In the Alps I am unassailable, especially when I am alone and have no enemy but myself.
Letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, 3 September 1877
Nietzsche sold his possessions, apart from his books and a few pictures. He entrusted management of his finances to his trusty friend Franz Overbeck and he gave his notes and notebooks into Elisabeth’s safekeeping (a grave mistake and a hostage to fortune). He retained only two trunk-loads of the books that he could not bear to be parted from. They accompanied him as he made his rounds of the milk-and-air-cure resorts of the Alps: Davos, Grindelwald, Interlaken, Rosenlauibad, Champfèr and St Moritz. He ranged like Prometheus over the high places, often walking for eight or ten hours a day, with his mind fixed on the inscrutable purpose of the universe, discovering a wonderful lucidity in contemplating the immense realm of the imperfectly understood. He tramped the stony mountain paths as high as he dared, but his ascent always had to stop short of the greatest heights, where the bright light of the eternal snows pierced his eyes like bared swords, as he noted down his thoughts towards the next book.
‘In this book you will discover a “subterranean man” at work, one who tunnels and mines and undermines. You will see him – presupposing you have eyes capable of seeing this work in the depths – going forward slowly, cautiously, gently inexorable, without betraying very much of the distress which any protracted deprivation of light and air must entail; you might even call him contented, working there in the dark. Does it not seem as though some faith were leading him on, some consolation offering him compensation? As though he perhaps desires this prolonged obscurity, desires to be incomprehensible, concealed, enigmatic, because he knows what he will thereby also acquire: his own morning, his own redemption, his own daybreak? … He will tell you himself of his own accord, this seeming Trophonius [son of Apollo, who was swallowed up by the earth and lived on, underground, as an oracular god], and subterranean, as soon as he has “become a man” again. Being silent is something one completely unlearns if, like him, one has been for so long a solitary mole.’1
A passage from the preface to Daybreak, and a portrait of himself during the Wanderjahre, the wilderness years during which the purblind ex-philologist mole of yore wandered the mountains and shores of Europe transforming himself into the blind seer of vast, prophetic horizons.
The burrowing mole was at home below the tree line where the canopy softened the light to a green gloom. More importantly, it hid him from the clouds, which were full of electricity and persisted in a merciless persecution of him. Ever since Benjamin Franklin had apparently drawn down the electric energy from the clouds in his kite experiment of 1752, it was not altogether outrageous for the individual to imagine himself an electricity conductor, though today the notion of absorbing electricity from the atmosphere is considered a delusional symptom of mental illness, often associated with schizophrenia.
Nietzsche had always been peculiarly susceptible to electric storms. From his schooldays at Pforta onwards, his contemporaries had noticed that his most inspired and ecstatic outflows of creativity and musical improvisation were produced during thunderstorms. Dionysus’ father, Zeus, had appeared as a thunderbolt, and with an increasing feeling of kinship to Dionysus, Nietzsche believed that he was probably more susceptible to the power of the electricity in the clouds than any other man on earth. He wondered about going to Paris, to display himself as a specimen at the exhibition of electricity that was taking place there, and he decided that electricity was even more deleterious to his health than Wagner’s music.
‘I am one of those machines which can explode,’ he wrote; ‘… the electrical pattern in the cloud cover and the effects of the wind: I am convinced that 80% of my suffering results from these influences.’2 The attacks now often involved three days of raging pain and vomiting, accompanied by the feeling of being half paralysed, sensations of seasickness and real difficulty speaking. And yet also, high in the thin mountain air, he found himself at times overwhelmed by sudden gushes of extreme happiness of an exquisite intensity that he had never before experienced. He felt himself so thinned, so deliciously etiolated, that he had the sensation of moving through the landscape like a zigzag doodle drawn on paper by a superior power wanting to try out a new pen. He began to rate the mountains by the capacity of their forests to hide him from the all-seeing sky.
The legendary Teutoburg forest, scene of the defeat of the Roman legions by the Germanic tribes, gave the darkest darkness and the greatest satisfaction. Threading gloomy shades, he filled twelve pocket-size notebooks in what he called his ‘accursed telegram style’ – the only way he was capable of recording the bursts of significant thought between headaches – though his publisher had already written to tell him that the market for telegraphic aphorisms was saturated and he really must change his prose style, should he wish to gain readers.
Despite this advice, he sent Schmeitzner ‘A Miscellany of Opinions and Maxims’ and ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’, two collections of several hundred aphorisms each, which comprised the appendices to Human, All Too Human. He also sent an entire new book composed of 575 aphorisms called Daybreak (Morgenröte) subtitled Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. The thoughts it contained ranged from the morality of patting a dog to Nietzsche’s more typical preoccupations: Wagner, free will, individual freedom, religion and the state.
Daybreak went further along the road of materialism. It was written during one of his periods of interest in contemporary scientific speculation, together with his delighted discovery of the seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher Spinoza. ‘My solitude is now a solitude for two! I am really amazed, really delighted! I have a precursor!’ He wrote a poem to Spinoza, in whom he saw mirrored his own ‘denial of free will, purposes, evil, the moral world order and the non-egotistical … Of course the differences are enormous, but they are differences more of period, culture, field of knowledge.’3 He read Robert Mayer’s Mechanics of Heat, Boscovich’s theory of non-material atoms, and Force and Matter (1855) by the materialist medical doctor Ludwig Büchner, whose bestselling book spread the gospel that ‘the researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer allow us to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product like all other organic beings’. F. A. Lange’s History of Materialism (1866) asserted that man was only a special case of universal physiology, and thought was only a special chain in the physical processes of life. When Nietzsche was looking back on this year and writing about it in Ecce Homo, the autobiography he wrote in 1888 when he was zigzagging between sanity and insanity, he described himself in thrall to a burning and exclusive fascination with physiology, medicine and natural science. This is what he set out to explore in Daybreak: the idea that man is merely a bodily organism whose spiritual, moral and religious beliefs and values can be explained by the physiological and medical. General interest at that time was growing in the idea that man might control the future by controlling his own evolutionary development through diet. It is an attitude famously summed up by the philosopher and anthropologist Feuerbach, who had died only a few years earlier: ‘If you want to improve the people, give them better food instead of declamations against sin. Man is what he eats.’4
And yet, in direct contradiction to this, Daybreak also introduces speculation on the significance of the exaltation and ecstasy of madness on the history of ethics and morality. Nietzsche proposes that beneath the fearful pressure of millennia of custom, the only way to break out was ‘by a dreadful attendant: almost everywhere it was madness which prepared the way for the new idea, which broke the spell of a venerated usage and superstition. Do you understand why it had to be madness which did this?’ Madness was total freedom. It was the speaking trumpet of the divinity. If madness was not conferred, it must be assumed.
‘All superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad … How can one make oneself mad when one is not mad and does not dare to appear so? … Ah, give me madness, you heavenly powers! Madness, that I may only at last believe in myself! Give deliriums and convulsions, sudden lights and darkness, terrify me with frost and fire such as no mortal has ever felt, with deafening din and prowling figures, make me howl and whine and crawl like a beast: so that I may come to believe in myself! I am consumed by doubt, I have killed the law, the law anguishes me as a corpse does a living man: if I am not more than the law I am the vilest of all men.’5
The book ends with a clarion call to dare all:
‘We aeronauts of the spirit … whither does this mighty longing draw us, this longing that is worth more to us than any pleasure? Why just in this direction, where all the suns of humanity have hitherto gone down. Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering westward, hoped to reach an India – but that it was our fate to be wrecked against infinity? Or, my brothers. Or? –’
Few authors are brave enough to end a book on ‘Or? –’
*
His illness was his own Alexandrian journey to reach an India, his means of wrecking himself against infinity. Every painful seizure tested his ability not to be overcome, every recuperation was a rebirth confirming the value of suffering as the price of revelation. Recovery from the brink of death (imagined or real) inspired soaring creativity as day by day, alone, he inched towards the age at which his father had died, blind and insane, from ‘softening of the brain’, the age at which he had long expected the same for himself.
Looking back on the year 1879, he recorded 118 days of acute and disabling sickness. And, face to face with Thanatos, what had he achieved? A few minor writings, a failed professorship, two books: The Birth of Tragedy, which had no meaningful impact on reforming the cultural world beyond pleasing Wagner, the father whom he had already outgrown, and Human, All Too Human, the book baring his Icarus aspirations that spirits should soar, whatever the cost in melting wax. The book had gained three admirers, no reviews, sold a mere hundred copies and goaded his publisher into warning him against producing more books in the only way that he was physically capable.
He determined that his spiritual isolation was to be reflected as completely as possible by his outer life. He wanted no human company, not even a scribe. Nothing must dilute the intensity of the subjective experience. Insanity must be risked, if it was the crucible of knowledge.
With the ghastly emotional occasion of Christmas looming, he returned to Naumburg, planning to take up his solitude in the tower in the town wall. But he was too ill. His mother and sister put him to bed in the old childhood home, the house on Weingarten. Round Nietzsche’s bedbound free spirit flowed all the annoyingly petty rituals that ensured the continuation of the old order: church services, evergreens, cakes, ceremonial visits paid in best clothes, tepid emotion, wilful denial of rational analysis. Hardly a mind-renewing festival of wild Dionysian inebriation modified by sweet Apollonian reason, but he was in no position to denounce ‘the falsified Protestant construction of history that we have been taught to believe in’,6 or, indeed, to take up any moral or ethical stance at all, for on 24 December he collapsed, and three days later he lost consciousness. His weeks of recovery were not helped by his mother nagging him to keep up his Greek. He was beginning to admit to his friends that he did not like his mother and his sister’s voice grated on his nerves. He was always ill when he was with them. He avoided quarrels and conflict; he felt he knew how to handle them but it did not agree with him to have to do so.
On 10 February 1880, he was sufficiently recovered to flee. He jumped onto a train, summoning the useful and devoted Köselitz to meet him at Riva, on Lake Garda. Köselitz would make a fair copy of the stuttering notes that Nietzsche had jabbed into his notebooks. He would turn them into something that Schmeitzner was able to read and print.
*
Nietzsche took a curious form of possessive hold over the self-doubting composer, by the extraordinary step of renaming him. He gave him the name ‘Peter Gast’. Köselitz immediately adopted it and retained it for the rest of his life. The genealogy of the name was riddlesome, a delicious mixture of the playful, the serious and the symbolic. ‘Peter’ for Christ’s chief disciple, St Peter, whom Christ called ‘the stone on which I build my church’.7 Gast meaning ‘guest’. The two words together combined into ‘the Stone Guest’, the name of the fateful character of the Commendatore in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. The role of the Commendatore, or Stone Guest, is that of Nemesis. Identifying himself with the figure of Don Giovanni is one of Nietzsche’s minor, but recurrent themes. He makes it clear that he is not the Don Giovanni of thousands of seductions but ‘the Don Giovanni of knowledge’, a reckless figure who chases up to the ‘highest and remotest stars of knowledge’ to explore forbidden realms, willing to sacrifice his immortal soul and forever endure the fires of Hell in order to gain occult revelation. In the opera, when finally Don Giovanni has overreached the bounds, it is the Stone Guest who forces him down to Hell to pay the price in everlasting torment. In giving Köselitz the name Peter Gast, Nietzsche was conferring on him the dual role of chief disciple and nemesis. The latter seems a singularly inappropriate role for the meek friend who ran around after Nietzsche for years, acting as unpaid secretary and amanuensis.
Peter Gast never failed rapturously to believe in Nietzsche’s books and Nietzsche in his turn wholeheartedly supported Gast’s musical compositions. Gast was the composer he might have been himself. He praised his genius to his friends and he hounded them for money to support Gast’s comic opera Il matrimonio segreto, whose music was entirely free of Wagner’s deadly and delicious metaphysical befogging. In March, the two of them left Riva for Venice, where Gast had made his home. Ostensibly Nietzsche was in Venice to speed on Gast’s opera but in fact he was driving his friend to distraction with what Gast called ‘Samaritan work’. This consisted of reading aloud to Nietzsche twice a day and taking dictation, as well as repeatedly rescuing his friend from a jumble of minor physical problems and mishaps.
Money stretched far in Venice. Nietzsche rented a very cold, vast room in the Palazzo Berlendi, reached by the most splendid marble staircase, and his window commanded an iconic view that was of enormous significance to his own generation and several to come.
‘I have taken a room with a view to the Island of the Dead,’8 he wrote.
There must have been something in the funerary view that compensated the rising generation for the collapse of traditional illusions. That same year that Nietzsche was there, the Symbolist Böcklin was painting The Island of the Dead,9 a picture that would hang on the walls of Lenin, Strindberg, Freud and Hitler, and as a cultural badge on the walls of every Berlin intellectual from the 1880s to the 1930s, as Nabokov observed. Wagner was so struck by Böcklin’s grasp of the mood of the moment that he invited him to design the sets for his new opera, Parsifal, in Bayreuth. Böcklin declined and so the commission went to Paul von Joukowsky instead.
Nietzsche’s window commanded the Böcklin view of smooth, luminous water broken by funeral boats transporting the dead towards the enclosing walls of the cemetery island. Above the walls rose tall, dark cypress trees, pointing like fingers up to the heavens and the mystery that lies beyond the grave. The view would inspire Nietzsche to write ‘The Tomb Song’, one of his most beautiful poems, in which the graves on the island include the tombs of his youth, of the gentle, strange marvels of love and of the songbirds of his hopes.
Venice heated up; its mosquitos became active. Nietzsche abandoned the watery city without a backward look. Peter Gast got back to his own work, with relief.
For two years, Nietzsche wandered. In each new place, hope sprang that he had found his Arcadia. The beauty of the diverse prospects caused him to tremble and adore the earth, so profligate with its marvels, as though nothing could be more natural than to experience life as a transposed Greek hero, as both heroic and idyllic. ‘Et in Arcadia ego … And that is how individual men have actually lived, that is how they have enduringly felt they existed in the world and the world existed in them …’10
But in each new Arcadia he would eventually discover some intolerable imperfection: either it was too high, or too low, or too hot or too damp or too cold, or it was situated wrongly beneath the electric clouds and the all-seeing sky. There was always a good reason for the wanderer to move on.
In the summertime, he took up residence in the cool alpine regions but when the mountains became too cold and the brightness of the first snowfall threatened his eyes, he embarked on disastrous train journeys (lost luggage, lost spectacles, lost sense of direction) to the warmth of the French Riviera or Italy. And then, in July 1881, he discovered his Arcadia in Sils-Maria, one of the many pretty hamlets dotting the ravishing landscape of the Upper Engadine around St Moritz. Sils-Maria seized his soul as Venice never had. ‘I would have to go to the high plateaus of Mexico overlooking the Pacific to find anything similar (for example, Oaxaca), and the vegetation there would of course be tropical,’11 he wrote with crazy lack of reason to Peter Gast, going on in the same letter to reassure Gast that his secretarial duties might soon be coming to an end as he had heard of a new typewriter invented by a Dane. He had sent the inventor a letter of enquiry.
The Swiss tourist boom was just beginning. There were several modest hotels in Sils-Maria but even so they would have been too expensive and too sociable. Instead Nietzsche took a monastic upstairs room in the simple house belonging to Gian Durisch, the mayor of the village, who sold groceries downstairs and kept pigs and chickens in the garden. It cost him a franc a day.12 A tall pine tree grew close to the east-facing window of his bedroom-cum-study, filtering the light that came in to a dim green. This was a kindness to his eyes.
He did not love Sils-Maria because it spared him illness. On the contrary, in July and again in September it brought him closer than ever to the brink; ‘I am desperate. Pain is vanquishing my life and will … Five times I have called for Doctor Death.’13 But the deeper the descent, the higher the exaltation; ‘thoughts have arisen the like of which I have never seen before …’ He compared himself to a machine that might explode, and at the start of August he did indeed experience his first combustible thought since proposing the Dionysian/Apollonian dichotomy. Standing on the shore of Lake Silvaplana beside a monumental pyramid-shaped boulder that later he was to name ‘Zarathustra’s Rock’, he conceived the thought of eternal recurrence:
‘What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence … The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over again, and you with it, speck of dust!”’14
A truly terrifying idea, and such an important one that he made a note on a scrap of paper that it had come to him ‘6,000 feet above sea level and much higher above human things’.
It probably related to a number of scientific books he had been reading, on which he made notes:
‘The world of forces does not suffer diminution, otherwise in infinite time it would have grown weak and perished. The world of forces suffers no cessation; otherwise this would have been reached and the clock of existence would have stopped. Whatever state this world can attain it must have attained it, and not once but countless times. Take this moment: it had already been once and many times and it will return as it is with all its forces distributed as now: and so it stands with the moment that gave birth to it and the moment that is its child. Man! Your whole life will be turned over like an hourglass time and again, and time and again it will run out – one vast minute of time between, until all the conditions which produced you, in the world’s circular course, come. Then you will find every pain and every pleasure and every friend and enemy and every hope and every error and every leaf of grass and every shaft of sunlight, the whole nexus of all things. This ring, in which you are a tiny grain, shines again and again. And in every ring of human existence altogether there is always an hour when – first for one, then for many, then for all – the most powerful thought surfaces, the thought of the eternal recurrence of all things: each time it is for humanity the hour of midday.’15
It can be no coincidence that he expressed the idea of the life of man as the ring of human existence. Wagner had not only composed his Ring but had meticulously structured it as a ring, an eternal recurrence, a circular tale whose hourglass turns and turns again and again.
Nietzsche also wrote down the name Zarathustra for the first time in his Sils-Maria notebook, but only the name. Both ideas would take some more years to ripen.
By October 1881, Sils-Maria was getting cold. ‘I travelled with all the energy of a madman to Genoa’, where he eventually settled in an attic. ‘I have to climb a hundred and sixty-four steps inside the house, which is itself situated high up in a steep street of palaces. Being so steep, and ending in a great flight of steps, the street is very quiet, with grass growing between the stones. My health is in terrible disorder.’16 He was husbanding his money. Often this meant that he lived for days on dried fruit. Sometimes his kind landlady would help him cook. He could not afford to heat his room. He would go and sit in cafés for warmth but the minute the sun came out he went to a lonely cliff by the sea to lie beneath his parasol, motionless as a lizard. It helped his head.
Generally Nietzsche was not concerned with the impression he was making on people. During these migrant years, people remembered his quietness, his passivity, his soft voice, his poor but neatly kept dress, the scrupulous good manners he showed towards all, particularly women, and the eerie absence of expression produced by the fact of his mouth being permanently invisible behind the moustache and his eyes behind blue-or green-lensed glasses, his whole face further deeply shaded by the green visor. But for all that, he was no shadow, he was never overlooked; his presence was all the more noticeable for the noli me tangere aura within which he moved. He made the discovery that ‘The gentlest, and most reasonable of men can, if he wears a large moustache, sit as it were in its shade and feel safe there – he will usually be seen as no more than the appurtenance of a large moustache, that is to say a military type, easily angered and occasionally violent – and as such he will be treated.’17
*
Paul Rée came to Genoa in February 1882, bearing the typewriter. The Malling-Hansen Writing Ball was a hemispherical contraption resembling a brass hedgehog with each bristle ending in a letter. When depressed by a finger, the bristle printed that letter onto the page. The machine had attracted some notice when it was exhibited in Paris. Nietzsche’s hopes were high that it might enable him to write by touch, thus sparing his eyes. It was not an immediate success. ‘This machine is as delicate as a small dog and causes a lot of trouble.’ It had been damaged in transit and was not working properly but even after it was repaired it was no easier for his eyes to peer at typewriter keys than at the nib of a pen inching along the page. Fortunately, for the moment, Paul Rée was at hand to help.
They went to the theatre to see Sarah Bernhardt play La Dame aux camélias but the divine Sarah was no greater success than the typewriter: at the end of the first act she collapsed. The audience waited an hour for her to come back and when she did, she burst a blood vessel. Nevertheless, her statuesque form and commanding manner roused in Nietzsche tender memories of Cosima.
In March, Rée moved on to Rome to rejoin Malwida von Meysenbug, who had transferred her ‘Academy of Free Spirits’ from Sorrento to Rome, where it was now called ‘The Roman Club’. Rée burst in one evening, harassed and broke, having lost all his money on the way, gambling in Monte Carlo. Apparently a benevolent waiter had lent him the money to get this far. Malwida scuttled out to pay off the waiting cab while Rée joined the circle of assembled free spirits, and found himself immediately spellbound by the startling personality of Lou Salomé,18 an elegant and cosmopolitan twenty-one-year-old half-Russian girl of great magnetism, originality and intelligence. Lou was travelling with her mother, ostensibly for her health but in fact to take advantage of greater intellectual opportunities than Russia liked to offer its women. Lou’s father, a Russian general ennobled for his part in the Napoleonic wars, was dead, whereupon Lou and her mother had travelled from St Petersburg to Zurich for Lou to pursue her intellectual ambitions. She attended lectures at Zurich University but she had started to spit blood, a signal to move south. A letter of introduction brought her to Malwida’s Roman salon where, not for the first time or the last, Lou plunged into the role of intellectual femme fatale. Lou Salomé bewitched many eminent intellectuals during her long lifetime, including Rainer Maria Rilke and Sigmund Freud.
Nietzsche’s name was pronounced as that of a god by Rée and Malwida at the Roman Club. Naturally, Lou expressed a strong wish to meet him. Nietzsche was still in Genoa, and Lou immediately started a close relationship with his friend Rée. When Malwida’s literary salon closed its doors at midnight, Rée would escort Lou home. Soon they were strolling the streets around the Colosseum every night between the hours of midnight and two. Such behaviour naturally shocked Lou’s mother. Even the progressive feminist Malwida protested. ‘Thus I discovered’, Lou wrote disingenuously, ‘the extent to which idealism in such matters can interfere with the urge toward personal freedom.’19 She was never averse to playing siren or Circe. By her own admission she had early determined that she would get her way at all times. She regarded truth-telling as ‘enforced stinginess’ that should never be allowed to interfere with a primary goal. ‘I was mightily spoiled at home, so I felt omnipotent. Without my image in the mirror I would be homeless,’ she wrote in her memoirs, which are devastatingly clear-eyed about her own personality while magnificently careless of other truths.
Rée wrote ecstatically to Nietzsche about the ‘energetic, unbelievably clever being with girlish, even childish qualities …The Russian girl you must absolutely get to know.’20
Sniffing one of Malwida’s marriage plans, Nietzsche replied jokily from Genoa that if this meant marriage, he’d put up with it for two years, but no longer. What Nietzsche did not know was that Lou was as averse to the idea of marriage as he was. All her life, she preferred to live with two men at a time. She did, in fact, marry five years later but only because her suitor stabbed himself in the chest and threatened to finish the job if she refused. They remained married for forty-five years, devoted to each other throughout, though the marriage was never consummated and she was perfectly happy for the housekeeper to be her husband’s long-term mistress while Lou imported her own devoted admirers into the marriage, the first of whom was Rée.
In Genoa, Nietzsche saw the opera Carmen for the first time. As soon as he could, he saw it again. Before he died he would see it twenty times. Carmen replaced his obsession with Tristan und Isolde. With music by Bizet and a libretto based on a novella by Prosper Mérimée, the opera had no pretensions towards the sublime or even the extraordinary. Unlike Wagner, it offered no adventures of the soul and might even be called a materialist opera. Carmen requires no super-sized orchestra. Its tunes are tremendously hummable. It lasts a short time. It ignores the metaphysical. It is not about gods and legends, not even about kings and queens. It tells a tabloid tale of lust among the lower class. Don José is an undistinguished little corporal whose well-regimented, narrow life collides with the Dionysian in the shape of Carmen, a passionate and sexually voracious girl who works in a cigarette factory. Carmen is a femme fatale who (like Lou Salomé) takes and discards men on her own terms. The uncomprehending and uncontrollable uproar of lust, jealousy and possessiveness that Carmen rouses in Don José inevitably leads to him murdering her in a Dionysian frenzy.
Having expressed her wish to travel to Genoa to meet Nietzsche, Lou became angry on hearing that he would not wait there for her to come. He had decided to leave Genoa for Messina. In terms of Nietzsche’s health, the decision made little sense. If Genoa was getting too hot for him in the month of March, Sicily was hotter still. But his recent summers in the mountains had now made him decide that summering at higher altitudes brought him closer to the electricity in the clouds, aggravating his condition. Instead, he would try a summer at the furthest distance achievable from heaven: sea level. Besides, Carmen had roused a hunger for the south.
‘The vulgar element in everything that pleases in Southern Europe … does not escape me; but it does not offend me, just as little as does the vulgarity that one encounters on a walk through Pompeii [he was probably referring to the erotic art] and basically even when reading any ancient book. Why is this? Is it because there is no shame and everything vulgar acts as confidently and self-assuredly as anything noble, lovely, and passionate in the same kind of music or novel? “The animal” has its own right, just like the human being; let it run about freely – and you too, my dear fellow man, are still an animal, despite everything!’21
The other pull to Messina was Wagner, who was spending the winter there with Cosima. There had been no contact between Nietzsche and Wagner for three years, but Nietzsche had frequently dreamt of him and Cosima. His dreams were friendly, positive and ungrudging. He would like to see them again.
He wrote eight light-hearted little poems called The Idylls of Messina, mostly about boats and goats and maidens, and he boarded a boat for Messina with a high heart. He was horribly seasick. By the time he arrived in Sicily, he was physically wrecked and Wagner and Cosima had already left. Wagner had suffered chest spasms in Palermo and run home. The scorching sirocco was blowing from the Carthaginian coast, a wind well known for depressing the spirits and gritting every surface and crevice with tiny, unbearable particles of sand. The only redeeming feature of Nietzsche’s uncomfortable trip to Sicily was the sight of the volcano of Stromboli, whose legends of flying ghosts would later enter his tale of Zarathustra.
Cards and letters from Rée continued to arrive hymning the intelligence of Lou Salomé. Nietzsche received a letter from Malwida that was almost a summons: ‘A very remarkable girl (I believe Rée has written to you about her) … seems to me to have arrived at much the same results you have so far in philosophical thinking, i.e. at practical idealism with a discarding of every metaphysical assumption and concern for the explanation of metaphysical problems. Rée and I agree in the wish to see you together with this extraordinary being …’22
Another dreadful boat ride brought him back from Sicily. When he had recovered, he boarded a train for Rome.
1 Section 1 of the Preface to the second edition of Daybreak, 1886.
2 Electricity: see letters to Peter Gast and Franz Overbeck during August and September 1881.
3 Nietzsche to Franz Overbeck, 30 July 1881.
4 Ida Overbeck recalled Nietzsche quoting Feuerbach’s ideas during 1880–3, when Nietzsche lived in the Overbeck household for several short periods; see Gilman (ed.), Conversations with Nietzsche, pp. 111–15.
5 Daybreak, Book I, Section 14.
6 Nietzsche to Peter Gast, 5 October 1879.
7 Matthew 16:18.
8 Nietzsche to Franz Overbeck, 27 March 1880.
9 In fact Böcklin’s picture depicts the cemetery in Florence, also reached by water, though it was always assumed, for watery reasons, that the view depicted was the graveyard island of San Michele, Venice.
10 Human, All Too Human, Book III, ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’, Section 295.
11 Nietzsche to Peter Gast, 14 August 1881.
12 According to an index of Swiss consumer prices from 1501 to 2006, the average wage of a skilled Swiss building craftsman at the time was 2.45 francs per day or 12.25 francs per week. The rent was on the low side.
13 Letter to Franz Overbeck, 18 September 1881.
14 The Gay Science, Book IV, Section 341.
15 Notebook, 1881.
16 Nietzsche to Elisabeth Nietzsche, 5 December 1880. The attic was in Salita delle Battistine 8, opposite the park of the Villetta di Negro, in which he found peace and shade.
17 Daybreak, Book IV, Section 381.
18 Lou Salomé (1861–1937), daughter of a Russian general of Huguenot stock; her mother was German.
19 Lou Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back: Memoirs, trans. Breon Mitchell, Paragon House, New York, 1990, p. 45.
20 Paul Rée to Nietzsche, 20 April 1882.
21 The Gay Science, Book IV, Section 77.
22 Malwida von Meysenbug to Nietzsche, 27 March 1882.