In that one moment of our saying Yes, all eternity was welcomed, redeemed, justified and affirmed — a hopeful, affirmatory note by Nietzsche and a few photos from a Bank Holiday Monday walk to Fen Ditton

I have a wedding to conduct tomorrow and so have had to move the writing of Sunday's address to today. Following up an unexpected lead — which has nothing directly to do with my chosen, immediate subject matter (perhaps like Thoreau seeking his hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove. . .) — I found myself tracking down one of Nietzsche's entries made in his late notebooks to which I was introduced a few years ago by Pierre Hadot in his book "The Present Alone Is Our Happiness" (Stanford University Press, 2009, pp. 179-180). Here it is in the translation by Kate Sturge for Cambridge University Press:

If we say Yes to a single moment, this means we have said Yes not only to ourselves but to all existence. For nothing stands alone, either in ourselves or in things and if just once our soul has quivered and resounded with happiness like a harpstring, then all eternity was needed to condition that one event — and in that one moment of our saying Yes, all eternity was welcomed, redeemed, justified and affirmed (7[38], Friedrich Nietzsche, "Writings from the Late Notebooks", CUP, 2003, pp. 135-136).


On reading this it immediately took me back to the sublime, hot and sunny May Bank Holiday walk I took with Susanna out to Fen Ditton along the River Cam earlier this week. It was one of those days, not only when Susanna and I were minded to say "Yes not only to ourselves but to all existence", but when everyone around us seemed to be saying Yes as well. For your pleasure I post a few of the photos I took that day.

All taken with a Fuji X100F

Just click on a photograph to enlarge