Walking the Tightrope

“On his 44th birthday (the 15th October) he wrote the short passage ’An diesem vollkommnen Tage’ which he placed between the Forward and the first chapter of Ecce Homo and which is in its exalted cheerfulness the most pathetic in his works:  ‘”On this perfect day, when everything has become ripe and not only the grapes are growing brown, a ray of sunlight has fallen on to my life: I looked behind me, I looked before me, and never have I seen so many and such good things together.  Not in vain have I buried my forty-fourth year today, I was entitled to bury it – what there was of life in it is rescued, is immortal.’” ( Hollingdale , page 194) Without question, while there are flashes of brilliance, the major works of 1888 are collectively of a different taste than his writings up through the Genealogy . One great controversy about Nietzsche pertains to exactly when his mental capacities were affected by his approaching insanity.  Was it a completely sudden occurrenc...

Note: The following excerpts are taken from Chapter 10 of Leslie Chamberlain's Nietzsche in Turin , which I have referenced before.  In this chapter, Chamberlain addresses the onset of Nietzsche's madness and specifically his Dionysus Dithyrambs - the final poems of his life. It affords us a glimpse into the intimate state of Nietzsche's mental decline with appropriate emphasis upon the neurotic obsession for all things associated with Richard Wagner that haunted Nietzsche's final semi-lucid days. It also serves to illuminate Nietzsche's (self-denied) mediocrity as a poet, his intensely felt isolation, his personal affinity (elevated valuation) for ancient Greek culture, and is additionally a reflection of Nietzsche's continuing undercurrent of eroticism. "Nietzsche's art, which had become the art of life, fought a tremendous battle with sickness.  He was like the outcast Trojan priest Laocoon , resisting the punishing sea serpents to the last breath...