The Gay Science

⚖The case for it

The title comes from the troubadours, who used it to mean the craft of poetry, and the gaiety in these sections is what a person manages after the ground gives way. The short entries do invite careless reading, granted, but careless readers stop at the famous lines and never reach section 341. There a demon asks whether you would take this life again, every ache and every dull afternoon, repeated forever, and the question lands harder for arriving with no argument behind it. The remarks on women are ugly and should be called that. What you are left with is a writer teaching himself to live without a floor.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Aphorisms are easy to quote and easy to misread, and this is the most quotable Nietzsche there is; 'God is dead' gets worn as a slogan by people who never noticed it is spoken in dread, not triumph. Book V was bolted on five years later, so the cheerful book carries a colder appendix that does not quite match its title. And the asides on women are the usual nineteenth-century bile, no better here for being brief.

— the honest librarian