Nietzsche on the tasks of writing

I'm reading Nietzsche's Unfashionable Observations, or what has been previously translated as the Untimely Meditations. The first of these is an extended, withering attack on one David Friedrich Strauss, who as far as I know has been completely forgotten outside of those who know about him through Nietzsche. I'm finding this essay to have a lot of contemporary relevance, because much of what Nietzsche attacked in German academia and culture in the 1870s holds true of American academia and (the tiny world of) intellectual culture today.

At this time Nietzsche was breaking free of the world of academic philological scholarship (quite possibly an unmooring and setting adrift as well). He sought to create original works worth studying, being inspired by the models of classical authors, rather than doing scholarship on the tiniest details of those classical authors as a comfortable (bourgeois!) profession (something academia no longer promises to be, but that's a story for other posts).

I liked the following quote:

Anyone who has reached his fortieth year should have the right to write an autobiography, for even the most insignificant person can have experienced and seen up close something that the thinker may find worthwhile and noteworthy. But to make a confession about one's beliefs must be considered incomparably more exacting, because it presupposes that the confessor ascribes value not only to what he has experienced, explored, or seen during his lifetime, but even to what he has believed.

As someone who has reached and even surpassed his fortieth year...

The knife in his quote is double-edged. But I will take the optimistic side of it: One who has reached "a certain age" (I don't know that there's anything sacred about forty, but, hey, it works) has experiences that are worth writing about. And even beliefs, if written about in a way incomparably more exacting.