This Is My Way

Two philosophers, separated by an ocean and a generation, arrive at almost the same sentence. Henry David Thoreau, in the woods outside Concord, insists that a person must follow an inner music even if no one else can hear it. Friedrich Nietzsche, through the mouth of Zarathustra, refuses to give his disciples a path at all. Clancy Martin reads Nietzsche on this point, John Kaag reads Thoreau, and the two readings converge on a single radical idea: that becoming yourself means deviating from the way everyone else has agreed to walk.