Edvard Munch, about whose famous painting, "The Scream," I've written in the past, came to my mind recently.  The impetus was an exhibit of Munch's work mounted by the Metropolitan Musuem of Art in New York City, "Between the Clock and the Bed."  Although I didn't attend the show, I obtained the book the Museum published about it.
     Many paintings stood out to me, but I write about just one here.  It is a portrait of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.  Perhaps most famous for his lauding of the "Ubermensch" (Overman or Superman), the person who breaks through the ordinary and mundane and rises above the "herd" to new heights of adventure, as well as his observation that, "God is dead," Nietzsche stirs a range of emotions in all who come across him.  Some people hate him, some people love him, some people feel sorry for him.
     Nonetheless, Nietzsche remains a compelling figure, and it is not surprising that Munch painted his portrait.  What I found particularly intriguing was that Munch, the person who painted "The Scream," chose to paint the person whose ideas directly contributed to the ethos of emptiness "The Scream" embodies, as if one is to see, in Nietzsche, the lost human being, screaming into the world he made.
     And make a world Nietzsche did:  a world without God.  It's a world of freedom yet a world of pain, an intense, joyful pain.  And that's Nietzsche's point:  better to step into the scary unknown than to lapse into the customary old.
     Probably so.  But sometimes the old, the world of God, is the most challenging world of all:  a world of faith.  Faith in the unseen, yes, but faith ultimately that in this unseen rests the worth and integrity of all that is.
     As Nietzsche well knew, meaning is lost without it.