“My patient friends,” Nietzsche exhorted his reader at the conclusion to the Preface to Daybreak, “learn to read me well!” Even though that reader is, as Nietzsche was well aware, “in the midst of an age of ‘work,’ that is, of hurry, of indecent and sweaty haste, wanting to ‘get everything done at once,’ including every old and new book,” different rules should apply to his own writings—“read well, that is slowly, deeply, looking cautiously back and forward, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers …” (D P:5). While Nietzsche's call for patience in the “age of ‘work’” has clearly gained in its urgency since he penned these words in the small fishing village of Ruta di Camogli, just outside Genoa, in the autumn of 1886, the modern reader is nevertheless arguably in a better position than ever to read Nietzsche well. Not...

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