For
those who value mental fitness, Nietzsche Awakens! by Farid Younes is an
essential read. In this slim volume, the author reworks all of Nietzsche's
famous aphorisms . . . Why not? . . . and then invites Nietzsche himself to
respond!
Farid
Younes is a philosopher, architect, and college professor who makes his home in
Byblos, a coastal town in northern Lebanon. He lived through both the Lebanese
and now the Syrian civil wars. Like all Lebanese, he has plenty of
"serious" in his life. The need for him and other Lebanese is to find
the distance needed to cope and if possible to move events and circumstances in
a better direction. BR>/>Nietzsche Awakens! is a refined and disciplined version
of a coffee house like the famous "Haven--The Cabin" that rests on a
Byblos hilltop looking out over the Mediterranean.
BR>/> Here, the author's neighbors meditate over their chess boards or
chat quietly and put the pieces of their world back together.
Nietzsche Awakens! is a mind game, that could almost have
been lifted from conversations in The Cabin. It is the author's invitation to
each of us to test and tone our intellect, to use our intelligence to create
clever word play and to define razor sharp slices of meaning.

BR>/> At a certain point, the parlor game of this book reaches depths that
Nietzsche (a famously troubled soul) experienced in his own life--depths that
Farid Younes and his fellow citizens know all too well. Farid's discourse is a
precise and rarefied melody that floats through his book . . . and yet his text
has a base line, far below, that is sensed rather than read, felt more than
heard: it is visceral, a physical pressure, a movement of darkness. It is the
tangible mental byproduct of the unspeakable cruelty and carnage of war and the
despair of refugees who line the Lebanese streets.
BR>/>Where are we . . . who are we . . . if our minds do not work? Mental
fitness can be a gift, but it is also an obligation of each one of us to
ourselves, our families, our communities
. BR>/> As the Muslim and Christian knights of Crusader times battled for their
idea of truth in these steep mountains above the Mediterranean, today humanity
itself is called to combat the prejudice, stupidity, rigid thinking, blatant
self-dealing, and the other idiocies that prevent us from addressing the primary
challenges of our time.
BR>/>Ni