Walking the Tightrope

“Nobody at this low point in his career, and probably not even Nietzsche – who felt that from the euphoric heights of Orta and the Monte sacro in early May he had been precipitated by mid-November to the dark depths of the ‘abyss’ – could guess that within a few weeks he would rebound and reach a new zenith in an astonishing ‘eruption’. But this is what happened. It was a triumph of will power, of Selbstuberwindung (self-overcoming), as he called it, and it offered dramatic proof that, as he had written Franz Overbeck, the ‘watch-spring’ of his overly tensed, ‘machine-like’ brain had not snapped and that he still possessed enough of the magic powers of the alchemist to be able to transform the ‘dung’ of misfortune into verbal ‘gold’. “Climatic factors again played a major role in this amazing resurgence. During the first two weeks of January 1883 Rapallo was so lashed by wintry gales and rain that never in his life had Nietzsche felt so frozen as in his small, seaside albergo . H...