Sodom and Gomorrah

....taken the trouble of dropping M. de Charlus a line, I had reproached them furiously for wanting to make me accept dishonorable propositions. But anger alone, and the desire to find the words that would be most disagreeable to them, had dictated this untruthful reply. In actual fact, I had not imagined there to have been anything sensual, or even sentimental, in the Baron’s offers. I had said that to my parents out of sheer foolishness. But the future sometimes dwells in us without our knowing it, and the words thought to be untruthful describe an imminent reality. 

....his thoughts turned to the Qual d’Orsay® and the desire to make a great career, he wore the look of a caged beast, casting glances in all directions expressive of fear, craving, and stupidity. His own was such that he did not pause to consider that the street boys of his adolescence were no longer children and that, when a newspaper-vendor yelled “La Presse!”? into his face, he shuddered in terror more even than in desire, believing he had been recognized and tracked down. 

Here I was forced to submit. At last, suddenly, the name came in its enirety: “Mme d’Arpajon.” I am wrong to say that it came, for I do not believe it appeared to me under its own propulsion. Nor do I think that my numerous faint memories relating to this lady, whose help I did not cease to solicit (by exhortations such as, “Come on, this is the woman who’s a friend of Mme de Souvré, who has so simpleminded an admiration for Victor Hugo, along with so much terror and repugnance”)-I do not believe that all these memories, fluttering about between me and her name, served in the very least to refloat it. In the great game of “hide-and-seek” played out in the memory when we are trying to recover a name, there is not a series of graduated approxima tions. We can see nothing; then, all of a sudden, the exact name ap. pears, and quite different from what we thought we could divine. It is not it that has come to us. No, I believe, rather, that, as we go on through life, we spend our time distancing ourselves from the zone where a name is distinct, and that it was by the exercise of my will and my attention, which enhanced the acuity of my inward gaze, that I had suddenly penetrated the semidarkness and seen clearly. At all events, if there are transitions between forgetfulness and memory, those transitions are unconscious. For the intermediate names through which we pass, before finding the right name, are themselves false, and bring us no closer to it. They are not even names, properly speaking, but often mere consonants not to be found in the rediscovered name. The work of the mind as it passes from nothingness to reality is so mysterious, on the other hand, that it is possible after all that these false consonants are a pole held clumsily out to us in advance, to help us grapple the right name. “All of which,” the reader will say, “teaches us nothing about this Jady’s disobligingness; but since you’ve been at a standstill for this long, let me, M. l’Auteur, make you waste one minute more to tell you how regrettable it is that, young as you were (or as your hero was, if he is not yourself), you should already have had so little memory as to be unable to recall the name of a lady whom you knew very well.” It is very regret table, you are right, M. le Lecteur. And sadder than you think, once it is sensed as heralding the day when names and words will vanish from thé illuminated zone of the mind and we shall have to give up forever naming to ourselves those whom we have known best. It is regrettable, indeed, that, from our youth on, it should require such labor to recover names we know well. But were this infirmity to occur only with names barely known and quite naturally forgotten, and which we do not want to weary ourselves by recalling, then this infirmity would not be without its advantages. “And what are they, pray?” Well, monsieur, the fact is that this malady alone causes us to take notice of and to learn, and enables us to analyze, the mechanisms of which we would otherwise be ignorant. A man who drops into his bed each evening like a dead weight and lives again only at the moment of coming awake and getting up, will that man ever dream of making, if not great discoveries, then at least some minor observations, concerning sleep? He hardly knows whether he sleeps. A spot of insomnia is not without its uses for appreciating sleep, for projecting a certain light into that darkness. An unfailing memory is no very powerful stimulus for studying the phenomena of memory. “So Mme d’Arpajon finally introduced you to the Prince?” No, but be quiet and let me take up my story again. 

“There’s not a word of truth in it, not one, it’s a complete invention and would have been totally stupid. Really, it’s unbelievable, this spontaneous generation of error. I won’t ask you who told you that, but i would be really intriguing, in a setting as confined as this, to go bac. step by step and find out how it took shape. Moreover, how can what the Prince said to me be of any interest to anyone? People are very inquisitive. I’ve never been inquisitive myself, except when I’ve been iy love and when I was jealous. And for all that that taught me! Are yoy jealous?” I told Swann that I had never felt jealousy, that I did not evey know what it was. “Well, I congratulate you! When you’re a little bit jealous, it’s not altogether unpleasant, from two points of view. For one thing, because it enables people who are not inquisitive to interest themselves in the lives of other people, or at least of one other person, And then because it gives you quite a good sense of the sweetness of possession, of getting into a carriage with a woman, of not letting her go off alone. But that’s only in the very early stages of the disease, or when the cure is almost complete. In between, it’s the most frightful of tortures. Moreover, I have to say that I’ve seldom experienced even the two forms of sweetness I’m referring to; the first by the fault of my na ture, which is incapable of any very prolonged reflection; the second because of circumstances, by the fault of the woman, I mean of the women, of whom I’ve been jealous. But that doesn’t matter. Even when you no longer care about things, it still means something that you did so once, because it was always for reasons that escaped other people. We feel that the memory of those feelings is only in us; it’s into our selves we must return in order to look at it. Don’t make too much fun of the idealist jargon, but what I mean is that I’ve loved life and have loved the arts. Well, now that I’m a bit too tired to live with other pe” ple, these old feelings that I’ve had, so personal to myself, seem very precious to me, which is the obsession of every collector. I open up ™Y heart to myself like a sort of showcase, and I look one by one at © many loves that other people won’t have known. And about this colle tion, to which I’m now even more attached than to other people, I tell myself, a little like Mazarin with his books,” but without any anguish as it happens, that it will be very tiresome to leave it all behind. But let’s get on to my conversation with the Prince, I’m only going to tell one person about it, and that person will be you.” My hearing him was made harder by the conversation that, right beside us, M. de Charlus, who had returned to the card room, was prolonging indefinitely. “And do you read, too? What do you do?” he asked the Comte Arnulphe, who did not know even the name of Balzac. But his shortsightedness, because he saw everything very small, made him appear to be seeing from a long way off, so that, a rare touch of poetry in a statuesque Greek god, remote and mysterious stars were as if inscribed in his pupils. 

&

 I had just glimpsed, in my memory, bent over my fatigue, the tender, concemed, disappointed face of my grandmother, such as she had been on that first evening of our arrival; the face of my grandmother, not that of the one whom I had been surprised and self-reproachful at having missed so little, who had nothing of her but her name, but of my true grandmother, the living reality of whom, for the first time since the Champs-Elysées, where she had suffered her stroke, I had rediscovered jn a complete and involuntary memory. This reality does not exist for us until such time as it has been re-created in our minds (otherwise, the men who have been involved in some titanic battle would all be great epic poets); thus, in a wild desire to hurl myself into her arms, it was only at this instant—more than a year after her funeral, on account of the anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from coinciding with that of our feelings—that I had just learned she was dead. I had spoken of her often since that time and thought of her also, but beneath the words and thoughts of an ungrateful, selfish, and cruel young man there had never been anything that might resemble my grandmother, for, in my frivolity, my love of pleasure, and accustomed as I was to seeing her as an invalid, I contained within me the memory of what she had been only in a virtual state. At whatever moment we may consider it, our total soul has an almost fictitious value only, for all its great wealth of assets, for now some, and now others of these are unavailable, whether the riches concerned be actual, or be those of the imagination, and in my own case, for example, fully as much the riches contained in the ancient name of Guermantes, as those, so very much more solemn, of the true memory of my grandmother. For to the disturbances of memory are linked the intermittences of the heart. It is no doubt the existence of our body, similar for us to a vase in which our spirituality is enclosed, that induces us to suppose that all our inner goods, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession. Perhaps this is as inaccurate as to believe that they escape or return. At all events, if they do remain inside us, it is for most of the time in an unknown domain where they are of no service to us, and where even the most ordinary of them are repressed by memories of a different order, which exclude all simultaneity with them in our consciousness. But if the framework of sensations in which they are preserved be recap, tured, they have in their turn the same capacity to expel all that is incompatible with them, to install in us, on its own, the self that experi enced them. Now, since the self that I had suddenly rebecome had not existed since that far-off evening when my grandmother had undresseq me on my arrival in Balbec, it was, quite naturally, not after the day we were living, of which that self knew nothing, but—as if there were, in time, different and parallel series—without any break in continuity, im. mediately after that first evening in the past, that I adhered to the mo. ment when my grandmother had leaned toward me. The self that I was then and which had vanished all that time ago, was once again so close to me that I seemed to hear still the words that had come immediately before, yet which were no more than a dream, just as a man not properly awake thinks he can perceive close beside him the sounds of his receding dream. I was nothing more than the being who had sought refuge in his grandmother’s arms, to erase the traces of her sorrows by giving her kisses, the being I would have had as great difficulty in imagining to myself, when I was one or another of those who had been succeeding one another inside me for some time past, as the efforts it would now have required, sterile in any case, to re-experience the desires and joys of one of those beings that, for a time at least, I no longer was. I recalled how, an hour before the moment when my grandmother had thus leaned over, in her dressing gown, toward my boots, wandering in the stiflingly hot street, in front of the pétissier, | had thought I could never, such was the need I had to embrace her, wait for the hour I had still to spend without her. And now that this same need was rebom, I knew that I could wait for hour upon hour, that never again would she be beside me, I had made the discovery only now because IJ had just, on being aware of her for the first time, alive, real, swelling my heart to bursting, on meeting her again, that is, realized that I had lost her forever. Lost forever; I could not understand, and I applied myself to suf fering the pain of this contradiction: on the one hand, an existence, 4 tenderness, surviving in me such as I had known them, that is to say created for me, a love in which everything so much "nd in me its complement, its object, its constant direction, that ‘s of great men, all the geniuses who may have existed sinc 1 began, 

&

widow of the bdtomnrer had themselves introduced to her. And she was so sensitive to everything connected with my grandmother that she was infinitely touched, and preserved ever afterward the memory and her gratitude for what the First President said to her, just as she felt hurt and indignant at the fact that, on the other hand, the bdtonnier’s wife spoke not one word in remembrance of the dead woman. In point of fact, the First President felt no more concern for her than did the bdtonmer’s wife. The emotional words of the one and the silence of the other were only, although my mother set so great a distance between them, different ways of expressing the indifference that the dead inspire in us. But I believe that my mother took comfort above all from the words into which, against my will, I allowed a little of my pain to pass. It could but make Mamma happy (despite all the affection she had for me), like everything that ensured my grandmother’s survival in our hearts. On each of the days following, my mother went down to sit on the beach, to do exactly as her mother had done, and read her two favorite books, the Memoirs of Mme de Beausergent and the Letters of Mme de Sévigné. She, or any of us, could not bear the last-named being referred to as the “witty Marquise,” any more than La Fontaine as “le Bonhomme” or “good old La Fontaine.”!3! But when in the letters she read the words “my daughter,” she thought she heard her mother speaking to her. 

&

very happy to play something for you,” Mme de Cambremer said to me. “But, you know, | only play things that no longer interest your generation. | was brought up to worship Chopin,” she said in a low voice, for she was fearful of her daughter-in-law and knew that the latter regarded Chopin as not being music, so that “to play him well” or “to play him badly” were expressions devoid of sense. She acknowledged that her mother-in-law had good technique and performed the virtuoso passages to perfection. “They'll never get me to say she’s a musician,” ended Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin. Because she saw herself as “advanced” and (in art only) “never far enough to the left,” as she put it, she imagined that music not only progresses, but does so along a single line, and that Debussy was some sort of super-Wagner, a little more advanced even than Wagner. She had not realized that, if Debussy was not as independent of Wagner as she herself was to believe in a few years’ time, for we use the weapons won in battle after all finally to liberate ourselves from him whom we have momentarily vanquished, he was nevertheless seeking, people beginning to have had their fill of works that were too complete, in which everything is expressed, to satisfy a contrary need. This reaction had been bolstered momentarily, of course, by theories similar to those that, in politics, come to the support of laws against the Congrégations, or wars in the East (teaching against nature, Yellow Peril, etc.).? An age of haste called, it was said, for rapidity in art, absolutely as they might have said that a future war could not last more than a fortnight, or that the out-of-the-way spots beloved of the stagecoaches would be forsaken by the railways but restored to honor by the motorcar. It was recommended not to tire the listener’s attention, as though we did not have at our command different degrees of attention, the highest of which it is in fact up to the artist to awaken. For those who yawn with fatigue after ten lines of some second-rate article have been making the journey to Bayreuth year after year to hear the Tetralogy.!° The day was coming, moreover, when, for a time, Debussy would be declared to be as fragile as Massenet,"! and the joltings of Meélisande demoted to the rank of those of Manon. For theories and schools, like microbes and globules, devour one another and, by their struggles, enSure life’s continuance. But that time had not yet come. 

&

... As for the sculptor Ski, so called because of the difficulty they found in pronouncing his Polish name, and because he himself, since he had been living in a certain society, had affected not to wish to be confused with relations who were very well placed but somewhat boring and very numerous, he, aged forty-five and extremely ugly, had a sort of impishness, of dreamy whimsicality, that he had preserved from having been, until the age of ten, the most ravishing child prodigy in the world, the apple of every lady’s eye. Mme Verdurin claimed he was more artistic than Elstir. Any resemblance he bore to the latter was purely external, however. It was sufficient for Elstir, who had met Ski on one occasion, to feel for him that profound repulsion that is inspired in us, even more than by those people who are our complete opposites, by those who resemble us only on our worst side, in whom are displayed what is least good about us, the faults which we have cured, unfortunate reminders to us of how we may have appeared to some before we became what we are. But Mme Verdurin believed that Ski had more temperament than Elstir, because there was no art for which he did not have an aptitude, and she was convinced that he might have developed that aptitude into atalent had he had less laziness. This last even seemed to the Patronne to be one more gift, being the opposite of hard work, which she thought was the lot of those without genius. Ski would paint anything you wished, on cuff links or over doors. He sang with the voice of a composer, and played from memory, giving an imitation of an orchestra at the piano, less by his virtuosity than by the false bass notes that signified his fingers’ inability to indicate that at this point there was a comet, which he imitated in any case with his mouth. Searching for words as he spoke, to make people believe in an interesting impression, in the same way he would hold back a chord and then strike it, saying “ping,” to make the brass section sound, he passed for being wonderfully intelligent, but in point of fact his ideas amounted to two or three very limited ones. Annoyed by his reputation as a fantasist, he had taken it into his head to demonstrate that he was a practical, positive person, whence a triumphant affectation in him of false precision and false good sense, made worse by the fact that he had no memory and that his information was always inaccurate. The movements of his head, his neck, and his legs might have been graceful had he still been nine years old, with blond curls, a big lace collar, and little red leather boots. Having arrived ahead of time with Cottard and Brichot at the station in Graincourt, they had left Brichot in the waiting room and gone to take a stroll. When Cottard had wanted to go back, Ski had replied: “But there’s no rush. It’s not the local train today, but the departmental train.” Overjoyed at observing the effect that this pedantic nuance produced in Cottard, he added, speaking of himself: “Yes, because Ski loves the arts, because he models in clay, people think he isn’t practical. Nobody knows this line better than I.” Nevertheless, they were on their way back to the station when, suddenly, catching sight of the smoke of the little train as it arrived, Cottard let out a cry and shouted, “We'll have to run like the very devil.” They had in fact arrived just in time, the distinction between the local and the departmental trains having ever existed only in Ski's head.

Zara

The passage continues, “'So bless me then, you calm eye that can look without envy upon all-too-great happiness! Bless the cup that wants to overflow in order that the water may flow golden from it and everywhere carry the reflection of your bliss! Behold, this cup wants to become empty again, and Zarathustra wants to become human again.’ Thus began Zarathustra’s going under.” 

Here ends The Gay Science as published in 1882. 

The final book as we know it today contains his revisions of 1887 which include a new introduction, a fifth section containing thirtynine additional aphorisms, and quite a few poems. But when, in 1883, he wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the book takes up exactly where the original 1882 Gay Science left off. Between writing the two books he had lost Lou, and, in her, his chosen disciple. Faute de mieux, her role as the vehicle to ensure his mortal legacy was to be taken by Zarathustra. Often, outside the book, Nietzsche refers to Zarathustra as his son. 

Why did Nietzsche choose Zarathustra? Zarathustra, also called Zoroaster, was a Persian prophet who probably lived some time between the twelfth and sixth centuries before Christ. Zarathustra’s sacred text, the Zend-Avesta tells that the gods worshipped by the very ancient Persians were evil. Thus Zarathustra presented a key to the problem of evil that could never be answered by Judaism, Christianity or Islam, whose all-powerful gods were all-good. In Zoroastrianism the god of light and good is called Ahura Mazda (also known as Ormuzd). He is in constant conflict with the god of darkness and evil, Angra Mainyu (Ahriman), and his daevas. At the end of time, Ahura Mazda will score a final victory, but until then he is not in control of events. Consequently, Zoroastrianism, unlike the three great religions of the book, escapes the paradox of an all-powerful 

Is responsible tor what many people ta 

good God who 1s responsible tor what many people take to be unnecessary evil.® 

Zarathustra’s ten years of solitude in the mountains between the ages of thirty and forty might stand for Nietzsche’s post-Basel decade of independent thinking, which was often conducted on high mountains. Zarathustra is forty, the same age as the writer Nietzsche is, when he comes down “to be among the people.” He carries down fire, as Prometheus had carried the fire that would transform cultures and civilizations and as the Holy Ghost had carried down tongues of fire at Pentecost. Fire bestows upon the chosen ones (the enlightened ones) the gift of “speaking in tongues,” i.e. in words that are universally comprehensible. It is a synonym for wisdom and for revelation. Zarathustra’s fire has the specific ability to scorch meaning into the meaninglessness of life following upon the death of God. His mouth alone (through Nietzsche’s) will be the first to address the nihilism, despair and devaluation of moral life that was reaching its fC crisis within the context of nineteenth-century materialism. 

All gods are dead, Zarathustra preaches. Now we want the superman to live. I teach you the superman. “Human being is something that must be overcome.”? 

What is man? A hybrid between plant and ghost. What is the superman? He is the meaning of the earth who remains faithful to the earth. He does not believe those who offer extra-terrestrial hopes: they are despisers of life, who die self-poisoned. 

The superman knows that whatever seems cruel, random or disastrous is not a punishment sent from the eternal reason-spider above to punish the sinner. There is no eternal reason-spider and no eternal reason-spiderweb. Rather, life is a dance floor for divine accidents.’° Meaning must be found through saying “yes” to the divine accidents on the dance floor. 

Zarathustra preaches to the villagers that man is a bridge, not a goal. This is man’s glory. The human is between beast and superman, a rope fastened over an abyss. 

On hearing this, Zarathustra’s first disciple emerges from the crowd to attempt to cross the abyss by walking the tightrope. A buf. foon jumps up and topples the tightrope walker, who falls to the ground and dies. Zarathustra takes the body of his first disciple, the tightrope walker, for burial. Ele is mocked by the common herd, Despite this, he resolves to show them the rainbow bridge that stretchcs-not to Valhalla the home of the gods, where Wagner’, tainbow bridge led-but to the state of becoming the superman. 

This he does by giving them his beatitudes (eighteen of them, Christ gave eight). They are not commandments and they are impenetrably mystical. The first reads: “I love those who do not know how to live except by going under, for they are those who cross over.” The last: “I love all those who are like heavy drops falling individually from the dark cloud that hangs over humanity: they herald the coming of the lightning, and as heralds they perish.”"' 

The sun stands at mid-day and he enjoys time with his animals. The eagle is “the proudest animal under the sun” and the serpent is coiled like a ring around the neck of the eagle. The serpent is “the wisest animal under the sun.” Nietzsche often took the eagle as standing for himself and the serpent as standing for Lou (the serpent is female and he uses the same word, Altigste, for the cleverness of Lou and the cleverness of the serpent). The two animals together hold an increasing significance for him. They recall many symbols, including the fatal omen that heralded the Fall of Troy (which may stand for the fall of any doctrine or civilization) when Apollo through a serpent cursed Cassandra who, like Nietzsche, was blessed with the gift of foreseeing the future. Cassandra’s curse, like Nietzsche’s, was that nobody would believe her words or her predictions. 

Narrative is now abandoned and Nietzsche gives us instead twenty-two aphoristic discourses on subjects ranging from individual virtue to what constitutes criminality, to how to make a good death. The full list comprises: 

On the Three Metamorphoses 

On the Teachers of Virtue 

On the Hinterworldly 

On the Despisers of the Body 

On the Passions of Pleasure and Pain On the Pale Criminal] 

On Reading and Writing 

On the Tree on the Mountain 

On the Preachers of Death 

On War and Warriors 

On the New Idol 

On the Flies of the Marketplace On Chastity 

On the Friend 

On a Thousand and One Goals On Love of the Neighbor 

On the Way of the Creator 

On Little Women Old and Young On the Adder’s Bite 

On Child and Marriage 

On Free Death 

On the Bestowing Virtue 

They give us Nietzsche's ideas on those subjects, couched in his alter ego Zarathustra’s archaic, biblical language. 

Unsurprisingly in view of his recent experience, women are now given very harsh treatment, in striking contrast to his gentle understanding of them in The Gay Science. Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a lustful woman? he asks. And the famous “You go to women? Do not forget the whip!” 

“On Free Death” is probably the section most revolutionary for his time. Christian teaching on suicide considered the ending of one’s own life an unforgivable sin. Suicides were buried in unhallowed ground outside the walls of the churchyard. This symbolized their soul’s eternal exclusion from Heaven. But Nietzsche suggests the option of voluntary euthanasia for those in intolerable pain, those who realize that their quality of life has vanished, or those who simply feel that their time has come. He recommends that they should be allowed voluntarily to end their own lives without whiff of criminality or eternal damnation. 

Each of the twenty-two discourses models how to live honorably and truthfully to the ideal of the superman who is non-religious, in. dependent, self-disciplined and creative. Each ends with the words “Thus spoke Zarathustra.” The book ends on an optimistic, ecstatic and characteristically opaque note: “And that is the great noon, where human beings stand at the midpoint of their course between animal and Ubermensch and celebrate their way to evening as their highest hope: for it is the way to a new morning. 

“*Then the one who goes under will bless himself, that he is one who crosses over; and the sun of his knowledge will stand at noon for him. 

“Dead are all gods: now we want the Ubermensch to live-Let this be our last will at the great noon!’

“Thus spoke Zarathustra.” 

The book is short, barely a hundred pages. Its cadences are poetic, repetitive, hypnotic, brief and dynamic. He said that he wrote it-or it wrote him-in ten days of ecstatic inspiration and revelation. In fact it probably took him a little longer, nearer a month. 

On February 14, 1883, he sent it to his publisher Schmeitzner, describing it in his covering letter as “a fifth gospel.” He went from Rapallo to Genoa to post it, maybe for the joy of launching it from the proper place on its symbolic voyage, or maybe for the advantage of the swifter postal service from Genoa. While he was there, he learned from a newspaper of Wagner’s death the previous day. He took it as an omen, a supernatural connection: another pair of rapiers clashing in mid-air. Bending the truth a little, he observed that the finishing section was accomplished precisely at that sacred hour when Richard Wagner died in Venice. 

Wagner’s soul was voyaging to join the other Argonauts of the spirit. Wagner, too, had once been wrapped in the seven skins of solitude of the visionary prophet. Now that he was dead, Wagner's earlier and purer self could be reclaimed. Nietzsche was therefore entitled to refer to Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a new Ring. His father Wagner was dead; his son Zarathustra was born. 

It was a mark of Nietzsche’s discretion and spiritual generosity that, as he revealed in a letter to Franz Overbeck a week after Wagner’s death, he had known for some time the import of Wagner’s wretched correspondence with his doctors. “Wagner was by far the fullest human being I have known, and in this respect I have had to forgo a great deal for six years. But something like a deadly offense came between us; and something terrible could have happened if he had lived longer.”*3 On April 21 he wrote more openly to the musician Peter Gast, “Wagner is rich in malicious ideas, but what do you say to his having exchanged letters on the subject (even with my doctors) to voice his belief that my altered way of thinking was a consequence of unnatural excesses, with hints of pederasty?” A few months later, in July, he also mentioned to Ida Overbeck an “abysmal treachery of revenge” that had come to his ears the preceding year. 

There had indeed been abysmal treachery and public humiliation, not only by Wagner, but by Lou and Rée as well. 

FN and Lou

 

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 toward all, particularly women, and the eerie absence of expression produced by the fact of his mouth being permanently invisible behind the mustache and his eyes behind blueor 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 mustache, 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 mustache, that is to say a military type, easily angered and occasionally violent-and as such he will be treated.” 

Paut 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 theater 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,” an elegant and cosmopolitan twenty-one-year-old half-Russian girl of great magnetism, originality and intelligence. Lou was traveling 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 traveled 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 behavjor 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.”'? 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.””° 

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 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 toward 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 yout 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 incomprehending 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 che human being; let it run about freely-and you too, my dear fellow man, are still an animal, despite everything!””’ 

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 lighthearted little poems called The Idylls of Mes

sina, 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...” 

Another dreadful boat ride brought him back from Sicily. When he had recovered, he boarded a train for Rome. 

 Before she had even met Nietzsche Lou had determined to live with him and Rée in a ménage @ trois. She envisioned it an Heilige Dreteinigkeit, a Holy Trinity of philosophizing free spirits “filled almost to bursting with spirituality and keenness of mind.” 

Her fantasy took shape during the time leading up to Nietzsche's arrival in Rome, as she prowled miasmic midnights round the Colosseum with Rée pontificating on philosophy and tantalizing her with endless talk of his brilliant friend. 

“T will confess honestly,” she wrote, “that a simple dream first convinced me of the feasibility of my plan, which flew directly in the face of all social conventions. In it I saw a pleasant study filled with books and flowers, flanked by two bedrooms, and us walking back and forth between them, colleagues, working together in a joyful and earnest bond.”! The disposition of the two bedrooms between the three of them was not made clear. 

Lou did not hide her unconventional plan from Malwida, who called it a brazen fantasy and began to worry. Lou’s ineffectual and permanently outmaneuvered mother talked of summoning her brothers against the disreputable scheme. Everyone was against it. Even Rée, Lou said, was “somewhat perplexed,” though he was wholeheartedly in love. Within the first three weeks of knowing her he had asked her to marry him, including in the proposal the unusual condition that there would be no sex, because it disgusted him. Lou was also disgusted by sex following a traumatic episode in her late teens in St. Petersburg when her trusted intellectual mentor, a married elderly Dutch priest with daughters of her own age, had suddenly forced himself upon her. Rée’s proposal of a mariage blanc would have been to her taste had she been fond of her reputation. It would certainly have conferred respectability. But Lou never gave a fig for her reputation. Throughout her long life, she loved nothing better than to épater les bourgeois. 

WHILE LOU AND HER MOTHER WENT TO THE OVERBECKS IN Basel, Nietzsche went straight from Lucerne to Naumburg to prepare The Gay Science for his publisher. He hired the services of a bankrupt tradesman, who took dictation while Elisabeth read from the manuscript in which he announces for the first time the death of God. He tells it like this: “Haven't you heard of that madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly, ‘I’m looking for God! I’m looking for God!’ Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing around together just then, he caused great laughter. Has he been lost, then? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone to sea? Emigrated? ... The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Where is God?’ he cried; ‘I’ll tell you! We have killed him-you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling ...Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing?

Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? ... Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing of the divine decomposition?-Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him. How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all mur. derers! The holiest and mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? ... Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? There never was a greater deed-and whoever is born after us will on ac. count of this belong to a higher history than up to now!’” 

The crowd look at him disconcertedly and the madman observes, “This deed is still more remote to them [the post-deists] than the remotest stars-and yet they have done it themselves!” He throws the lantern that gives the new light down onto the ground. Leaving the crowd in the marketplace, he forces his way into the churches that lie in his path. In each church he strikes up a requiem for the soul of God, using a form of words that is a blasphemous parody of the requiem for the dead. The people, though they no longer believe in God, are offended by his behavior and they evict him forcibly from their churches. 

“What then are these churches now,” he asks them, “if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?”' 

Later in the same book, Nietzsche rehearses another idea that he will enlarge on in his later philosophy: that following the death of a god, his statue will still be shown for centuries in a cave where it will continue to cast a tremendous and gruesome shadow on the wall. God is dead, yes. But, given the ways of men, Nietzsche prophesies, there will remain for thousands of years the shadow of the morality he imparted. It is the stern job of the Argonaut of the spirit to vanquish the shadow, as well as the god himself.? 

Both stories placed a heavy burden on the shoulders of nineteenthcentury rationalists (such as Rée) who, having killed God, did not seem to realize the consequence that you cannot keep the ethical content of Christianity without its theology. The rational materialists must also address the consequence switch in moral power. In this lurked the possibility of vast and catastrophic consequences for mankind. “Incipit tragoedia,’ Nietzsche prophesied at the end ,tragedy looms. 

Bocklin and fn

 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 // 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,”® 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 Bécklin was painting The Island of the Dead, 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 Bécklin’s grasp of the mood of the moment that he invited him to design the sets for his new opera, Parsifal, in Bayreuth. Bécklin declined and so the commission went to Paul von Joukowsky instead. 

Nietzsche’s window commanded the Bocklin view of smooth, luminous water broken by funeral boats transporting the dead toward 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 .. .”?° 

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,’ 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 ex