Saying Yes to the Nick of Time

There is a moment in John Kaag's commentary on Henry David Thoreau’s Walden where he reaches into his background in nineteenth-century German philosophy and draws a comparison between the Concord saunterer and the philosopher who first inspired his philosophical education: Friedrich Nietzsche. Thoreau's philosophy, he says, taught him to improve the nick of time by being "a little more attentive to the world as it moves past us," and then he adds that this insight came to him paired with "Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of the love of fate, the amor fati." It is also the key to how Thoreau's deliberate living and Nietzsche's eternal recurrence turn out to be two disciplines aimed at the same target: the human habit of living everywhere except the present moment.