The ice is near, the loneliness is terrible..
The album was born from my fascination with solitude and vastness. It’s about losing yourself in nature, about how the land can erase your traces and return you to something more elemental. I wanted to translate that sensation into sound: the beauty of isolation, the serenity of distance, the clarity that comes when you finally stop trying to belong.
The ice is near, the loneliness is terrible— but how serenely everything lies in the sunshine! how freely one can breathe! How much, one feels, lies beneath one!
Philosophy, as I have understood it hitherto, is a voluntary retirement into regions of ice and mountain peaks—the seeking out of everything strange and questionable in existence everything upon which, hitherto, morality has set its ban.
Through long experience, derived from such wanderings in forbidden country, I acquired an opinion very different from that which may seem generally desirable, of the causes which hitherto have led to men’s moralising and idealising.
The secret history of philosophers, the psychology of their great names, was revealed to me. How much truth can a certain mind endure; how much truth can it dare ?—these questions became for me ever more and more the actual test of values. Error (the belief in the ideal) is not blindness ; error is cowardice. . . . Every conquest, every step forward in knowledge, is the outcome of courage, of hardness towards one’s self, of cleanliness towards one’s self.
I do not refute ideals; all I do is to draw on my gloves in their presence.
Friedrich Nietzsche – Ecce Homo
