The physicist, Albert Einstein uncountable eons ago said this: “A human being is part of the whole called by us ‘the universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Merely by virtue of having, through no force of mine own will, been born in the age that I was, I could quite readily teach that brilliant old sage many a thing that would stand his primitive quantum theory on its ear and fry the synapses in his pre-historic brain. But yet I could not improve upon this one simple set of thoughts.
One of the few voices of ancient Earth whose humanist ideology remains indelible unto this day, he, in this utterance, I do believe, expresses matter far more relevant to the ultimate future of our shared Universe then Nietzsche did in all his endless, and often incoherent rhapsodizing. I know Nietzscheans who would doubtless seek to kill me for the crime of ever having harbored, much less voiced such a thought. Perhaps it is right that they should. I am not unlike them. There is some irrepressible part of me that loves to destroy in the face of adversity; loves the feel of a snapping neck, or the rendering of an adversarial limb forever useless. Neither can the Humans, try as they may, deny the existence of this same trait, though by varying degrees dormant, within them. An honest assay will testify to the only actual difference being that, if Nietzscheans are Humans magnified, then such traits we haven’t the luxury to repress. We are Nietzscheans, and death and life – such life! – reside within us in equal measure. And yet I am more like my father who said, “Judge not. Allow rather to each live thing its will until it becomes an impediment to your own. Then, think not. Only destroy it utterly.” In the first part of this instruction there allows room for Einstein’s “compassion and understanding;” his humanism, to which my father’s nietzscheanism seems to me to be unusually close kin, (a blood relative, perhaps, that might, in certain circumstances, be unabashedly compelled to kill his cousin). And indeed we are close kin. But while the “delusion of consciousness” is shared by Human and Nietzschean alike, it must at some time be revealed and accepted that the Nietzschean “delusion” rests inevitably upon a genetically wrought point of fact. We were created and bred to walk among men, but our Nietzschean consciousness is a much closer relative to that of the tundra wolves of Lyrus. This is no one’s fault. This just is. And so, inasmuch as we are part of the whole, we are, at the same time, separate from the rest. The restraints of our prison are that much stronger for it, and it is that much more great a feat to free ourselves to “embrace the whole of nature in its beauty” when the pragmatism of not even acknowledging such, much less embrace it, is literally born in the Nietzschean mind.
In all of this, my confusing morass of ideas above, I endeavor to drive to a point. It is a point about the true nature of humanity; a point about beauty, where it is manifest, and how a Nietzschean, if he cares at all, (as the Kodiak inexplicably did) must, in some measure, struggle against all that is most natural in order to observe it in all the places where it is found. It is, it seems, an alibi for all that, from this hour on, the coming days will see me do. It is a lament that Humans will never be Nietzschean, and that Dylan Hunt, who deserves honor – or at least respect if honor means nothing to a Nietzschean as I’m told – can only be given so much, because he cannot, by virtue of his very Humanness, ever truly understand, and so must ultimately be dispossessed. And it is the last epistle that I will commit to posterity here, aboard the Andromeda – anyone’s posterity. The immediate future will allow me no leisure to reflect, propound, and explain. The coming days will be days of doing, as I and all Nietzscheans were born to, and much will teeter upon this pinnacle in time, awaiting, only for moments, my unhindered action.
I have known friendship aboard this vessel. Of such there has been none more compelling, by turns, joyful, frustrating and infuriating, and in conclusion, rewarding than that with the ship’s captain. And perhaps somewhere in the three years past there might have been a time for heroes, which is what he is, and the thing most beautiful in him that has always drawn my human attention while being, as well, the source of some inexplicable sadness. Perhaps there were moments in the walk of time when right and wrong could be construed as clearly defined, and one have needed only the moralistic and military wherewithal to plant one’s feet in defense of the “good side”, and swing their battle axe with both hands. There may or may not have been time for me to repose and admire the simplicity of that as the choice of a man who, by virtue of his skills, could have effected so much more, and yet, like a quixotic knight errant, chose to champion archaic and untenable principals – and well – in an age that would never know them again. Whether there was time or not, I did hesitate in the motion of life to walk and talk with this lovely and glorious idiot. Surrendering to my compulsion to embrace him, for reasons I will never clearly know, but refused to question, and fought, in fact, to defend my right not to, I have done my obeisance to Einstein. Old Wizard, your profundity will not be lost to a race of warriors beyond your furthest imaginings. Let Dylan Hunt, holding open for moments the door to my prison, stand in for the whole of nature in its odd and inexplicable beauty, and let me now pass on. Waiting hence is the duty and homage I owe to my father who would not negate the self in exchange for comprehension and compassion. For there is to be no more of sleep and waiting. Now we will think no more, as he instructed, but act, and ever act. A resurrection awaits. A magic and mighty people, warrior poets, kick again and shift restlessly in the womb of time, and come what comes. But I set it down here, that those who come wondering may know, that I stopped, and I watched, and I smiled, and I felt, and, forever indebted to the infinite blessing of a superior gene, I understood.
And I am Tyr Anasazi out of Victoria by Barbarosa, out of Isis by Temujin II, out of Faihu by Raja, out of Ariadne by Hadrian, out of Ti Mo by Temujin I, out of Mannaz by Suleiman, “The Sultan.” And I am the father of Tamburlaine out of Freya, the father of the next thousand years.
