Damn it! let the sentences breathe—
When did I learn to use em dash in my writing? When I first started reading Nietzsche in my 20th year I was immediately captured by his aphoristic and poetic style of writing. I have never thought him as a philosopher but a prophet of the original-breath, he breathed the em dashes—not just a few but a lot, the silence between words, sentences and paragraphs. Nietzsche hated dialectical prose. His em dashes disrupt Hegelian flow, refusing resolution. They are interruptions of metaphysical certainty. Zarathustra speaks like a Vedic rishi, a prophet—not a professor. The em dashes mirror oral cadence, sacred pauses. Many people believe that this grammatical synthesis is a syntax of interruption but I find it a refusal to kneel before the altar of dialectical finality. Wouldn't you kneel before such glorious urges?
I found out about "The Spoke Zarathustra" from Osho's book recommendation. Osho was a voracious reader. It is said that he read more than one hundred thousand books in his lifetime (I have started making my own list since then, yes from 2009, which I have been mentioning in my various posts here). Osho has more than 600 books over 60 languages (not written by him but by his disciples like Socrates) and around 6000 recorded discourses. He discoursed like this:
"I love the book THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA. I love very few books; I can count them on my fingers.... THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA will be the first on my list. THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV is the second. Third is THE BOOK OF MIRDAD. Fourth is JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL (1984 in Lao Tzu House, Rajneeshpuram, Oregon, USA)"
The list goes on… and what I find more perplexing is that he puts Bhagwat Gita in eighth list on his first series. After reading his book "Books I Have Loved," I read every book from his list.
While I started reading Zarathustra, I just didn't read text, periods, commas, I read the breaks that Nietzsche wanted to create for the blasphemy against metaphysical coherence. I literally roll to the floor, tears coursing down from my cheeks. Whoever thinks of em dash as the pause they are wrong. Em dash is not the pause of logic.
What I think personally, em dash is just an Aesthetic and Rhythm of Thought. When you speak, or read aloud (most of the ancient texts used to be read aloud) you stop for breathing (that time they had no symbols such as dashes so they used hand movements to cover that part as in Vedic text, Mantra should be read aloud with the gestures of the hands. Before punctuation, we all know that, there was a gesture, so gesture precedes the grammatical rules, right? Let me ask you one simple question. What was that gesture? What was that primordial pause? Yes, that was a breath, short, sharp and compressed truths and Em dashes create such a silent realization. He knew what the Vedic rishis knew—that speech is violent, and silence is divine. The em dash, then, is a mudrā of the mind—a hand raised to say: wait—something is being born. Is that wrong?
Actually, em dash debate started in the late 18th to 19th century. In Tristram Shandy (1759–67) used the em dash as a radical, almost anti-narrative device, to mimic thought, hesitation, or emotional outburst — this made it controversial. Poetry lover? Have you read Emily Dickinson? She used a lot of em dashes. For example this one, "Because I could not stop for Death" — She uses it as a grammatical chaos. But for me it's her genius.
And the fact is: Her dashes were later edited out or standardized until the late 20th century when scholars restored them, triggering debates again.
Nietzsche did not write like a typical philosopher. His writing is poetic, aphoristic, musical—and the em dash is a tool to create that rhythm. It acts like a breath, a pivot, a burst of silence between fragments.
Just as God speaks through silence (see The Cloud of Unknowing), Nietzsche's dash represents the unknowable, the nihilistic gap after the "death of God."
In my opinion when you stop lying while writing then you would stop for a moment and put that em dash, it separates the man's thought from beast to God. It's a gesture where your lie dies. In this whole written world em dash is the only mark we put to break on our sufferable lamentation. We think between those em dashes. I always think of Nietzsche's em dash as a nihilistic gap to prove his philosophical greatness. I love his hanging em dash which is normally used at the end of the sentence like:
"I teach you the Overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. — What have you done to overcome him?"
See that em dash after period, that proves the 'suspended silence'.
In my next post I will further explore about how reading and languages we perceive from the text.