I lived at Fritzsch's and was really delighted with that good man. Things are going well with him, his health included. My second "Thoughts Out of Season" (or over-seasoned thoughts) is now in the press. You will receive the first proofs in a few days, for, my dear friend, I am going to avail myself of your willing kindness and beg you to help me with your advice here and there, and moral and intellectual correction. After all, we must not lose much time, for it will be printed quickly and must be quite ready at the end of January.
Therefore, my dear good friend, send your corrected proofs every time as soon as possible to me here in Bâle, for the long distances make things a little complicated and we must try to avoid any hitch in the printing...Karl Hillebrand's anonymous book, "Twelve Letters By An Aesthetic Heretic" (Berlin, Oppenheiin, 1874), has given me the most unbounded joy. How refreshing it is! Read and wonder; he is one of us, one of the "Company of the Hopeful."
May this company flourish in the new year and may we remain good comrades! Ah, my dear fellow, we have no choice; we must either be hopeful or desperate. Once and for all, I have resolved to hope. I was very vexed at the horribly cautious academic Confratres in Kiel. Fancy such fear of "Youth"!...So may we remain faithful friends in 1874 and continue so until the last day.
Yours, FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.
To Rohde - February, 1874 Bâle, February 15, 1874. DEAREST FRIEND: First of all, my best Sunday greeting to you. Are you living in the gray north? We are having such fine warm days with plenty of sunshine and even deep coloured sunsets already. We have only had one day's snow the whole winter. Since the new year, too, I have been living more carefully and rationally, and am feeling fit in consequence. My eyes are the only trouble. I sorely need an amanuensis. I must tell you though that for the last six months a most sympathetic and talented pupil has come under my notice, one who already belongs to our party heart and soul. His name is Baumgartner, an Alsatian, and the son of a manufacturer of Mülhausen. He comes to me every Wednesday afternoon and stops the evening, and then I dictate to him or he reads aloud to me, or letters are written. In short, he is a godsend to me, and, I assure you, will be for all of us one day. At Easter I shall go back to Naumburg again in order to try a systematic course of rest and wholesome living, and then I shall ultimately be able to bear things a little better. I have thought out a good deal since Christmas, and have had to roam so far afield that often when my proofs arrive I wonder when I could have written the stuff, and whether it can all be my work. I am feeling very hostile just now towards all political and smug bourgeois virtues and duties, and occasionally I even soar far above "national" feeling. May God mend this and me!
In addition to all your trouble, dear faithful friend, you have also had that of proof-reading. The smallest hint is gratefully turned to account, and many a blemish has been removed by your hand. By-the-bye, a whole number of strange errors had nothing to do with me, but arose out of the copying of my illegible MS. Unfortunately I was unable to avail myself of your help for the last sheet. For many reasons I thought they had forgotten to send it to you and time was pressing. Luckily I was able to remove the worst stumbling block myself, and have made the text of the conclusion a little lighter by cutting out about a page. A certain generality of treatment was, however, necessary, as I had to take into account the elaboration of some of the special arguments in subsequent "Thoughts Out of Season." So let the monster go its way. I wonder who will find any pleasure in it! Who will even read it? I believe people will think it a piece of great foolishness on my part—and they will be right! But I am really heartily tired of all this cleverness and must become absorbed in myself. On my honour, I cannot help it. But promise me you will not immediately despise me on that account. For I really believe that you understand me in these things and have a right to it, dear friend. When I think of my fellow philologists I sometimes feel something like shame. Still, I do not believe I can be so easily driven off my appointed path—and before that I mean to say for once all I have to say; one cannot do oneself a greater kindness than that. When you get your copy (which I hope will be within a fortnight), I beg you to do me just this one favour: tell me as severely and briefly as you like all about my faults, my mannerisms, and the dangers of my method of exposition, for I am not satisfied with it and aspire to something quite different. Help me, therefore, with a few little hints, I shall be most grateful...
Good-bye, dear friend. Yours, FRIEDRICH N.
To Freiherr Karl Von Gersdorff - April, 1874 Bâle, April 1, 1874. MY DEAR FRIEND: If only you had not such an exaggeratedly high opinion of me! I am afraid that one day you will be somewhat disappointed in me, and I will inaugurate this change in you at once by declaring from the bottom of my heart that I deserve not one word of the praise you have lavished upon me. If only you knew how disheartened and melancholy I really feel about myself as a productive being! All I long for is a little freedom, a taste of the real breath of life; and I kick, I revolt against the many, the unutterably many constraints to which my mind is still subject. And of real productive work there can be no thought so long as one is not freed, however slightly, from one's trammels and the pain or oppression arising from one's limited outlook. Shall I ever attain to inner freedom? It is very doubtful. The goal is too remote, and even if one gets within measurable distance of it, one has by that time consumed all one's strength in a long search and struggle. When freedom is at last attained, one is as lifeless and feeble as a day-fly by night. That is what I dread so much. It is a misfortune to be so conscious of one's struggle and so early in life! And unlike the artist or the ascetic, I cannot balance my doubts by means of great deeds. How wretched and loathsome it is to me to be continually wailing like a mire-drum. For the moment I am really very, very tired of everything—more than tired.
My health, by-the-bye, is excellent; you need have no fears about that. But I am not quite satisfied with Nature, who ought to have given me a little more intellect as well as a warmer heart. I always fall short of the best. To know this, is the greatest torture a man can have. Regular work in an official post is so good because it leads to a certain obtuseness and then one suffers less...Accept my best wishes for yourself and your dear parents. Think what life would be like without a friend! Could one bear it? Would one have borne it? Dubito.
FRIDERICUS.
To Rohde - October, 1874 Bâle, October 7, 1874. MY DEAR FRIEND: Last night I returned from the mountains, and this morning I mean to set to and consecrate the work of the winter term by means of a birthday letter to you. I do not lack either courage or confidence; I have brought back both of these with me from the mountains and the lakes, where I discovered what it was that one lacked most, or rather what it was that one has too much of. That is to say, egoism; and this is the result of one's eternal lonely brooding and lonely suffering. In the end, one begins to feel constantly as if one were covered with a hundred scars and every movement were painful. But, joking apart, I shall very soon be thirty and things must change somewhat; they must become more virile, more even in tenour, and no longer so damned unstable. To continue one's work and to think of oneself as little as possible—that must be the first necessity. After some reflection it has struck me that I am very ungrateful and childish with my irritating despair, for I have been thinking how incomparably lucky I have been during the last seven years and how little I can gauge how rich I am in my friends. Truth to tell, I live through you; I advance by leaning upon your shoulders, for my self-esteem is wretchedly weak and you have to assure me of my own value again and again. In addition to that, you are my best examples, for both you and Overbeck bear life's lot with more dignity and less wailing, although in many respects things are more and more difficult for you than for me. But what I feel most is the way you outstrip me in loving solicitude and unselfishness. I have thought much about these facts of late, and I may surely be allowed to mention them to you in a birthday letter.
Farewell, my dear friend, and remain as affectionate to me as you have been hitherto—then we shall easily be able to endure life yet a while longer.
Your devoted friend, FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.
Nietzsche To Malvida Von Meysenbug - October, 1874 Bâle, October 25, 1874. DEAREST FRAULEIN: At last I am able once again to let you have some news of me by sending you another work of mine.The third of the "Thoughts Out of Season" Schopenhauer as an Educator.—Translator.From the contents of this last essay you will be able to form some idea of all that I have experienced in the interval. Also, that with the lapse of years I am, among other things, in a much more serious and precarious position than you might gather from the mere reading of the book itself. In summa, however, you will surmise that things are going well with me, and going onwards, too, and that all I lack, alas! is just a little of the sunshine of life. Otherwise I should be compelled to acknowledge that things could not be going better with me than they are. For it is indeed a piece of great good fortune for me to progress step by step towards the accomplishment of my mission. And now I have written three of the thirteen "Thoughts Out of Season," and the fourth is already taking shape in my mind. How happy I shall feel when I have at last unburdened my heart of all its negative hates and all its indignation, and yet I dare hope that in five years I shall be within sight of this glorious goal! Already at the present moment I am thankful to feel how very much more clearly and sharply I am learning to see things—spiritually (not bodily, alas!) and how very much more definitely and intelligibly I can express myself. Provided that I am not led entirely astray in my course, or that my health does not break down, something must certainly come of all this. Just imagine a series of fifty such essays as the four I have already written—all the product of a soul's experience forced into the light of day! With such matter one could not help but produce some effect; for the tongues of many would have been unloosed and enough would have been put into words that could not be so quickly forgotten, much that today is almost as good as forgotten yea, that is scarcely to hand. And what should divert me in my course? Even hostile attacks I can now turn to account and to pleasure, for they often enlighten me more quickly than friendly sympathy, and I desire nothing more than to be enlightened about the highly complex system of conflicting elements that constitutes the "modern world." Fortunately, I am quite devoid of all political and social ambition, so that I need fear no dangers in that direction—no loadstones to draw me aside, no compulsion to compromise or to consider consequences; in short, I can say all I think, and what I want to do is to test once and for all to what extent modern mankind—so proud of its freedom of thought—can endure free thought. I do not ask anything either excessive or fantastic from life; besides, in the course of the next few years we shall experience something for which all the world of the past and the future may envy us. Moreover, I am blessed beyond all deserts with the most excellent of friends; and now, quite between ourselves, the only thing I want, and that quite soon, is a good wife, and then I shall regard all my worldly wishes as fulfilled. All the rest depends upon myself...
Meanwhile, my heartiest wishes for your health, and may you continue to think kindly of Your most devoted servant, FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.
Nietzsche To His Sister - January, 1875 Bâle, January 22, 1875. MY DEAR SISTER: It was a good thing that you wrote me a letter close on the heels of the one mother wrote, for I was beside myself and had already written down some bitter words. I now see that I misunderstood her.
But how is it that she was able to misunderstand me so, and all this time to conceal from me this incomprehensible hostility to the two Wagners? Am I so difficult to understand and so easy to misunderstand in all my intentions, plans, and friendships? Ah, we lonely ones and free spirits—it is borne home to us that in some way or other we constantly appear different from what we think. Whereas we wish for nothing more than truth and straightforwardness, we are surrounded by a net of misunderstanding, and despite our most ardent wishes we cannot help our actions being smothered in a cloud of false opinion, attempted compromises, semi-concessions, charitable silence, and erroneous interpretations. Such things gather a weight of melancholy on our brow; for we hate more than death the thought that pretence should be necessary, and such incessant chafing against these things makes us volcanic and menacing. From time to time we avenge ourselves for all our enforced concealment and compulsory self-restraint. We emerge from our cells with terrible faces, our words and deeds are then explosions, and it is not beyond the verge of possibility that we perish through ourselves. Thus dangerously do I live! It is precisely we solitary ones that require love and companions in whose presence we may be open and simple, and the eternal struggle of silence and dissimulation can cease.
Yes, I am glad that I can be myself, openly and honestly with you, for you are such a good friend and companion, and the older you grow and the more you free yourself from the Naumburg atmosphere, the more will you certainly adapt yourself to all my views and aspirations.
With love and devotion, YOUR BROTHER. (Marginal note by Nietzsche in the foregoing letter): You can read all this in print in my Schopenhauer; but they are at the same time my own experiences and feelings that always visit me—as at the present moment, for instance.
To Rohde - February, 1875 Bâle, February 28, 1875. DEAREST FRIEND:...Now, let me tell you something you do not yet know—something which you, as my most intimate and most sympathetic friend, have a right to know. We two, Overbeck and I, have a domestic trouble, a domestic ghost. Please don't have a fit when you hear that X— is contemplating going over to the Holy Catholic Church and wants to become a Catholic priest in Germany. This has only just come to light, but as we afterwards heard, to our dismay, he has been thinking over it for years, though his resolution has never been so mature as it is now. I cannot help feeling hurt over it, and at times it seems to me the worst possible slight that could be given me. Of course, he does not mean it in that way, for up to the present he has not for one moment thought of anyone but himself, and the confounded stress our religion lays on the "salvation of one's own soul" leaves him utterly indifferent to anything else, friend ship included...At last, he confessed what his attitude was, and now every three days, almost, there is an explosion. The poor man is in a desperate condition and no longer accessible to words of counsel; that is to say, he is so entirely led by vague aspirations that he seems to us like a wandering valleity. Oh, our excellent, pure Protestant air! I have never in my life before felt my dependence upon the spirit of Luther so strongly as I do now, and this wretched man wants to turn his back on all these liberating geniuses! It is so very hard for me to understand how, after eight years of intimate association with me, this spectre should arise at my elbow, that I often wonder whether he can be in his right senses, and whether he ought not to undergo a cold-water cure. And, after all, I am the man on whom the blame of this conversion will rest. God knows I do not say that out of egoistic solicitude. But I, too, believe that I stand for something holy, and I should blush for shame if I were suspected of having had anything to do with Catholicism, for there is nothing I hate with a more deadly hatred.
Interpret this ghastly story in as friendly a manner as possible and send me a few words of comfort. I have been wounded precisely in my friendship, and hate the dishonest, sneaking nature of many friendships more than ever, and shall have to be more cautious in future. X— himself will doubtless be quite at home in some sort of conventicle, but in our company he seems to me now to be suffering incessantly. Your disconsolate friend, FRIEDRICH N. For Overbeck also. Please burn this letter if you think fit.
To Rohde - December, 1875 Bâle, December 8, 1875. Ah, dear friend, I did not know what to say to you, so I held my peace and was full of fear and anxiety on your account. I did not even like to ask how things were going, but how often, how very often my heartfelt sympathy sped your way! Everything has turned out as badly as possible, and I can think of only one way in which it could have been worse—to wit, if the matter were less appallingly plain than it actually is. The most intolerable thing of all is surely doubt, ghostlike semi-certainty—and you have at least been relieved of this, which was such a torment to you here. I am now racking my brain in trying to discover how you can possibly be helped. For a long while I thought that they were going to transfer you and that they would give you an appointment at Freiburg in Breisgau. But afterwards it struck me that such an idea had never even entered their minds. Certainly the publication of your work will prove the best remedy in your case. One cannot help deriving some pleasure from that, and at all events it will force you to think of other matters. This promises to be a steady pursuit and will perhaps help you over this terrible winter.
Let me tell you how I am faring. As far as my health is concerned, things are not so good as I really supposed they would be when I effected the complete change in my mode of life here. Every two or three weeks I have to lie in bed for about thirty-six hours in great pain with the usual trouble you know so well. Perhaps it will gradually get better, but I feel as if I had never had such a hard winter. What with new lectures, etc., the day drags so wearily that in the evening I am always more and more glad to have finished, and actually marvel at the hardness of existence. The whole exasperating business does not seem worth while; the pain you inflict on yourself and others is out of all proportion to the benefit either they or you yourself derive from your efforts. This is the opinion of a man who does not happen to be troubled by his passions, though he is certainly not made happy by them either. During the hours that I rest my eyes, my sister reads aloud to me, almost always Walter Scott, whom I would readily agree with Schopenhauer in calling "immortal." What pleases me so much in him is his artistic calm, his Andante. I should like to recommend him to you, but there are some things which, though they benefit me, can get no hold of your spirit, because you think more quickly and more sharply than I do. As to the use of novels for the treatment of one's soul, I will say nothing more particularly as you are already forced to help yourself with your own "novel." Nay, I advise you to read "Don Quixote" again—not because it is the most cheerful but because it is the most austere reading I know. I took it up during the summer holidays, and all personal troubles seemed to shrink to nothing and appear simply laughable, not even worthy of a wry face. All earnestness, all passion, and everything men take to heart is Quixotism—for some things it is good to know this; otherwise it is better not to know it...
Your friend, F. N.
To Freiherr Karl Von Gersdorff - December, 1875 Bâle, December 13, 1875. MY DEAR FRIEND: I received your letter yesterday, and this morning, just at the beginning of a week of hard work, your books arrived. A man certainly ought to feel cheerful when he has such sympathetic and affectionate friends! Believe me, I admire the fine instinct of your friendship—I trust the expression does not sound too biological—which made you light upon these Indian maxims, just as I, with a sort of waxing thirst, have been turning longing eyes to India for the last two months. From Schmeitzner's friend, Herr Widemann, I borrowed the English translation of the Sutra Nipata, a portion of the sacred books of the Buddhists, and I have already made a household word of a strong closing sentence from one of the Sutras—"and thus I wander alone like a rhinoceros." My conviction about the worthlessness of life and the delusiveness of all aims frequently oppresses me so keenly, particularly when I lie in bed feeling ill, that I long to hear more of this Indian wisdom, provided it is not permeated with Judaeo-Christian phraseology. For, some time or other, I learnt to feel such a loathing for this phraseology that I literally have to be on my guard against dealing unjustly with it.
As to how the world wags—this you can tell from the enclosed letter from that terrible sufferer Z—. Of course one ought not to cling to it, and yet what can help one to endure life, when one no longer really wills anything! I am of opinion that the will to knowledge is the last remaining vestige of the will to life; it is an intermediary region between willing and no longer willing, a piece of purgatory, in so far as we look discontentedly and contemptuously on life, and a piece of Nirvana, in so far as, through it, the soul approaches the state of pure disinterested contemplation. I am training myself to unlearn the eager hurry of the will to knowledge. This is what all scholars suffer from, and that is why they all lack the glorious serenity derived from acquired enlightenment, insight. For the present I am too heavily burdened by the various claims of my official post to help falling all too frequently though reluctantly into that eager hurry, but by degrees I shall put all this right. And then my health will be more settled—a condition I shall not attain before I thoroughly deserve it, before, that is to say, I have discovered that state of my soul which is, as it were, my destiny, that healthy state in which it has retained but one of all its instincts—the will to know. A simple home, a perfectly regular daily routine, no enervating hankering after honours or society, my sister's company (which makes everything about me Nietzschean and strangeful restful), the consciousness of having 40 excellent books of all times and climes (and many more which are not altogether bad), the constant joy of having found educators in Schopenhauer and Wagner, and the Greeks as the object of my daily work, the belief that henceforward I shall no longer lack pupilsThe attacks of his German colleagues had emptied his auditorium.—Translator.—all these things now for the time being make up my life. Unfortunately my chronic physical troubles, which at fortnightly intervals seize me for about two days at a time and sometimes longer, must be added to the reckoning. But they must end some day.
Later on, when you are securely settled down in your own home, you will be able to reckon upon me as a holiday guest who will be likely to spend some considerable time with you. It is often a solace to me to exercise my imagination anticipating these later years of your life, and I often think I may one day be of service to you in your sons. Yes, dear old devoted Gersdorff, we have now shared a goodly portion of youth, experience, education, inclination, hatred, striving, and hope in common; we know that we can thoroughly enjoy even sitting beside each other in silence. I don't think we need to give each other any pledges or promises, because we thoroughly believe in each other. I know from experience that you help me where you can, and whenever I have reason to rejoice I always think, "How pleased Gersdorff will be!" For, I must tell you, you have the magnificent gift of sympathizing with another's joy and this is a rarer and nobler capacity than pity.
And now farewell, and may you cross the threshold of your new year of life the same man as you have always been. I cannot wish you more. It was as this man that you won your friends, and if there are still a few sensible women knocking around you will not have much longer "To wander alone like a rhinoceros." Your devoted friend, FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.
To Freiherr R. v. Seydlitz - September, 1876 Bâle, September 24, 1876. DEAR SIR: After a letter such as yours, containing so stirring a testimony of the depth of your soul and intellect, I can say nothing but this: let us keep in close touch with each other, let us see to it that we do not lose each other again now we have found each other! I rejoice in the certainty of having won another genuine friend. And if you only knew what this means to me! For am I not as constantly engaged in the kidnapping of men as any pirate not, however, with the object of selling them into bondage, but rather in order to sell them, with myself, into freedom.
Your sincere and devoted friend, FRIEDR. NIETZSCHE.
To Freiherr Karl Von Gersdorff - May, 1876 Bâle, May 26, 1876. DEAR FRIEND:...I must tell you something, which, so far as other people are concerned, is still a secret, and must remain so for the present: following upon an invitation of the best friend in the world, Fräulein von Meysenbug, I intend in October to spend a whole year in Italy. I have not yet been granted leave by the authorities, but I think it will come, more particularly as, with the view of sparing so small a corporation the burden of my pay, I have volunteered to forfeit my salary for the whole period. Freedom! You cannot imagine how deeply I breathe when I think of it! We shall live in the simplest manner possible at Fano (on the Adriatic). This is my news. All my hopes and plans regarding my ultimate spiritual emancipation and untiring advancement are once more in full bloom. My confidence in myself, I mean in my better self, fills me with courage. Even the state of my eyes does not affect this. (Schiess thinks they are worse than they were some time ago. The long and short of it is I want a secretary). My lectures are very well attended. In one of them I have about 20 scholars, in the other about 10, and the same numbers at the school. I shall certainly not marry; on the whole, I hate the limitations and obligations of the whole civilized order of things so very much that it would be difficult to find a woman free-spirited enough to follow my lead. The Greek philosophers seem to me ever more and more to represent the paragon of what one should aim at in our mode of life. I read Xenophon s Memorabilia with the deepest personal in terest. Philologists regard them as hopelessly tedious. You see how little of a philologist I am. F. N.
To Madame Louise O. - September, 1876 Bâle, September, 1876. DEAR, KIND FRIEND: In the first place I was unable to write, for I underwent an eye-cure, and now I ought not to write for a long long time to come! Nevertheless I read your two letters again and again; I almost believe I read them too often. But this new friendship is like new wine—very agreeable though perhaps a trifle dangerous.
At least for me.
But for you also, especially when I think of the sort of free spirit you have lighted upon!—a man who longs for nothing more than daily to be rid of some comforting belief, and who seeks and finds his happiness in this daily increase in the emancipation of his spirit. It is possible I wish to become more of a free spirit than I am capable of becoming.
So what is to be done? An "Abduction from the Harem"Die Entführung aus dem Sérail," first performed in Vienna July 10th, 1752.—Translator. of Faith, without Mozart's music?
Do you know Fraulein von Meysenbug's autobiography published under the title of "Memoirs of an Idealist?
What is poor little Marcel doing with his little teeth? We all have to suffer before we really learn to bite, physically and morally—biting in order to nourish ourselves, of course, not simply for the sake of biting!
Is there no good portrait in existence of a certain blond and beautiful woman?