For all the progress updates in one place:
Progress Update: July 2025
Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during July 2025, and my notes on the progress:
Philosophy as a Way of Life
Divine Comedy (Dante)
The Ethics of Ambiguity (Simone de Beauvoir)
When Life Hits Hard
9 Steps to Build a Life of Meaning
Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering
The Antichrist (Nietzsche)
Ecce Homo (Nietzsche)
Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche)
Essay:
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (Nietzsche)
Notes:
• July was another month of slow progress. I focused on my last weeks in Florence, studying Italian, rather than making progress on my reading. On the good side, I went on a Nietzsche binge in the last few days of the month while I visited Sils Maria.
• It was great to go through Nietzsche’s work while hiking the same trails where he conceived his ideas. The hikes were challenging, and he would do them every day for months. He chose a physical struggle that led to beautiful sights and the crisp air at the peaks of the mountains. The difficulty and effort were tied to the beauty of the ascent, the sights, and reaching highs above ourselves—all concepts of his philosophy.
He even said that if you wanted to understand him, you would have to go up in the mountains and breathe high-altitude air. He especially loved the Engadine region, and wrote several of his books there.
I realized he wasn’t going there to relax; he was there to calm the outside so he could rage storms from the inside.
It makes me think of Japan and what it means to me. If someone wanted to understand how I see life, they would have to visit Tokyo to get a full picture.
In that sense, being in Sils Maria gave me a better understanding of Nietzsche’s life and philosophy.
This was an important experience for my research, my thinking, and by extension, my book.