Nietzsche’s Letters: 1885

Nice, mid-March 1885: Draft of a Letter to Elisabeth Nietzsche

When I read your letter I once again became aware of the reason why some of the finer minds in Germany take me to be insane and even spread the rumor abroad that I died in an asylum. I am much too proud as ever to believe that any person could love me, namely, this requires the precondition that a person knows who I am. Just as little do I believe that I will love anyone. That would require—wonder of wonders!—finding a person of my stature. Do not forget that I despise as much as I deeply pity such beings as Richard Wagner or A. Schopenhauer, and that I find the founder of Christianity superficial in comparison with myself; I have loved them all at a time when I had not understood what a human being is.

It strikes me as one of those puzzles I have sometimes thought about—how it is possible that we are blood related? Whatever had occupied me, worried me, and elevated me has never brought me a co-knower and friend! It is a pity that there is no God, so that at least one knower would exist.— As long as I am healthy, I retain sufficient good humor in order to play my role and to hide from the world within that role, for instance as a Basel professor. Sadly enough, I have been very ill and would hate, unspeakably, the people I have come to know, myself included. —

My dear sister, let all this remain between ourselves—and you may promptly burn this letter. If I were not such a good example of a play-actor, I could not bear to live another hour.

For people like myself, marriage does not fit into the picture: it could only be in the style of our Goethe [who eventually married Christiane Vulpius, a non-literate seamstress]. I never think of being loved.

When I have shown you great rage, it is because you forced me to relinquish the last human beings [Lou Salomé and Paul Rée.] with whom I could speak without Tartuffery. Now—I am alone.

With them, I had been able to converse without a mask about things which interested me. What they thought of me was quite immaterial to me. — Now I am alone.

Hide this letter from our mother and— — —

[....] Do not be angry over this letter. There is more civility in it than if, as usual, I were to play a comedy. [....]

Venice, May 7, 1885: Letter to Franz Overbeck

Very edified by your letter and very relieved: for the suspicion occasionally arises that you may regard the author of Zarathustra as one who has gone quietly round the bend. Indeed, my danger is great, but it isn’t that sort of danger: rather, in the meantime I no longer know whether I am the Sphinx, who poses the questions, or the renowned Oedipus, who is questioned—so that I have two chances for the abyss. Things will now follow their own course. —

Yours in gratitude, Friend N.

Sils Maria, July 2, 1885: Letter to Franz Overbeck

Dear old friend Overbeck,

[....] I have been dictating almost every day for two or three hours. But my “philosophy”—if I have the right to call what tortures me to the very roots of my being by that name—is no longer communicable, at least not by means of print. [....] Besides, our age is endlessly superficial, and I am often ashamed of myself for having already said so much publicly which at no time, even in far worthier and profounder ages, would have been appropriate for “public” consumption. This century’s shamelessly “free press” is enough to ruin anyone’s instincts and good taste. I hold up before myself the images of Dante and Spinoza, who were better at accepting the lot of solitude. Of course, their way of thinking, compared to mine, was one which made solitude bearable; and in the end, for all those who somehow still had a “God” for company, what I experience as “solitude” really did not yet exist. My life now consists in the wish that it might be otherwise with all things than I comprehend, and that somebody might make my “truths” appear incredible to me. — — [....]

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