Krzysztof Michalski, The Flame of Eternity: An Interpretation of Nietzsche's Thought, translated from the Polish by Benjamin Paloff (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007, 2012) "In Zarathustra Nietzsche says that the will to power is 'the scalding scourge of the hardest among the hardhearted,' that it is the dark flame of living pyres,' that it is the earthquake that breaks and breaks open everything worm-eaten and hollow; [. . .] the lightning-like question mark beside premature answers.' In short, that it characterizes life as an effort at change that knows no insurmountable opposition, at change that cannot be encompassed by any rational schema, in any design (from here to there)--at change that disrupts all continuity, any linkage between what has come before and what might come after, that tears each moment of life from the context of other moments, and thus also from the context of time as a succession of instants, as the difference between 'yesterday' and 'today.' " "Life as flame, the moment consumed by fire, disconnected from what was or will be. In this sense: eternity." "Life, the will to power, which overcomes everything that the succession of instants gradually accumulates around me, the continuity of time, making me this, and not that . . . --the effort that place me on the plane to eternity." "'This infinitely small moment,' Nietzsche write, 'is the higher reality and truth, a glimmer on the eternal river.'" Id. at 120.).
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagan, American Nietzsche: A History of An Icon and His Ideas (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2012) ("In the opening years of the twentieth century, a growing number of American political radicals, literary critics, academic philosophers, theologians, and journalists took an interest in the German philosopher who in recent years had been taking Europe by storm. With curiosity and confusion, fascination and frustration, they sought to make sense of a thinker who one writer in 1900 described as 'the most radical philosopher of the century, and one of the most picturesquely eccentric figures in all literature.' Interest in Nietzsche grew so rapidly that by the 1910s observers could, without hyperbole, refer to the American 'Nietzsche vogue.' But as fascination with Nietzsche escalated, so too did the apparent incongruity of it all. Commentators puzzled over what they perceived to be the incommensurability between Nietzsche's aristocratic radicalism and the democratic culture in which it found a home. Observers then could not help but wonder: What is the philosophy of an anti-Christian, antidemocratic madman doing in a culture like ours? Why Nietzsche? Why in America? Id. at 21-22. "This book examines what American readers were drawn to in this philosophy and its author, and what, in turn, they drew from them. It analyzes the dynamic history of how Nietzsche's antifoundationalism (the denial of universal truth), together with his sustained critiques of Christan morality, Enlightenment rationality, and democracy, has compelled many American to question their religious ideals, moral certainties, and democratic principles. . . ." Id. at 22. Also, see Alexander Star, "The Overman," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/15/2012.).
