As a teenager I was fascinated by Nietzsche (I was desperate, of course), but now, forty years later, here I am on an airplane flight, Beyond Good and Evil on my lap — and no, I don’t remember what prompted me to dust it off after all these years.
The page falls open to an aphorism so widely quoted it has become cliché —
“Take care that if you fight monsters, you do not become a monster. For if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
I wonder what was he suggesting — did he mean that introspection is dangerous? That would be a strange thought, since every schoolchild knows the unexamined life is not worth living. But maybe there is a question of degree. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow describes Kurtz as lost — “I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines.” Alone in the jungle, Kurtz’s soul “looked within itself.” And whatever it saw drove him mad.
Perhaps Nietzsche gazed into the abyss and saw the heart of nothingness. For elsewhere he wrote that the self contains an “abysmal sickness, weariness, discouragement” — symptoms of the impoverishment of life that results when the “will to power” turns against itself – symptoms of the spirit of nihilism that grasped 19th century European culture, once it became apparent that their god was dead.
Abyss means “a deep or seemingly bottomless chasm.” You lean over, drop a stone, listen.
I picture a cave hidden deep within a canyon. A cave which lies in the bottom of my mind. It reaches back to my earliest memories. Reaches back farther — to the source of that collective, ancestral knowledge handed down over generations. I wonder, if you followed this tunnel far enough, would it lead you all the way back to the inception. If you ventured deep enough within the darkness, would you bump into the primordial forces that animate us?
I put down the book. Glance out the window. Staring straight at me is — a cloud.
This was a year or two ago. Ever since then this strange idea has stuck with me, namely, that deep within the abyss you might find a cloud….
The Long Brown Path 