The Accidental Plagiarist: The Trouble with Originality

by Erik Campbell

I. We Few, We Hapless Few
Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

There comes a point in many a person’s life when things that Nietzsche said begin to make good sense.

This is not necessarily a propitious sign. Understanding or simply identifying with Nietzsche doesn’t typically fill one’s life with joy; it can make a mess of one’s love life, make one speak in intelligent-sounding but laceratingly depressing epigrams, and give one the urge to sign missives as “Dionysus” or “The Damned.”

I recall the day when I finally understood one of Nietzsche’s statements which had previously baffled me, one which Harold Bloom is fond of quoting. To wit: “There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” What happened was, I was talking one evening to a co-worker about the war in Iraq and, after explaining why I think we should get out of there fast, he suggested the following: “We should just nuke the whole goddamn country. What’s Iraq? Desert. We nuke the whole goddamn country and turn the desert to glass. Then our troops just have to look down and find the oil. Easy. It’s all about easy extraction.”[1] Then he laughed and slapped my back in solidarity. That laugh, I thought, is the sound of hope losing its feathers.

Read more…

http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2007/spring/campbell-accidental-plagiarist

A great read  – specially in the light of the current broadsheet.