Walking the Tightrope

“For the summer he went to Sils-Maria and stayed there until the 20th September, when he returned to Turin .  Apart from a relapse in the middle of the summer, he was feeling his health had improved; his spirits were lighter, and he experienced a joy in working which exceeded anything he had known before.  Had his ‘medical knowledge’ been what he claimed, he might have recognized the symptoms and perhaps, even at this late stage, done something to prevent or retard the ultimate consequences: but he did nothing and, in all probability, failed to realize there was anything to be done. “His decline into insanity took the form of an increasingly intense feeling of euphoria culminating at last in megalomania. As early as February his letters revealed that the overcompensation of previous years was beginning to assume a somewhat heightened coloring: writing to Seydlitz on the 12th, for instance, he says: “’Between ourselves – it is not impossible that I am the first philosopher...

Nietzsche wrote his Genealogy , which we have just examined, mostly during his fifth summer at Sils Maria.  At the same time, already increasingly a hermit, Fritz practically faded from the social framework.  He became what he referred to as a "cave bear."  He clung to threads of people through correspondences but now he rarely saw any of them personally.  Perhaps Elizabeth had started it all by moving to Paraguay.  For over a year now, letters were all he had known of his once beloved sister.  Overbeck and Koselitz and his few lady friends saw him less and less.  He entertained individual friends and couples now and then, but the lively social Fritz of as recently as 1882 was gone. The persona of “Fritz” (playful, joking, interested in the perspective of others) became “Nietzsche” (the solemn, prophetic philosopher) only. According to Julian Young, Nietzsche felt gloomy at the beginning of 1887 about the lack of sales of his books, his increased...