Introduction : is there something missing in our lives? Is Nietzsche to blame? -- Part 1. The avant-guerre : when art mattered. The Nietzsche generation : ecstasy, eros, excess -- No one way that life must be -- The voluptuousness of objects -- Heaven : not a location but a direction -- Visions of Eden : the worship of color, metal, speed, and the moment -- The insistence of desire -- The angel in our cheek -- "The wrong supernatural world" -- Part 2. One abyss after another. Redemption by war -- The Bolshevik crusade for scientific atheism -- The implicitness of life and the rules of existence -- The imperfect paradise -- Living down to fact -- The impossibility of metaphysics, a reverence for metapsychology -- The faiths of the philosophers -- Nazi religions of the blood -- Part 3. Humanity at and after Zero Hour. The aftermath of the aftermath -- The warmth of acts -- War, the American way and the decline of Original Sin -- Auschwitz, apocalypse, absence -- "Quit thinking!" -- A visionary commonwealth and the size of life -- The luxury and limits of happiness -- Faith in detail -- "Our spiritual goal is the enrichment of the evolutionary epic" -- "The good life is the life spent seeking the good life" -- Conclusion : the central sane activity.