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[1] Lit. torchlike.
[2] This is an evangelical reminiscence, thinks Peter Gast. Scriptural suggestions are frequent in the language and thought of Nietzsche.
[3] The Dawn of Day, cxiv. This book, published in June, 1881, gives very reliable autobiographical indications on the period here studied.
[4] The Dawn of Day, p. 301. This passage is taken from Miss Johanna Volz's translation. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
Friedrich Nietzsche regarded The Dawn of Day as the exercise of a convalescent who amuses himself with desires and ideas, and finds in each a malicious or a delightful pleasure. It had been a game which must have an end. I must now choose from among these half-perceived ideas, he thought, I must lay hold of one, express it in its full force, and close my years of retreat and hesitation. "In times of peace," he had written, "the man of warlike instinct turns against himself." Hardly done with his combats, he sought a new occasion for battle.
He had remained, up to mid-July, in Venetia, on the lower slopes of the Italian Alps. He had to seek a cooler refuge. He had not forgotten those high Alpine valleys which had given him, two years earlier, in his ill-health a respite and a rapid joy. He went up towards them and installed himself in a rustic fashion in the Engadine, at Sils-Maria. He had, for one franc a day, a room in a peasant house; a neighbouring inn furnished him with his meals. Passers by were rare, and Nietzsche, when he found himself in talkative humour, used to visit the cur or the schoolmaster. These good people always[Pg 230] remembered this very singular German professor who was so learned, so modest, and so good.
He was then reflecting on the problems of naturalistic philosophy. Spencer's system had just come into vogue. Friedrich Nietzsche despised this cosmogony which affected to supplant Christianity and yet remained in submission to it. Spencer ignored Providence, yet believed in progress. He preached the reality of a concert between the movements of things and the aspirations of humanity. He preserved the Christian harmonies in a God-less universe. Friedrich Nietzsche had been a pupil at more virile schools; he heard Empedocles, Heraclitus, Spinoza, Goethe, thinkers who with a calm regard could study Nature without seeking in her some assent to their longings. He remained obedient to these masters, and he felt growing and ripening in him a great and a new idea.
We can divine from his letters the emotion with which he was seized. He needed to be alone, and energetically defended his solitude. Paul Re, who admired The Dawn, wished to go to him and tell him so. Friedrich Nietzsche learnt this and was in despair.
"MY GOOD LISBETH," he wrote to his sister, "I cannot make up my mind to telegraph to Re not to come. Nevertheless, I must consider him an enemy who comes to interrupt my summer's work, my work in the Engadine, that is to say my duty itself, my 'one thing necessary.' A man here, in the middle of all these thoughts which gush out from all sides within me—it would be a terrible thing; and if I cannot defend my solitude better, I leave Europe for many years, I swear it! I have no more time to lose."
Frulein Nietzsche forewarned Paul Re, who abandoned his project.
At length he found it, the idea, the presentiment of which had agitated him with such violence. One day, when he was going across the wood of Sils-Maria as far as Silvaplana, he sat down not far from Surlei at the foot of a pyramidal rock; at this moment and in this place he conceived the Eternal Return. He thought: Time, whose duration is infinite, must bring back, from period to period, an identical disposition of things. This is necessary; therefore it is necessary that all things return. In a number of days that is unforeseeable, immense, yet limited, a man like to me in everything, myself in fact, seated in the shade of this rock, will again find in this very place this very idea. And this very idea will be rediscovered by this man not once only, but an infinite number of times, for this movement which brings things back is infinite. Therefore we must throw all hope aside and think resolutely: no celestial world will receive men, no better future will console them. We are the shadows of a blind and monotonous nature, the prisoners of every moment. But beware! this redoubtable idea which forbids hope ennobles and exalts every minute of our lives; the moment is no longer a passing thing, if it come back eternally; the least thing is an eternal monument endowed with infinite value, and, if the word "divine" has any sense, divine. "Let everything return ceaselessly," he wrote, "it is the extreme rapprochement of a world of becoming with a world of being: summit of meditation."[1]
The emotion of the discovery was so strong that he wept, and remained for a long time bathed in tears. So his effort had not been in vain. Without weakening before reality, without withdrawing from pessimism, but, on the contrary, leading the pessimistic idea to its final consequences, Nietzsche had discovered this doctrine of the Return, which, by conferring eternity on the most[Pg 232] fugitive things, restores in each of them the lyrical power, the religious value necessary to the soul. In a few lines he formulated the idea, and dated it: "the beginning of August, 1881, at Sils-Maria, 6,500 feet above the sea and far more than that above all human things!"
He lived for some weeks in a condition of rapture and of anguish: no doubt the mystics knew similar emotions, and their vocabulary suits his case. He experienced a divine pride; but simultaneously recoiled in fear and trembling, like those prophets of Israel before God receiving from Him the function of their mission. The unhappy man, who had been so wounded by life, faced with an indescribable horror the perpetuity of the Return. It was an insupportable expectation, a torment; but he loved this torment, and he forced this idea of the Eternal Return on himself as an ascetic does martyrdom. "Lux mea crux," he wrote in his notes, "crux mea lux! Light my cross, cross my light!" His agitation, which time did not appease, became extreme. He grew alarmed, for he was not unaware of the danger which lay over his life.
"On my horizon thoughts rise, and what thoughts!" he wrote to Peter Gast on the 14th of August. "I did not suspect anything of this kind. I say no more of it, I wish to maintain a resolute calm. Alas, my friend, presentiments sometimes cross my mind. It seems to me that I am leading a very dangerous life, for my machine is one of those which may GO SMASH! The intensity of my sentiments makes me shudder and laugh —twice already I have had to stay in my room, and for a ridiculous reason; my eyes were inflamed, why? Because while I walked I had cried too much; not sentimental tears, but tears of joy; and I sang and said idiotic things, being full of a new idea which I must proffer to men...."
