my sweetest friend

"Except for a few exceptions, my company on this earth is mostly Nietzsche ..." (Bataille, On Nietzsche)

We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and with good reason. We have never looked for ourselves -- so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves. How right is the saying -- 'Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also'; our treasure is where the hives of our knowledge are. As born winged-insects and honey-gatherers we are constantly making for them, concerned at heart with only one thing -- 'to bring something home'. As far as the rest of life is concerned, the so-called 'experiences', -- who of us has even enough seriousness for them? Or enough time? I fear we have never really been 'with it' in such matters: our heart is simply not in it -- and not even our ear! On the contrary, like somebody absent-minded and sunk in his own thoughts who, the twelve strokes of midday having just boomed into his ears, wakes with a start and wonders 'What hour struck?', sometimes we, too, afterwars rub our ears and ask, astonished, taken aback -- 'What did we actually experience then?' or even -- 'Who are we, in fact?' and afterwards, as I said, we count all twelve reverberating strokes of our experience, of our life, of our being -- oh! and lose count ... We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity, we do not understand ourselves, we must confusedly mistake who we are, the motto 'everyone is furthest from himself' applies to us for ever -- we are not 'knowers' when it comes to ourselves ...

(Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, preface s.1, trans. Carol Diethe)

Oh! how happy we are, we knowers, provided we can keep quiet for long enough ...

(preface s.3)