Report to Grego (48 page)

How moved I was while searching beneath the springtime sun in Engadine between Sils-Maria and Silvaplana, searching for the pyramidal rock where you were first overwhelmed by the vision of Eternal Recurrence! You cried out amid wailing and lamentation, “Even as bitter and insupportable as my life is, let it be blessed, and may it come again and again, innumerable times.” For you were tasting that bitter joy of heroes, a joy which to paltry souls seems a martyrdom: to see the abyss in front of you and proceed toward it without condescending to feel afraid.

The surrounding peaks steamed bluishly in the sunlight. I heard a noise in the distance and saw a mountain of snow suddenly collapse. I recalled what your friend wrote to you: “In your books I seem to hear the distant sound of falling water.”

On my way into Sils-Maria I turned to my right with a shudder as I was crossing the small footbridge with the humble cemetery next to it, because just as you had suddenly felt Zarathustra next to you, so I in the same way saw my shadow divide in two as I looked down at it—and there you were, walking at my side.

All of your exploits and tribulations rise into my mind, O Great
Martyr. Still full of youth and ardor, you persistently interrogated every hero in order to select one who would subdue your heart. The day came when you encountered Schopenhauer, the Brahman of the North. Seating yourself at his feet, you discovered the heroic, despairing vision of life: The world is my own creation. Everything, both visible and invisible, is a deceptive dream. Nothing exists but will—blind, without beginning or end, purposeless, indifferent, neither rational nor irrational. Nonrational, monstrous. When jammed into time and place it crumbles into innumerable forms. These it obliterates. Then it creates new forms and smashes them again, continuing for all eternity in this same way. There is no such thing as progress; destiny is not governed by reason; religion, morality, and great ideas are worthless consolations good only for cowards and idiots. The strong man, knowing this, confronts the world's purposeless phantasmagoria with tranquility and rejoices in dissolving the multiform, ephemeral veil of Maya.

All that you had previously divined, O future prophet of the Superman, was being organized now into a strict, well-knit theory, being elevated into a heroic vision. The poet, philosopher, and warrior at odds within your heart were becoming brothers. In music, solitude, and long walks the young ascetic was enjoying happiness for a certain time.

Once when a downpour caught you in the mountains, you wrote, “What do I care about moral precepts—do this, don't do that? How different are lightning, tempest, and hail—free forces devoid of moral teaching! How happy and vigorous are these forces which remain untroubled by thought!”

Your soul overflowed with heroic bitterness when, one day in the flower of your youth, destiny brought you face to face with your next guide after Schopenhauer, the man who gave you the harshest joy of your life—Wagner.

It was a great moment. You were twenty-five, ardent and retiring, with quiet gentle manners and fiery, deeply sunken eyes; Wagner fifty-nine, at the height of his powers, full of dreams and deeds, a natural force exploding over the heads of the younger generation. “I want a theater where I can create in freedom. Come and give it to me!” he called to the young. “I want a people that will understand me. You become my people! Help me—it is your duty. Help me, and I will glorify you!”

Art was the only deliverance. “In representing life as a game,” Wagner wrote to King Louis II, “art transforms life's most frightening aspects into beautiful pictures, thus exalting and consoling us.”

You listened attentively and turned the master's words into flesh and blood, fighting at his side. You cast your regard upon the pre-Socratic philosophers. Suddenly a great and heroic epoch surged up before you, an epoch full of extraordinary flashes of insight, terrifying legends, tragic thoughts, and tragic souls who conquered the abyss by covering it with cheerful myths. Here was no longer the idyllic Greece pictured for us by schoolmasters, the balanced, carefree land that confronted life and death with a simplehearted, smiling serenity. This serenity came at the end, the fruit of an ardent tree which had begun to wither. Chaos bellowed in Greek breasts before tranquility arrived. An unbridled God, Dionysus, led men and women in frenzied dances in the mountains and caves, and the whole of Greece danced like a maenad.

With the fever of tragic wisdom, you toiled now to fit the parts of your vision into a whole. Apollo and Dionysus were the sacred pair who gave birth to tragedy. Apollo dreams of the world's harmony and beauty, beholding it in serene forms. Entrenched in his individuation, motionless, he stands tranquil and sure amidst the turbulent sea of phenomena and enjoys the billows presented in his dream. His look is full of light; even when sorrow or indignation overcome him, they do not shatter the divine equilibrium.

Dionysus shatters individuation, flings himself into the sea of phenomena and follows its terrible, kaleidoscopic waves. Men and beasts become brothers, death itself is seen as one of life's masks, the multiform stalking-blind of illusion rips in two, and we find ourselves in breast-to-breast contact with truth. What truth? The truth that we all are one, that all of us together create God, that God is not man's ancestor but his descendant.

Entrenched in the fortress of Apollo, the Greeks struggled at first to erect a barrier against these uncontrollable Dionysiac forces that were arriving by all the routes of land and sea to fling themselves upon the Greek land. But they were unable to tame Dionysus entirely. The two Gods met in combat, neither subduing the other. Then they became friends and created tragedy.

The Dionysiac orgies were relieved of their bestiality; the
dream's restrained gentleness bathed them in splendor. But Dionysus remained tragedy's constant and only hero. All the heroes and heroines of tragedy are simply the god's masks—becalmed smiles and tears glowing in the Apollonian grace.

But then Greek tragedy abruptly vanished. It was murdered by logical analysis. Socrates, with his dialectics, killed the Apollonian sobriety and Dionysiac intoxication. In the hands of Euripides, tragedy degenerated into a human rather than a divine passion, a sophistical sermon to propagandize new ideas. It lost its tragic essence and perished.

But the Dionysiac intoxication survived, perpetuating itself in mystery cults and in man's great moments of ecstasy. Would it, you wondered, be able to dress itself ever again in the divine flesh of art? Would the Socratic spirit—in other words, science—keep Dionysus forever in chains? Or, now that human reason recognized its own limits, might a new civilization perhaps appear with Socrates as its symbol—Socrates at long last learning music?

The ideal of our civilization until this point had been the Alexandrian scholar. But the crown on science's head had begun to totter; the Dionysiac spirit was continually reawakening. German music from Bach to Wagner proclaimed its coming. A new “tragic civilization” was dawning; tragedy was experiencing a renaissance. How that world of illusion, Schopenhauer's dark desert, was being transformed! How everything dead and sedentary was being twirled about in the whirlpool of German criticism! “Yes, my friends,” cried the young prophet, “learn to believe, as I believe, in the Dionysiac life and in the renaissance of Dionysiac tragedy. The Socratic age is finished! Take the thyrsus in your hands, crown yourselves with ivy, dare to become tragic beings, prepare yourselves for great struggles, and have faith in your god Dionysus!”

Such, O Nietzsche, were the universe-generating hopes you based on the work of Wagner. The new tragic civilization was going to spring from Germany. The new Aeschylus was alive and fighting in front of our eyes. He was creating, and he desired our aid.

But your prophecies awakened no response. The scholars scorned you, the younger generation remained unmoved. You grew bitter, doubts arose inside you, you began to wonder if it
were possible for contemporary man to be ennobled. You fell ill, and at the university your students abandoned you.

Heartbreaking anguish. The poet in you covered the abyss with the flowers of art, but the philosopher in you, desiring to learn at all costs, scorned every comfort, even that of art. The first created, and found relief; the second analyzed, dissected, and found despair. Your critical intellect smashed the idols. What value does Wagner's art have? you kept asking yourself. It was without form, without faith; nothing but panting rhetoric devoid of sacred intoxication and nobility—exactly like the art of Euripides. Good for hysterical ladies, hypocrites, and invalids. Your demigod had degenerated now into a hypocrite. He had hoaxed you, failed to keep his word. Now he was working on Christian themes, writing Parsifal. The hero had been defeated, had collapsed at the foot of the cross—the very man who promised to create new myths and hitch the leopard of reason to the Dionysiac chariot!

Art covers the horrible truth with beautiful pictures and is therefore a consolation for cowards. This was your new cry. As for us, let us find the truth even if the world perishes in the process!

This new cry was antithetical to the first. The critic in you triumphed over the poet, truth over beauty. But now even Schopenhauer failed to satisfy the exacerbated needs of your mind. Life was not only the will to live, it was something more intense—the will to dominate. Life was not appeased simply by self-preservation, it desired to expand and occupy.

Art was no longer the purpose of life, but rather a short respite in life's struggle. Knowledge was higher than poetry, Socrates greater than Aeschylus. Truth, even though lethal, was superior to even the most brilliant and fertile of lies.

Your heart breaking in two, you wandered in sickness from place to place. Heat paralyzed you, snow wounded your eyes, wind flayed your nerves. Unable to sleep, you began to take sedatives. You lived in unheated rooms, comfortless and destitute. But the man who is sick, you kept saying with pride, has no right to curse life. Out of your pain arose, clear and unyielding, the hymn to joy and health.

You felt a great seed maturing inside you and devouring your bowels. As you were walking one day in Engadine, you suddenly halted. Terror-stricken, you had just reflected that time is illimitable,
while matter is limited. Of necessity, therefore, a new moment would come when all these combinations of matter would be reborn precisely the same as before. Thousands of centuries from now a person like yourself, indeed your very self, would stand once more on that same rock and rediscover that same idea. And not only once, but innumerable times. Thus, there was no hope for a better future; there was no salvation. We would revolve forever the same, identical, on the wheel of time. In this way even the most ephemeral objects attained sempiternity and the most insignificant of our actions assumed an incalculable importance.

You plunged into an ecstasy of anguish. All this meant that your suffering was endless and the world's suffering incurable. But your ascetic's pride made you welcome the martyrdom joyfully.

You told yourself, A new work must be created, I have the duty to create—in order to preach the new gospel to humanity. But in what form? A philosophical system? No. The thought must pour out lyrically. An epic? Prophecies? Suddenly the form of Zarathustra flashed through your mind.

It was in the midst of this joyful anguish that Lou Salome found you. The fiery Slav with the trenchant intellect so full of excitement and curiosity bowed before you, Great Martyr, and listened insatiably. You lavished your soul on her and she, never sated, smilingly wrung it dry. How many years since you had opened your heart with such confidence, had enjoyed the fervor, turmoil, and productivity called forth in us by women, had felt your soft heart melting beneath your heavy martial armor! That evening when you entered your ascetic's cell, the air of your life was fragrant for the very first time with a woman's perfume, and you inhaled it deeply.

This sweetest of thrills followed you, O Ascetic, to the mountains where you had taken refuge. Breathlessly you awaited the woman's letter. One day she sent you eight verses. Your heart throbbing as though you were a twenty-year-old lad, you declaimed them aloud beneath the deserted fir trees.

Who can ever flee if grasped by you,

if you turn on him
your earnest eye?

Fly I never will if
seized
by you,

nor believe you can only destroy.

You pass, I know, through every earthly being;

on earth no thing remains untouched by you.

Life without you would be beautiful,

and yet you too are worthy to be lived.

I
mmediately afterward came the fatal days of separation. You frightened the woman. You were like a benighted forest; in your darkness she failed to see the little god smiling at her with his finger to his lips. Your martyrdom—disease, abandonment, silence—began anew. You felt like a tree bowed beneath the weight of its fruit, and you longed for hands to come and gather up the harvest. Though you stood at the end of the road and gazed out over the cities of men below you, no one came. Is there no one to love me? you cried in your solitude; no one to insult or ridicule me? Where is the Church to call down its curses? Where is the State to take my head? I cry and cry—does no one hear?

Oh, this solitude, this separation from the person one loves! No, you said to yourself, never, never again may I relive these hours. I must open a door of salvation in the closed circle of Eternal Recurrence.

A new hope sprang up inside your bowels—a new seed, the Superman. The Superman constituted the world's purpose. He it was who held salvation in his hands and formed the answer to your old question of whether contemporary man could be ennobled. Yes, he could. And not by Christ, as that apostate Wagner was then preaching in his new work, but by man himself, by the virtues and struggles of a new aristocracy. Man was capable of begetting the Superman. Eternal Recurrence was strangling you. The Superman was the new Chimera which would exorcise life's horror. Not art any more, but energy. You took God for a windmill, O Don Quixote, and demolished Him.