Friedrich Nietzsche by Curtis Cate

Author:Curtis Cate [CATE, CURTIS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000, BIO009000
ISBN: 9781468304763
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2012-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 27

Incipit tragoedia

– ‘Love is the danger of the loneliest, love

of everything, if only it is alive! Laughable,

verily, are my folly and my modesty in love!’

It was, ironically enough, Elisabeth Nietzsche, from whom he had tried to hide the truth, who finally helped lift her tormented brother off the horns of the dilemma on which he was psychologically impaled. For years she had been trying to persuade Fritz to spend his summers in the cool shade of the Tautenburger Wald, a dense Thuringian forest situated nine kilometres from Jena and a little more than twenty kilometres south-west of Naumburg. But after he had discovered the high Alps Fritz had stubbornly refused this ‘convenient’ solution to his annual search for summer shade and coolness. Not until the excruciatingly painful summer spent at Sils-Maria in 1881, when his peace of mind had been repeatedly shattered by thunderstorms and nerve-racking discharges of electricity, did he begin to have second thoughts about the infallibility of the ‘Alpine-highlands’ solution to this recurrent problem. Now that the ‘second phase’ of his life’s work – the one he had begun with Human, All Too Human – was virtually over, he could offer himself a period of intellectual repose, by accepting his sister’s suggestion that he spend the summer in the Tautenburg forest, before moving on in the autumn to attend lectures on scientific subjects at the University of Vienna.

On 22 June, when they met in Leipzig, Nietzsche was at last able to give his publisher, Ernst Schmeitzner, the first three parts of The Joyous Science. They were accompanied by a ‘Bacchanalian rout’ of sixty-three tongue-in-cheek ‘aphorisms’ in verse form, in which he made witty fun of everything: narrow-minded souls, health-obsessed pessimists, Seneca (‘primum scribere, deinde philosophari’), the lover who has lost his head, Lucifer, Feuerbach’s shocking contention that ‘Man created God’ (rather than the other way round), ponderous scholarship, poetic vanity, his own book, Human, All Too Human. In one of them, irreverently titled ‘Ecce homo’, he summed up his incandescent nature in six short lines:

Ja! ich weiss, woher ich stamme!

Ungesättigt gleich der Flamme

Glühe und verzehr’ ich mich.

Licht wird Alles, was ich fasse,

Kohle Alles, was ich lasse:

Flamme bin ich sicherlich.

(Yes, I know wherefrom I came!

Unsatiated like the flame

I glow and thus consume me.

Light will all be I conceive,

Coals everything that I do leave:

Flame am I assuredly.)

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