Walking the Tightrope

Fritz ended his professorship at Basel as sick and broken as he had ever been. He first returned home to his sister’s and mother’s care. The family, still slightly strained over Fritz’s unchristian thinking, nevertheless remained on intimate, friendly terms. Fritz thought of becoming his mother’s gardener in the autumn of 1879. One can reasonably assume that Fritz got his hands dirty with at least some minor tending of the soil and shrubs of his mother’s home in Naumberg. He took a liking to it, but it was a fleeting thought for such a restless mind hungry to express itself. “’My existence is a fearful burden,’ Nietzsche wrote to his doctor, Otto Eiser of Frankfort am Main, in January 1880: ‘I should have thrown it off long ago had I not been making the most instructive tests and experiments in the intellectual-moral field precisely in this condition of suffering and almost complete renunciation – this joy in seeking for knowledge carries me to heights where I overcome all torments and...