It broke open a shell in my heart,” the young man I’ll call Vogel said of reading Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human when we met for an interview earlier this year at a Brooklyn bar. “I was very, very depressed at that time…. Beauty in the world had become hauntingly distant. It existed over the horizon behind some mountain and I couldn’t access it.”
Vogel wears the owl of Minerva around his neck. It’s a reference to the pursuit of wisdom, but the charm also evokes Hegel’s maxim “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk” — the idea that true insight only comes late, at the end of an era. His bracelets, too, are symbolic: they represent Huginn and Muninn, who in Norse mythology are the two ravens who sit on the shoulders of the god Odin, and whose names mean thought and memory.
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