The art of travel (5)

«Sitting in a café on the Plaza Provincia, I acknowledged the impossibility of new factual discoveries. (...) Anything I learnt would have to be justified by private benefit rather than by the interest of others. My discoveries would hav to enliven me: they would have in some way to prove 'life-enhancing'. The term was Nietzsche's. In the autumn of 1873, Friedrich Nietzsche composed an essay in which he distinguised between collecting facts like an explorer or academic and using already well-known facts for the sake of inner, psychological enrichment. Unusually for a university professor, he denigrated the former activity and praised the latter. (...) The real challenge was to use facts to enhance 'life'. He quoted a sentence from Goethe: 'Ihate everything that merely instructs me without augmentating or directly invigorating my activity'.»