The Portable Nietzsche (13 page)

 

[310]

Will and wave.
How greedily this wave approaches, as if there were some objective to be reached! How, with awe-inspiring haste, it crawls into the inmost nooks of the rocky cliff! It seems that it wants to anticipate somebody; it seems that something is hidden there, something of value, high value.

And now it comes back, a little more slowly, still quite white with excitement—is it disappointed? But already another wave is approaching, still greedier and wilder than the first, and its soul too seems to be full of secrets and the lust to dig up treasures. Thus live the waves—thus live we who will—more I shall not say.

So? You mistrust me? You are angry with me, you beautiful monsters? Are you afraid that I might betray your secret entirely? Well, then be angry with me! Raise your dangerous green bodies as high as you can! Make a wall between me and the sun—as you do now! Verily, even now nothing is left of the world but green dusk and green lightning flashes. Carry on as you please, you pranksters; roar with delight and malice—or dive again, pouring your emeralds into the deepest depths, and cast your endless white manes of foam and spray over them—everything suits me, for everything suits you so well, and I am so well disposed toward you for everything: how could I think of betraying
you!
For—heed it well!—I know you and your secret, I know your kind! You and I—are we not of one kind? You and I—do we not have
one
secret?

 

[319]

As interpreters of our experiences.
A kind of honesty has been alien to all founders of religions and others like them: they have never made their experiences a matter of conscience for knowledge. “What did I really experience? What happened in me then, and around me? Was my reason bright enough? Was my will turned against all deceptions of the senses and was it courageous in its resistance to the fantastic?”—none of them has raised such questions; all the dear religious people still do not raise such questions even now: rather, they have a thirst for things that are
against reason,
and they do not want to make it too hard for themselves to satisfy it. And so they experience “miracles” and “rebirths” and hear the voices of the little angels! We, however, we others, who thirst for reason, want to look our experiences as straight in the eye as if they represented a scientific experiment, hour after hour, day after day. We ourselves want to be our experiments and guinea pigs.

 

[340]

The dying Socrates.
I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in everything he did, said—and did not say. This mocking and enamored monster and pied piper of Athens, who made the most arrogant youths tremble and sob, was not only the wisest talker who ever lived: he was just as great in his silence. . . .

 

[341]

The greatest stress.
How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak after you 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 more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust.” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly.” If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to
crave nothing more fervently
than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

. . . She told me herself that she had no morality—and I thought she had, like myself, a more severe morality than anybody. . . .

Zarathustra
is by far Nietzsche's most popular book, but Nietzsche himself never witnessed its success. The first three parts, each composed in about ten days, were at first published separately, and scarcely sold at all. Of Part Four, Nietzsche had only a few copies printed privately; and the first public edition was held up at the last moment in 1891 when his family feared that it would be confiscated on a charge of blasphemy. By then Nietzsche was insane and unaware of what was happening. Part Four appeared in 1892, and it was not confiscated. The first edition of the whole work followed not long after.

Zarathustra
is as different from its reputation as its author is different from the widely reproduced busts and pictures commissioned by his sister. Her grandiose conception of the heroic strikes us as childish and has provoked the reaction, understandably enough, that Nietzsche was really a mere
petit rentier
. But perhaps there are more kinds of valor than are dreamed of by most of Nietzsche's admirers and detractors. And the most important single clue to
Zarathustra
is that it is the work of an utterly lonely man.

He is shy, about five-foot-eight, but a little stooped, almost blind, reserved, unaffected, and especially polite; he lives in modest boarding houses in Sils Maria, Nizza, Mentone, Rome, Turin. This is how Stefan Zweig brings him to life for us: “Carefully the myopic man sits down to a table; carefully, the man with the sensitive stomach considers every item on the menu: whether the tea is not too strong, the food not spiced too much, for every mistake in his diet upsets his sensitive digestion, and every transgression in his nourishment wreaks havoc with his quivering nerves for days. No glass of wine, no glass of beer, no alcohol, no coffee at his place, no cigar and no cigarette after his meal, nothing that stimulates, refreshes, or rests him: only the short meager meal and a little urbane, unprofound conversation in a soft voice with an occasional neighbor (as a man speaks who for years has been unused to talking and is afraid of being asked too much).

“And up again into the small, narrow, modest, coldly furnished
chambre garnie,
where innumerable notes, pages, writings, and proofs are piled up on the table, but no flower, no decoration, scarcely a book and rarely a letter. Back in a corner, a heavy and graceless wooden trunk, his only possession, with the two shirts and the other worn suit. Otherwise only books and manuscripts, and on a tray innumerable bottles and jars and potions: against the migraines, which often render him all but senseless for hours, against his stomach cramps, against spasmodic vomiting, against the slothful intestines, and above all the dreadful sedatives against his insomnia, chloral hydrate and Veronal. A frightful arsenal of poisons and drugs, yet the only helpers in the empty silence of this strange room in which he never rests except in brief and artificially conquered sleep. Wrapped in his overcoat and a woolen scarf (for the wretched stove smokes only and does not give warmth), his fingers freezing, his double glasses pressed close to the paper, his hurried hand writes for hours—words the dim eyes can hardly decipher. For hours he sits like this and writes until his eyes burn.”

That is the framework, which changes little wherever he is. But his letters seem to reveal another dimension, for at times they are shrill and strange and remind us of his vitriolic remark about Jesus: it is regrettable that no Dostoevski lived near him. Who else could do justice to this weird, paradoxical personality? Yet the clue to these letters, as also to
Zarathustra
and some of the last books, is that they are the work of a thoroughly lonely man. Sometimes they are really less letters than fantastic fragments out of the soul's dialogue with itself. Now pleasant and polite, now such that arrogance is far too mild a word—and yet his feeling of his own importance, painfully pronounced even in some very early letters, was of course not as insane as it must have appeared at times to those to whom he wrote. Resigned that those surrounding him had no idea who he was, and invariably kind to his social and intellectual inferiors, he sometimes felt doubly hurt that those who ought to have understood him really had less respect for him than his most casual acquaintances. Book after book—and either no response, or some kind words, which were far more unkind than any serious criticism, or even good advice, or pity, worst of all. Is it surprising that on rare occasions, when he was sufficiently provoked, we find appeals to his old-fashioned sense of honor, even his brief military service, and at one point the idea that he must challenge a man to a duel with pistols? For that matter, he once wrote a close friend: “The barrel of a pistol is for me at the moment a source of relatively agreeable thoughts.”

Then there are his several hasty proposals of marriage, apparently followed by a real sense of relief when the suggestion was refused politely. The proposals may seem quite fantastic, the more so because, except in the case of Lou Salomé, no really deep feelings were involved. But a few times he was desperate enough to grasp at any possibility at all of rescue from the sea of his solitude.

In his letters these dramatic outbursts are relatively exceptional. But the histrionics of
Zarathustra
should be seen in the same light. For impulses that others vent upon their wives or friends, or at a party, perhaps over drinks, Nietzsche had no other outlet. In Nizza, where he wrote Part Three of
Zarathustra
, he met a young man, Dr. Paneth, who had read the published portion and was eager to talk with the author. On December 26, 1883, Paneth wrote home: “There is not a trace of false pathos or the prophet's pose in him, as I had rather feared after his last work. Instead his manner is completely inoffensive and natural. We began a very banal conversation about the climate, living accommodations, and the like. Then he told me, but without the least affectation or conceit, that he always felt himself to have a task and that now, as far as his eyes would permit it, he wanted to get out of himself and work up whatever might be in him.”

We might wish that he had taken out his histrionics on Paneth and spared us some of the melodrama in
Zarathustra.
In places, of course, the writing is superb and only a pedant could prefer a drabber style. But often painfully adolescent emotions distract our attention from ideas that we cannot dismiss as immature at all. For that matter, adolescence is not simply immaturity; it also marks a breakdown of communication, a failure in human relations, and generally the first deep taste of solitude. And what we find again and again in
Zarathustra
are the typical emotions with which a boy tries to compensate himself.

Nietzsche's apparent blindness to these faults and his extravagant praise of the book in some of his last works are understandable. His condition had become even more unbearable as time went on; and we should also keep in mind not only the complete failure of the book to elicit any adequate response or understanding, but also the frantic sense of inspiration which had marked the rapid writing of the first three parts. Moreover, others find far lesser obstacles sufficient excuse for creating nothing. Nietzsche had every reason for not writing anything—the doctors, for example, told him not to use his eyes for any length of time, and he often wrote for ten hours at a time—and fashioned work on work, making his suffering and his torments the occasion for new insights.

After all has been said,
Zarathustra
still cries out to be blue-penciled; and if it were more compact, it would be more lucid too. Even so, there are few works to match its wealth of ideas, the abundance of profound suggestions, the epigrams, the wit. What distinguishes
Zarathustra
is the profusion of “sapphires in the mud.” But what the book loses artistically and philosophically by never having been critically edited by its author, it gains as a uniquely personal record.

In a passage that is quoted again as the motto of Part Three, Zarathustra asks: “Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time?” The fusion of seriousness and satire, pathos and pun, is as characteristic of the message as it is of the style of the book. This modern blend of the sublime and the ridiculous places the work somewhere between the Second Part of
Faust
and Joyce's
Ulysses
—both of which, after all, might also have profited from further editing—and it helps to account for Nietzsche's admiration for Heine.

This overflowing sense of humor, which prefers even a poor joke to no joke at all, runs counter to the popular images of Nietzsche—not only to the grim creation of his sister, but also to the piteous portrait of Stefan Zweig, who was, in this respect, still too much under the influence of Bertram's
Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology
. Nietzsche had the sense of humor which Stefan George and his minions, very much including Bertram, lacked; and if Zarathustra occasionally excels George's austere prophetic affectation, he soon laughs at his own failings and punctures his pathos, like Heine, whom George hated. The puncture, however, does not give the impression of diffident self-consciousness and a morbid fear of self-betrayal, but rather of that Dionysian exuberance which
Zarathustra
celebrates.

Nietzsche's fate in the English-speaking world has been rather unkind, in spite of, or perhaps even in some measure because of, the ebullient enthusiasm of some of the early English and American Nietzscheans. He has rarely been accorded that perceptive understanding which is relatively common among the French. And when we look back today, one of the main reasons must be sought in the inadequacies of some of the early translations, particularly of
Zarathustra.
For one thing, they completely misrepresent the mood of the original—beginning, but unfortunately not ending, with their many unjustified archaisms, their “thou” and “ye” with the clumsy attendant verb forms, and their whole misguided effort to approximate the King James Bible. As if Zarathustra's attacks on the spirit of gravity and his praise of “light feet” were not among the leitmotifs of the book! In fact, this alone makes the work bearable.