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He wished to make a stay at Genoa. After some trouble he found a perfect home: a garret, with a very good bed, at the top of a staircase of a hundred and four steps, in a house which looked out on a path so steep and stiff that no one passed that way, and that grass grew between the paving stones—Salita delle Battistine, 8.
He arranged his life in a manner as simple as his domicile, and thus realised one of his many dreams. Often he used to say to his mother: "How do the common people live? I would like to live like them." His mother would laugh. "They eat potatoes and greasy meat; they drink bad coffee and alcohol...." Nietzsche sighed: "Oh, those Germans!" In his Genoese house, with its poor inmates, customs were different. His neighbours lived soberly. He imitated them and ate sparely; his thought was quicker and livelier. He bought a spirit lamp, and, under his land-lady's teaching, learnt how to prepare his own risotto, and fry his own artichokes. He was popular in the big house. When he suffered from headaches, he had many visitors, full of concern for him. "I need nothing," he would say, simply: "Sono contento."
In the evening, in order to rest his eyes, he would lie stretched out on his bed, without light in the room. "It is poverty," opined the neighbours; "the German professor is too poor to burn candles." He was offered some: he was grateful, smiled, and explained the circumstances. They called him Il Santo, il piccolo Santo. He knew it, and it amused him. "I think," he wrote, "that many among us, with their abstemious, regular habits, their kindliness and their clear sense, would, were they transported into the semi-barbarism of the sixth to the tenth centuries, be revered like Saints." He conceived and drew up a rule of life:
"An independence which offends no one; a mollified, veiled pride, a pride which does not discharge itself upon others because it does not envy their honours or their pleasures, and is able to stand the test of mockery. A light sleep, a free and peaceful bearing, no alcohol, no illustrious or princely friendships, neither women nor newspapers, no honours, no society—except with superior minds; in default of them, the simple people (one cannot dispense with them; to see them is to contemplate a sane and powerful vegetation); the dishes which are most easily prepared, and, if possible, prepared by oneself, and which do not bring us into contact with the greedy and lip-smacking rabble."
For Friedrich Nietzsche health was a fragile possession, and the more precious in that it must be incessantly conquered, lost, and reconquered. Every favourable day made him feel that surprise which constitutes the happiness of convalescents.
On jumping from his bed, he equipped himself, stuffed into his pouch a bundle of notes, a book, some fruit and bread; and then started out on the road. "As soon as the sun is risen," he wrote, "I go to a solitary rock near the waves and lie out on it beneath my umbrella, motionless as a lizard, with nothing before me but the sea and the pure sky." There he would remain for a long time, till the very last hours of the twilight. For these hours were kindly to those weak eyes of his, that were so often deprived of light and so often blinded by it—those menaced eyes, the least of whose joys was a delight.
"Here is the sea," he wrote, "here we may forget the town. Though its bells are still ringing the Angelus—that sad and foolish, yet sweet sound at the parting of day and night—only another minute! Now all is hushed! There lies the broad ocean, pale and glittering, but it cannot speak. The sky is glistening in its eternal mute[Pg 226] evening glory, in red, yellow, green hues; it cannot speak either. The small cliffs and crags, projecting into the sea—as though trying to find the most lonely spot—not any of them can speak. This eternal muteness which suddenly overcomes us is beautiful and awful; it makes the heart swell...."[4]
How often has he celebrated this hour, when, as he says, the humblest fisherman "rows with golden oars." Then he collected the fruits of the day; he wrote the thoughts which had come to him, clothed in the form and the music of their words. He continued the researches which he had begun at Venice. What is human energy? What is the drift of its desires? How are the disorders of its history, the quagmire of its manners, to be explained? He now knows the answer, and it is this, that the same cruel and ambitious force thrusts man against man, and the ascetic against himself. Nietzsche had to analyse and to define this force in order to direct it; this was the problem which he set himself, and he was confident that he would one day resolve it. Willingly he compared himself to the great navigators, to that Captain Cook who for three months navigated the coral-reefs, fathom-line in hand. In this year 1881, his hero was the Genoese, Christopher Columbus, who, when no land had yet appeared, recognised on the waves meadow grasses which had been carried into the open sea by some unknown river, the waters of which were milky and still free from salt.
"Whither do we wish to go?" he wrote. "Do we long to cross the sea? Whither does this powerful desire urge us which we value above all our other passions? Why this mad flight towards that place[Pg 227] where every sun has hitherto sunk and perished? Will they, perhaps, one day, relate of us that we also steered westward, hoping to reach an unknown India, but that it was our fate to suffer shipwreck on the Infinite? Or else, my brothers, or else?"
Nietzsche liked this lyrical page; he placed it at the end of his book as a final hymn. "What other book," he wrote, "concludes with an Or Else?"
By the end of January he had finished his work. But he was not able to re-copy his manuscript; his hand was too nervous, his eyesight too weak. He sent it on to Peter Gast. On the 13th of March the copy was ready, and Nietzsche announced it to the publisher.
"Here is the manuscript, from which I find it hard to part.... Now, hurry, hurry, hurry! I shall leave Genoa as soon as the book is out, and till then I shall live on cinders. Be quick, hurry up the printer! Can't he give you a written promise that by the end of April, at the latest, I shall have my book in hand, ready, complete?... My dear Herr Schmeitzner, let us all, for this once, do our best. The contents of my book are so important! It is a matter involving our honour that it be faulty in nothing, that it come into the world worthy and stainless. I conjure you, do that for me; no advertising. I could tell you a great deal more about it, but you will be able to understand it all by yourself when you have read my book."
The publisher read the manuscript, but understood it ill; he displayed no enthusiasm. In April, Nietzsche, still at Genoa, was still waiting for his proofs. He had hoped to surprise his friends by despatching an unexpected piece of work, and had said nothing to anyone, Peter Gast excepted. At last he renounced[Pg 228] the pleasure of having a secret. "Good news!" he wrote to his sister. "A new book, a big book, a decisive book! I cannot think of it without a lively emotion...." In May, he rejoined Peter Gast in a village of Venetia, Recoaro, at the foot of the Alps. His impatience grew every day. The delays of his publisher prevented him from clearing up the new thoughts which already pressed hard on him.
The Dawn of Day—this was the title which he finally selected—appeared at the most unfavourable time of the year, in July.
