be read to study its author, or to act as purely an academia set piece. It holds lessons that nigh on nobody has learnt, yet which everyone seems to aim for. Lessons about themselves, that only they can learn. Unfortunately, the stigma of the book has been twisted, and its combined frankness and inaccessible writing style mean that most never will.