Woe, when homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more freedom there - and there is no more ‘land’!

In Fragments, Collection #29, Christopher Hobson quotes Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), §124:

In the horizon of the infinite. - We have forsaken the land and gone to sea! We have destroyed the bridge behind us - more so, we have demolished the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean; it is true, it does not always roar, and at times it lies there like silk and gold and dreams of goodness. But there will be hours when you realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that has felt free and now strikes against the walls of this cage! Woe, when homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more freedom there - and there is no more ‘land’!

Hard not to read this passage and not think of the "Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Western Civ has got to go" chant at Stanford and other universities in the early eighties.   We burned that bridge and then many of the bridges to functional social norms which upheld prosperity in ways we did not understand.  Then we opened the doors to the naivety of multiculturalism.  Then we adopted and funded various offspring of totalitarian Marxism (Social Justice Theory, Critical Race Theory, DEI, ESG, AGW, etc.)  

We have spent fifty years burning bridges and throwing babies out with the bathwater only to arrive where Nietzsche suggested.  We look out on the infinity of this desolate new world.  

Woe, when homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more freedom there - and there is no more ‘land’!