I am the direct descendant of a long line of devout believers reaching back directly to the time of the Reformation (I number among my ancestors on the Protestant side Ulrich Zwingli, one of the lesser-known advocates of the Reformation). My grandmother is directly descended from the Voudrie line, and her ancestors constructed the Catholic Church in Cahokia, Illinois.
As a boy I delivered the Christmas sermon in the winter following the death of my father. I had always considered myself something of a religious wunderkind, going about “my Father’s businessâ€, and took pride in my already-developing oratory skills - I have always been an excellent public speaker, and even at that early age had considered going into the pastorship. My faith had not yet taken leave of me at that point, and it was quite reinforced by the Church’s permission to allow me to conduct the sermon (I believe my grandmother has it on video tape; I’ll see about getting it transferred to DVD, for my sake if nothing else).
Yet pride “goeth before the fallâ€; but in my instance it was not pride but disgust. I apparently delivered my sermon admirably - I was too young then to remember it with accuracy today - and yet I felt something strange, an almost dictatorial feeling as I stood there and shouted out from the pulpit. How was it that such a young boy had been granted authority over his elders? It seemed almost unspeakably strange to me.
I have always been an extremist. Whatever is extreme, whatever is different, and, above all, whatever elicits from me a feeling of emotional intensity, has always had my blessing. From that day forth I vowed to myself never to rest until I’d attained heights of feeling equal to (and yet preferably far beyond) those I’d experienced that day. No man before me, boy or adult, has felt with such intensity as I have; and I have learned that our divisions of feeling - into hatred, fear, love - are illusory; that all is one feeling, differentiated from itself only by degree of intensity. I appreciate both pleasure and pain, fear and love and all cruelty, and every state of mind and thought imaginable precisely for this reason.
One day I shall attain those commanding heights again - which means displacing any extant God from his throne. Though I am an atheist, I fully welcome the possibility that there is some manner of deity: for if there were, it would present the greatest of all possible challenges - to overcome God…
“The will to power can manifest itself only against resistances; therefore it seeks out that which resists it - this is the primeval tendency of the protoplasm when it extends pseudopodia and feels about. Appropriation and assimilation are above all a desire to overwhelm, a forming, shaping and reshaping, until at length that which has been overwhelmed has gone entirely into the power domain of the aggressor and has increased the same.â€
- Nietzsche, Nachlass 656
Like my mentor, I lost my father and was brought up into a devoutly religious household, surrounded with - plagued with, in my more misogynistic moments - women. I embrace, I require resistance. Life without strife, lived in the fullness of comfort, would not be life. (This, for example, is why I shall never marry: the same degree of intensity I associate with love comes also with war; rather a tyrant than a romantic.)
But perhaps I am mentally ill. It hardly matters. I am even now preparing a book over which wars will be fought. To arouse a reaction! That is the highest calling.