The Nietzsche Family Circus

"I think I am too sarcastic to believe in myself."


I am pleased to present to you my latest Internet discovery, The Nietzsche Family Circus, which pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote. In order to do so, I pair it with a poem about Nietzsche by Robert Hass from his latest book Time and Materials. It is not one of my favorite Hass poems. In fact, it contains the word "supple" which I don't tend to like. But it also contains the word "syphilis" which, I think, balances things out.

A Supple Wreath of Myrtle

Poor Nietzsche in Turin, eating sausage his mother
Mails to him from Basel. A rented room,
A small square window framing August clouds
Above the mountain. Brooding on the form
Of things: the dangling spur
Of an Alpine columbine, winter-tortured trunks
Of cedar in the summer sun, the warp in the aspen’s trunk
Where it torqued up through the snowpack.

“Every where the wasteland grows; woe
To him whose wasteland is within.”

Dying of syphilis. Trimming a luxuriant mustache.
In love with the opera of Bizet.

(Robert Hass, from Time and Materials Ecco Press 2007)