A sleep without dreams

an e-book version of thus spake zarathustra by friedrich nietzsche is keeping me awake these days here at my workstation. downloaded an earlier version (for free) from one of these sites devoted to discussing nietzsche's works. copied the whole thing, chapter by chapter, to msword before converting it to pdf. only to find out later that what i got was two to three parts short of the full text. so i had to do everything again. this time, apart from the full text, i also got the introduction by his sister and some annotations by a certain ludovici. but i had to read it again from the beginning. which is okay considering the new lessons and insights that one gets from it with each reading.

there's this section about how zarathustra encountered a wise man who lectures on the value of a good sleep, and how to keep awake "virtuously" the whole day in order to earn a good night's rest. for starters, the wise man prescribed the following: you need to overcome yourself ten times from doing something that causes weariness of the soul, reconcile with yourself ten times, discover ten truths, and laugh ten times during the day. zarathustra's comment:

"His wisdom is to keep awake in order to sleep well. And verily, if life had no sense, and had I to choose nonsense, this would be the desirablest nonsense for me also."

further down, zarathustra had this to say about the wise man:

"To all those belauded sages of the academic chairs, wisdom was sleep without dreams: they knew no higher significance of life."

thought about how most of us starts with and goes through this life without questioning one's so-called moral values. and how we seem to spend all of our waking days trying to be "virtuous", and faithful to this unexamined code of conduct. our goal is simply a morally uncomplicated existence based on a whole set of values passed down to us by people whose moral existence are unknown to us (or could even be suspect). we are after the wise man's ideal of "poppy-head virtues", a sleep without dreams. think i'd rather go on having those restless nights.