Walking the Tightrope

Nietzsche’s appointment to his professorship at the University had one rarely considered consequence; it left him without friends his own age. All of his student years he had enjoyed close friendships with classmates, Fritz was not a social hermit (though he already claimed to be an “intellectual” one) until many years later. “What Nietzsche most missed in Basel was the stimulating theater and concert life he had first encountered in Cologne and later relished in Leipzig. The old patrician town lacked a concert hall that could stand comparison with the famous Gewandhaus, while it’s stage offerings were so wretched that Nietzsche stigmatized Basel as being a place that was ‘hostile to the Theater-Graces’. In Leipzig he had been surrounded, stimulated and consoled by a circle of young friends…but in Basel he had no close friends or colleagues who were at all close to his age. The historian Jacob Burckhardt was twenty-six years older.” ( Cate , page 91) Among anyone at Basel: “It was Jaco...

“I am training myself to get rid of the habit of haste in willing to know; all scholars suffer from that and it is what deprives them of the glorious calm which comes from all insight gained. A simple household, a completely regulated daily routine, no irritating appetite for honors or for society, the life together with my sister (which makes everything around me so Nietzschean and strangely tranquil), the awareness of having most excellent and kind friends, the possession of forty good books from all ages and peoples (and of several more which are not exactly bad), the constant joy of having Schopenhauer and Wagner educators and in the Greeks the daily objects of my work, the faith that from now on I shall no longer lack good students – this is what makes my life at present. Unfortunately there is the added to this my chronic misery, which seizes me for almost two whole days every two weeks, and sometimes longer periods – well, that ought to come to an end one day.” (letter to Carl...