FN If there’s one writer who has been “the axe for the frozen sea within” me, it’s Friedrich Nietzsche. Let’s just say I have one tattoo, and it’s Nietzsche’s maxim, “Become what you are.” When I first read him nearly five years ago, he hit me like a deep-space asteroid. Reading Nietzsche is like finding some dusty ancient scrolls in a mountain cave that were left by a demigod who once visited Earth—like reading something secret and forbidden that humans shouldn’t really have access to. No one’s words have leapt off the page and punched me in the face in the same way. I’m still not sure how such a person actually walked this planet.

If there’s one writer who has been “the axe for the frozen sea within” me, it’s Friedrich Nietzsche. Let’s just say I have one tattoo, and it’s Nietzsche’s maxim, “Become what you are.” When I first read him nearly five years ago, he hit me like a deep-space asteroid. Reading Nietzsche is like finding some dusty ancient scrolls in a mountain cave that were left by a demigod who once visited Earth—like reading something secret and forbidden that humans shouldn’t really have access to. No one’s words have leapt off the page and punched me in the face in the same way. I’m still not sure how such a person actually walked this planet.