My five-year-old daughter eyed one of them carefully at breakfast one morning and, once she finished her toast, once the dishes were cleared and the room was empty, opened it. It arrived in three giant packing envelopes, which, after being retrieved from the front step, remained unopened on our kitchen table for a week. Most authors throw it away, but you have a nice amount.

Minutes later, I received the response: “I will mail it off today. “Sure, send the foul matter,” I wrote, almost against my will. Looking away shall be my only negation.” Looking away is the only thing that is forbidden and undesirable. I do not want to accuse I do not even want to accuse those who accuse.

Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. In Nietzsche’s words, “I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. It is to affirm and accept what one once denied or escaped. To neither evade nor bear but to ardently love what one once found most objectionable about life-this is the imperative of the amor fati. Well, I had to take to Wagner … ” At the same time, in the late 1880s, Nietzsche was beginning to articulate an important kernel of his philosophy known as the amor fati, the love of fate. If a man wishes to rid himself of a feeling of unbearable oppression, he may have to take to hashish. For I seemed condemned to the society of Germans. In truth, Wagner had turned on Nietzsche and spread rumors about his personal life, and the young philosopher hated him for it.Īs Nietzsche grew older, however, he returned to his harsh critique of the composer and, as many angry people do upon reflection, tempered it: “All things considered,” he writes in Ecce Homo, his final attempt at autobiography, “I could never have survived my youth without Wagnerian music. Wagner’s music was “sick.” Wagner’s music invited idolatry and patriotic zeal rather than genuine aesthetic appreciation. Wagner had, according to the young Nietzsche, done him and Germany and music tout court wrong. The earliest stories about himself were vitriolic screeds against his idol-turned-mortal-enemy: the Romantic composer Richard Wagner. In his later years, whether through intellectually bravery or sadomasochism, he returned to them repeatedly as a way of analyzing what he had become and how he had become it. Nietzsche wrote eighteen autobiographical essays before he reached middle age. The French philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir writes, “What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.” That might be true, but they’re usually omitted from a diary or a memoir for good reason, and the reviewing of foul matter was a willing return to something that I’d tried to leave behind.īut perhaps I was avoiding something important. It wasn’t just literary detritus, it was a spare part of myself. This is the case for any-or at least most-books, but the foul matter for a memoir, I suspected, was especially disturbing. Not really. For someone in the midst of writing, the foul matter is a reminder of how much work is left to be done: most of the wordsmithery that goes into drafting a book runs the very real risk of being scrapped. If writing is at all like this, foul matter is the stuff strewn across the studio floor.

Michelangelo once described the process of sculpting as the art of removing stone until a beautiful form emerges from a block of granite. If I’ve learned one thing it’s that you are largely stuck with yourself, most especially with your foulest parts.įoul matter, it turns out, as I learned by reading the rest of the note, is the inevitable literary flotsam that is generated in writing a book-the notes, page proofs, drafts, and rejected covers and art. I am now in the weeds of writing my second book, another hybrid of memoir and intellectual history, this time about parenthood and Friedrich Nietzsche. American Philosophy, published last year with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a memoir about facing a father’s death, a divorce and a remarriage, and how American philosophy (the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James) helped me survive. “Dear John,” the editorial assistant had written, “would you like to keep your foul matter from American Philosophy: A Love Story?”

Or found a new and more appropriate term for my writing. Or found an error so grievous they were recalling my books. Maybe they’d changed their mind about my contract. The email was from my publisher, from the heart of my publisher-the editorial department. A Russian heiress was embroiled in some “foul matter” and needed my Social Security number so she could deposit money into my account for safekeeping? A Nigerian prince requesting initial investment in “a guinea foul farm”? The email’s subject line was “FoulMatter”-an obvious Internet phishing scheme, I thought.

Mypublisher phishing