Review: Essay Oder Stirb

It is amazing how few people sit down and think. I mean really think, consider the big and the small things in life and not just what is happening to them, why, and why life is so unfair, but moving events and powers of our modern world. People in general no longer seem to look at the Big Picture, but more the minor facts and events of life. Perhaps the art of the philosopher has disappeared from the modern world, and civilization is more concerned with living from one day to the next without any major improvements, without managing to move on to better things. That is, better things outside of the standard of living, their earnings, their love life and relationships.

Gone too, for many, are the days when a Journal was used for daily thoughts, for considerations as much as for noting down major events. It is hard to imagine a Samuel Pepys today, writing in his small office at home, when all we have is the fast-moving, constantly changing Internet and facts, information, opinions piling themselves one upon another, blotting out each other with something new, something exciting, holding for a mere moment in time, scarcely attracting our attention for more than a few seconds.

Photo Credit: jDevaun – Creative Commons

Frank Nihil puts his thoughts down on paper in this small, deep work. He takes thoughts from his online works and sets them out as individual pieces, well constructed, thought-provoking, for others to consider. It is as if he is speaking to those who take this slim volume in their hands, challenging each person to delve into themselves, to find similarities, to work their way through his contemplations and find their own paths. Life, he writes, is complicated and is always getting in the way of itself.

He writes about life, about time, about the many ways what we need to do, what we want to do are thwarted, how our plans go astray. He speaks directly to our inner soul, to the dreams and desires we have, but have never managed to realize, never had the courage, or the time, to work towards. His words flow across the page with the simplicity of a good poem, taking us into his world as much as into our own, showing that we are not alone in being alone, not as individual in our worries as we might have imagined. And he challenges us to think, to consider, to move around all the hurdles and burdens of life and get out there, experience what there is, rather than just worrying over whether we will have enough time, whether we can fit our plans into the master scheme.

And Essay oder Stirb is a work that the reader can constantly come back to, opening it at random, reading a short piece, letting it settle and fester in the mind, draw us out of ourselves. The challenge is not in the reading of this well crafted work, the challenge is in thinking about what he has to say and going deep into ourselves to bring that depth out.

Published by Frank Nihil (Books on Demand – in German). ISBN: 978 3 732 28011 7.

• Viktoria Michaelis

Supplied through the author as a Goodreads First Read for review.

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