For those you need to be a cut-throat and I'm not a cut-throat. Cut-throats have the right attitude: nothing and nobody will stand in their way. They will win people around, they will knock others down. They will do and get all that they need to realise their dream and they will work hard. Cut-throats believe they will get to where they want to go and beyond that.
Some if not born a cut-throat can become a cut-throat, though the path to get to where they want to go might be rockier. I think, however, in general, there are those that are cut-throat and those that are not.
Nature? Nurture? Who knows.
But we always want to be what we're not. Or at the very least, on occasion, admire what we know we're not in others. Despise it even.
It's never too late! they say to fulfil an ambition. I think it is. For me at any rate. And I don't have one, because, as I've said, I don't have an ambitious bone in my body.
I've always suspected my bones were rather porous and this suspicion has since been proved correct. They are not the building blocks of ambition, but the supporting scaffold only. And so this too has proved in my ongoing working life, if you can call it that. Nietzsche however might call me a decadent, whereas I would argue I have a working ethic, I just don't always know what to do with it, nor where I can best make use of the codes I wish to live and work by.
I would argue Nietzsche had the same problem. But then I do like to be deliberately contradictory in my arguments; it infuriates my opponents.
And Nietzsche, too, seemed to like to ruffle feathers, as well as be self-congratulatory. The best example of the latter is his autobiography: Behold the Man!
I did as he said and beheld him, with my reading eyes, and discovered his vaingloriousness did not put me off getting to know him, nor, afterwards, his Zarathustra.
Nor did such swelling pride put me off knowing 'You Are Welcome' Cellini (a Florence-born goldsmith and sculptor) whose autobiography is more heroic than Nietzsche's. What one man can do! What one man went through! It's a fascinating account of life and art.
In mine, if there ever came a time for me to write my autobiography, there'd be very little self-congratulating going on, and maybe only a little truth.
For I have achieved nothing remarkable and nothing commonplace. A Life of Humdrum, could that be its title? It would be very humdrum indeed. No ambitions, so no ambitions thwarted. No wild adventures. No poor parental relations. No sibling or cousinly rivalry. And no mad passions.
There would literally be nothing to tell, unless the excitement all comes in the next forty years. If it does it won't be of my making. I won't have imagined it nor made it happen. Although I could decide to fictionalise my life in all the accounts I might leave of it. But as tempting as that would be, I think (as it always does) my brutal honesty would get the better of me, and some things might instead get written out rather than written in.
If you can imagine it, you can have it. Cut-throats believe that; they practise it! I can't say it's not true but I can't say it's true either, for those of their ilk would cut off their own finger (and others' too) to succeed, whereas I have never had a burning desire to be, to do anything, and therefore try anything to get what I want or to where I want to be. Nietzsche, so he claims, felt the same:
'To 'want' something, to 'strive' after something, to have a 'goal', a 'wish' in view – I know none of this from experience. Even at this moment I look out upon a future – a distant future! - as upon a smooth sea. It is ruffled by no desire. I do not want in the slightest anything that should become other than it is; I do not want myself to become other than I am...But that is how I've always lived.'
Picture credit: The good little sister cut off her own tiny finger fitted it into the lock and succeeded in opening it, from Snowdrop and Other Tales, Brothers Grimm. Illustration by Arthur Rackham.
Reading recommendation: Ecco Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Written February 2020.
