"Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you"
About this Quote
Nietzsche isn’t offering a calm meditation trick so much as a tactical hallucination: pretend time has been abolished, and the world’s “crooked” angles suddenly read as “straight.” The provocation is classic Nietzschean mischief. He takes the most stubborn human complaint - that reality is unfair, jagged, irrational - and suggests the problem might be our temporal bookkeeping. We experience injury and disappointment as scandals because we store them in a timeline: before/after, deserved/undeserved, progress/regress. Erase that sequence, and the moral arithmetic collapses.
The subtext is an attack on the comfort industry of metaphysics and resentment. “Crooked” is the language of grievance: something is out of joint, someone is to blame, history should be different. Nietzsche’s wager is that much of this crookedness is perspective, not property. Look “as though time were gone” and you’re forced into a godlike snapshot, where events don’t plead for justification in the future or redemption in the past. You can’t appeal to “eventually” or “once upon a time.” What remains is the raw facticity of things - and the possibility of affirming them without complaint.
Context matters: Nietzsche wrote in the shadow of a Europe drunk on progress narratives and moral certainties, while he was busy dismantling both. This line anticipates the eternal recurrence thought experiment: can you say yes to your life, not as a chapter in a story that improves, but as something you’d repeat? The “straightening” isn’t the world becoming better. It’s you becoming less dependent on time as an excuse to hate it.
The subtext is an attack on the comfort industry of metaphysics and resentment. “Crooked” is the language of grievance: something is out of joint, someone is to blame, history should be different. Nietzsche’s wager is that much of this crookedness is perspective, not property. Look “as though time were gone” and you’re forced into a godlike snapshot, where events don’t plead for justification in the future or redemption in the past. You can’t appeal to “eventually” or “once upon a time.” What remains is the raw facticity of things - and the possibility of affirming them without complaint.
Context matters: Nietzsche wrote in the shadow of a Europe drunk on progress narratives and moral certainties, while he was busy dismantling both. This line anticipates the eternal recurrence thought experiment: can you say yes to your life, not as a chapter in a story that improves, but as something you’d repeat? The “straightening” isn’t the world becoming better. It’s you becoming less dependent on time as an excuse to hate it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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