The Poetic Life

Fifteen years old, in a family that never said the word love, Clancy Martin fell for a girl and, in the same season, for a strange book. The book was Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Martin never really put it down: it drove him into philosophy, held him together through six bad years in the luxury jewelry business, and ended up as his own translation. Martin, who also wrote How Not to Kill Yourself, opens this series with the story of that first meeting and everything it set loose. Before a single chapter, this episode gives you the reader, and the life the book kept saving.