ADOPT A VULTURE: BOOKS I'VE RECENTLY READ & RECOMMEND

"Art reminds us. That our plans are meaningless. That help is not on the way. That our children can die in our lifetimes. The noblest message an artist can deliver to us is that the choice to make art is, indeed, an act of blistering revenge against the nonsensical, cold unfairness of this world. Tragedy strikes. We can close down, or we can keep working on finding a frame in which to house all of this confusion. A black frame, or a white one … any frame at all. We have a choice."

AMANDA PALMER

But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself?

Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia, in short that tendency to laziness of which the traveller spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them.

Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle; they dare to show us man as he is, uniquely himself to every last movement of his muscles, more, that in being thus strictly consistent in uniqueness he is beautiful, and worth regarding, and in no way tedious.

When the great thinker despises mankind, he despises its laziness: for it is on account of their laziness that men seem like factory products, things of no consequence and unworthy to be associated with or instructed.

The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: ‘Be yourself! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844–1900