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