Swipe Left.

6:06 a.m.

Back to the gym.
Still a little itchy.
Cleaned the shit outta the house.

Art.

Before Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit and Snapchat, we had canvases. Well... keep Tumblr. It was still white, minimal, and effortlessly cool. I've never owned a canvas myself, but if you've made it this far, you'll probably understand what I mean.

Art is, to borrow the Romanticists' vocabulary, the Sublime. Not merely beautiful, but grand enough to dwarf whatever worries you brought into the room.

Swipe left. Nietzsche's Art. Nietzsche's crush. Amor Fati.

Nietzsche saw the world itself as a work of art, endlessly creating and recreating itself. Art, for him, stands beyond morality, decorum, and even knowledge. I have always sided with him on this one. Art has always seemed older than every moral code we've ever invented and clever enough to survive all of them.

His relationship with music says it best. "Without music, life would be a mistake." I like to imagine he meant art in general.

If you think your love life is tragic, imagine being Nietzsche. He fell hopelessly in love with Lou Salomé, proposed three times, and was rejected three times. For someone who spent a considerable amount of ink dismantling marriage as an institution, he certainly became awfully traditional when it mattered.

Philosophers, I've noticed, become surprisingly ordinary the moment Cupid starts peer-reviewing their arguments.

That is precisely why Amor Fati fascinates me. Nietzsche understood suffering, disappointment, rejection, and still insisted on becoming a "Yes-sayer." Loving fate isn't pretending everything is wonderful. It's looking directly at life's absurdities and replying, "Fine. Carry on."

One passage from The Gay Science has always stayed with me:

"Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit... I doubt that such pain makes us better; but I know that it makes us more profound."

He isn't glorifying suffering. He's simply refusing to negotiate with it. Some people call that Stoicism. Nietzsche would probably object to the label.

Swipe right. Reality and Art.

Art is sublime because it exceeds usefulness. Plato famously dismissed it as imitation, twice removed from reality. Aristotle was kinder. I remain spectacularly unconcerned.

Perhaps that's because I'm a delightful mess of contradictions: part postmodern nihilist, part hedonist, with just enough Romanticism left to sabotage the rest. I know exactly what's wrong with Romanticism, yet I happily steal from it whenever it improves the day.

Reality has never struck me as particularly trustworthy anyway.

If Plato is right, then art imitates reality.

If postmodernism is right, reality is already an imitation of countless perspectives pretending to be objective.

Either way, somebody is copying somebody.

Art just happens to be more honest about it.

Swipe left. Reality, according to a postmodernist.

Reality, to me, has always been plural.

There isn't the reality.

There are versions.

Interpretations.

Drafts masquerading as final copies.

You choose the one that allows you to continue existing with a reasonable amount of dignity, while secretly knowing someone else has chosen an entirely different draft.

Do I genuinely live by my own standards?

I'd love to say yes.

Edit: I probably live by the conditions of determinism more than anything else.

If someone in Oujda hadn't accidentally spilled a homemade latte twenty years ago, causing a chain of microscopic events no novelist could plausibly write, perhaps I wouldn't be here talking about determinism at six in the morning.

Butterfly effects have dreadful taste in timing.

Swipe right. Conclusion.

Truthfully, I don't particularly care who won the debate on mimesis.

Not Plato.

Not Aristotle.

Art has always mattered to me for a far less respectable reason.

I need it.

Not because it tells the truth.

Because it occasionally gives reality the decency to leave me alone for a while.

Call it escapism if you'd like.

I'd probably agree.

Reality has enough sharp edges without me insisting on touching every single one of them.

So yes, hand me another novel.

Another painting.

Another symphony.

Another beautifully fabricated world.

If existence occasionally resembles Hades, then art is the brief, improbable holiday you somehow managed to book there.