My Birthday!!

I’m turning 30 today.  Am I reaching a milestone?  I found a few paragraphs from Derrida on Nietzsche turning 45 that might illuminate.  Derrida discusses a dated page from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo:

This page is in a certain way dated because it says “today” and today “my birthday,” the anniversary of my birth.  The anniversary is the moment when the year turns back on itself, forms a ring or annulus with itself, annuls itself and begins anew.  It is here: my forty-fifth year, the day of the year when I am forty-five years old, something like the midday of life.  The noon of life, even midlife crisis, is commonly situated at about this age, at the shadowless midpoint of a great day.

[...]It is a shadowless moment consonant with all the “mid-days” of Zarathustra.  It comes as a moment of affirmation, returning like the anniversary from which one can look forward and backward at one and the same time.  The shadow of all negativity has disappeared: “I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once.”

Yet this midday tolls the hour of a burial.  Playing on everyday language, he (Nietzsche), buries his past forty-four years.  But what he actually buries is death, and in burying death he has saved life–and immortality. “It was not for nothing that I buried [begrub] my forty-forth year today; I had the right to bury it; whatever was life in it has been saved, is immortal.  The first book of the Revaluation of all Values, the Songs of Zarathustra, the Twilight of the Idols, my attempt to philosophize with a hammer–all presents [Geshenke] of this year, indeed of its last quarter.  How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?–and so I tell my life to myself.” (Ear of the Other 11)

So, with Nietzsche and Derrida, I tell my life to myself and receive my life as a gift to myself.  Some of the past may be buried but, I tell myself, I have so much to be.

~ by tharmas on May 9, 2008.