Judas Goat...such a beautiful quote, but in faintness as the bottom, that is Nietzsche...and then his tragic demise... arguably, for him, you could say the monster DID succeed.
Dear Judas Goat, For me, I would not enter into any kind of contest with the abyss...staring or otherwise. I just accept the abyss, go with the inanity as necessary, and pretend my life has meaning, and wonder, and beauty anyway.
I am reminded of a couplet said o be a translation from Immanuel Kant -though I have never found the original in his works. "Two things move my heart with awe; Above, the starry heavens, within the moral law."
There are two kinds of infinite depth -that is the meaning of "abyss" -which, by the way, is one of the very few ancient Sumerian words surviving into the English language. "The starry heavens" represent one kind -to many, suggestive of God and the infinite richness of His creation. The other is the utter, endless emptiness of non-being, of death, the wasting of one's life by the rejection of life's creative possibilities -that is, of the "categorical imperative" which is the true meaning of "the moral law." I would call my own reaction to this latter not so much "awe", which for me is inspiring, exciting, moving toward affirmative action, as I would call it "awfulness" -the terror of endlee, pointless deadness.
Pardon my wordiness. Comes from the effort we philosophers cannot resist making in trying to communicate precisely the very fuzzy ideas we are trying to grasp.
Benedict Arnold 