One of the common but unspoken phenomena to which humans everywhere are susceptible—especially those that have bottomed out after finding that life has very few stable guideposts for the individual—is that of existential despair, which takes as many forms as there are individuals. But while the forms are many, the phenomenon itself is constant; it underlies its various manifestations. It is not strictly universal, since not everyone experiences it—rather than a common malady such as the measles or the flu, it is a kind of despair available to those that have provoked the hidden foundations of their lives, that have been too curious about what lies beneath routine and the…
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I Years before the onslaught of a madness that was to incapacitate him, voiding his intellect like the snapping of a high wire of isolation and brilliance, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a book by the name of The Gay Science featuring the parable of the madman leaping into the marketplace, bearing a lantern in the morning hours. Its echoes, reverberating through the decades to come, would sound across the wasteland of the twentieth century whose cruelty and slaughter would eclipse all conceptions of the 19th-century imagination: “The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you…
