Nietzsche said: "And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee." I must admit the first several times that I read this quote, I couldn't tell if it was wise, or just had the patina of wisdom that comes from parallel sentence structure. Crisscrossing subject and object lends a ring of sagacity. "If you can't take Mohammad to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammad." "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." "If you can't get the carrots out of the refrigerator, get the refrigerator out of the carrots." Yes, that last one is nonsense, but it's not nonsense like: "The banana pirouetted fuchsia all over the underside of an A-sharp chord." The carrot quote probably took your mind some time — if only milliseconds — to relegate to the trash heap. That's why this sentence structure is beloved by godmen & politicians: because you can sound wise even if you're kind of an idiot. So, I was ready to classify Nietzsche's quote pseudo-wisdom when I realized that my smartphone was the Abyss, and it was certainly staring back at me. It stared through all the data collection & neuroscientific and psychological research designed to keep a person scrolling. Maybe Nietzsche was on to something that even he didn't fully understand.
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