Enduring poverty

"The great advantage of having noble origins is that it enables one more easily to endure poverty." --F. Nietzsche ---------- I thought you could take that quote to heart. I think the proper interpretation is a literal one; does it not suit your case as well? ---------- You have the habit of always bringing in the political to undercut the intellectual; it spoils and revenges itself on your drive for higher studies. Similarly, in the books you choose to read, you exhibit a desire to immerse yourself in trivial biographical details, garnered from secondary sources, which limits your understanding of the work and also fails to illuminate the genius-character of the writer himself. Personally, I have chosen to work on myself out of a desire to increase my understanding of world-intellectual history not because I desire the feelings of power, which I think can be said of those who seek to 'get ahead in the world': in contrast, I have chosen to be poor, happy and independent rather than be one who is seeking to be financially secure, miserable and a slave, which I think is the lot of most if not all Americans. I strive every day of my life to be one of Nietzsche's noble, higher spirits, a person who is a man of culture and who keeps the problems of philosophy foremost in my thoughts. In my opinion, from Nietzsche's very words, the aristocratic-minded Superman arrives on the scene when the truly noble man comes into being, a person who stands for power and not merely as its representation: "...the impression this game produces on the non-aristocratic, and the spectacle of this impression, nonetheless constantly enhances the feeling of superiority. -- The incontestable advantage possessed by the culture of the nobility on the basis of this feeling of superiority is now beginning to reveal itself on an even higher level: thanks to the work of our free-spirits, it is now no longer reprehensible for those born and raised in the aristocracy to enter into the orders of knowledge and there to obtain more intellectual ordinations, learn higher knightly duties, than any heretofore, and to raise their eyes to the ideals of a victorious wisdom which no previous age has been free to erect for itself with so good a conscience as the age which is now about to arrive. And finally: with what is the aristocracy henceforth to occupy itself, now it is becoming daily more apparent that it will be indecent to engage in politics?"