Nietzche, Blood and Essays

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

~Friedrich Nietzsche

When my English teacher assigned us a critical lense essay, I was all on board. The basics of the assignment was to find a quote by basically anyone--from Buddha to Nicholas Cage--and use evidence from two books we’d read that year to support or refute it. Ever ambitious, I chose that little gem by Nietzsche, totally ready to write an essay.

I couldn’t even get past the first sentence.

See, the first step of this essay was to analyze the quote. In my mind, I knew what Nietzsche meant. As cheesy as it sounds, I knew in my heart what Nietzsche meant. The trouble was that I couldn’t write on actual paper what I knew. Everything I wrote down seemed mediocre, half-hearted and in a way...empty.

I knew that I was looking for a single word, just one word, that would make the rest of my sentence fall into place. It was like in Crome Yellow (Aldous Huxley), where Dennis tries to find the right word to describe the shape of the countryside, and the only word he can think of is in French. But I couldn’t just write my essay in French. I needed an English word. So I stared at my blank bedroom wall, searching and searching until I could feel that I was just on the brink of finding the right word. It had started to form in my head when my mother called me to do something for her.

Needless to say, I never quite got the word and I was left in a bad mood for the rest of the afternoon. The problem was that such an idea only had one way of phrasing. And that was Nietzsche’s. Basically, the reason I couldn’t phrase the statement correctly was because Nietzsche got there first. I’d also spelled Nietzsche’s name wrong on every try, not quite following the arrangement of the letters because t,z,s,c, and h aren’t meant to all go together in a cohesive way. I should have just picked a Nick Cage quote.

But no, honestly, I’m happy with the quote I picked. I’m happy because it was so perfect for my essay. I’m happy because it was so elusive. I’m happy because I had to fight with it. And I’m happy because I know that one night, or perhaps at three in the morning, I will hear that perfect word in a dream, long after my essay’s due date. I’ll be irritated because it came too late, but I’ll still be happy because it bothered to show up.

It’s what Hemingway meant when he said “There’s nothing to writing. You just sit at a typewriter and bleed.” Because, besides pouring one’s soul onto paper, there’s the fight to peg emotion down to plain ink. There’s the struggle to limit all of that stuff to twenty six letters. It can be easy one day, and hard and grueling the next. But there’s always the reward of the perfect composition at the end.