...das schwerste Gewicht

There is a vicious adherence to the concept of blindness in the face of eternal return. History blocks our route and we stand still, impatiently waiting for the reality of the past to step aside and permit us passage. This will never happen.
Incidentally, I despise everything which merely instructs me without increasing or immediately enlivening my activity. Our consideration of the worth and the worthlessness of history may begin at the intersection where it affects or impedes our experience of being. This work is to set down why we must seriously despise instruction without explication, why we must reject the permitting of ill-knowledge which structures societally destructive memes, and and why we must repulse the anti-intellectualism that holds to the belief of history as a worthless surplus of knowledge; a luxury for the out-of-touch.
This anti-elitism takes form and denies us what is most essential to us; they deny us our reliance of facts as if they were superfluous to the debate, and this superfluousness is necessarily aggressive and hostile to the rationality that is essential to logic. To be sure, we need history, but we need it in a manner different from the way in which the spoilt idler in the garden of knowledge uses it, no matter how elegantly he may look down on our coarse and graceless needs and distresses.
That is, we need history as that is permitting of life and action, not merely as a comfortable justification for turning away from life and action, or merely for glossing over the difficulties brought about by the absurdities of life or the subsequent cowardice to confront that absurdity. We wish to use history only insofar as it serves living in the most active senses.
But there is a degree of history and a valuing of it through which life atrophies and degenerates. Insomuch as history is the story that power decides, the recording of the struggle of the individual dissolves in the face of itself, this is rarely recognized by the individual. To bring this phenomenon to light as a remarkable symptom of our time is every bit as necessary as it may be painful.
I have tried to describe a feeling which has often enough tormented me. I take my revenge on this feeling when I expose it to the general public. Perhaps with such a description someone or other will have reason to point out to me that he also knows this particular sensation but that I have not felt it with sufficient purity and naturalness and definitely have not expressed myself with the appropriate certainty and mature experience. Perhaps one or two will respond in this way.

However, most people will tell me that this feeling is totally wrong, unnatural, abominable, and absolutely forbidden, that with it, in fact, I have shown myself unworthy of the powerful historical tendency of the times, as it has been, by common knowledge, observed for the past two generations, particularly among Americans.
Whatever the reaction, now that I dare to expose myself with this natural description of my feeling, common decency will be fostered rather than shamed, because I am providing many opportunities for a contemporary tendency like the reaction just mentioned to make polite pronouncements. Moreover, I obtain for myself something of even more value to me than respectability: I become publicly instructed and set straight about our times.