Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra

0. INTRODUCTION BY MRS FORSTER-NIETZSCHE. (continued)

With the exception of the ten days occupied in composing the first part of this book, my brother often referred to this winter as the hardest and sickliest he had ever experienced. He did not, however, mean thereby that his former disorders were troubling him, but that he was suffering from a severe attack of influenza which he had caught in Santa Margherita, and which tormented him for several weeks after his arrival in Genoa. As a matter of fact, however, what he complained of most was his spiritual condition--that indescribable forsakenness--to which he gives such heartrending expression in "Zarathustra". Even the reception which the first part met with at the hands of friends and acquaintances was extremely disheartening: for almost all those to whom he presented copies of the work misunderstood it. "I found no one ripe for many of my thoughts; the case of 'Zarathustra' proves that one can speak with the utmost clearness, and yet not be heard by any one." My brother was very much discouraged by the feebleness of the response he was given, and as he was striving just then to give up the practice of taking hydrate of chloral--a drug he had begun to take while ill with influenza,--the following spring, spent in Rome, was a somewhat gloomy one for him. He writes about it as follows:-- "I spent a melancholy spring in Rome, where I only just managed to live,-- and this was no easy matter. This city, which is absolutely unsuited to the poet-author of 'Zarathustra', and for the choice of which I was not responsible, made me inordinately miserable. I tried to leave it. I wanted to go to Aquila--the opposite of Rome in every respect, and actually founded in a spirit of enmity towards that city (just as I also shall found a city some day), as a memento of an atheist and genuine enemy of the Church--a person very closely related to me,--the great Hohenstaufen, the Emperor Frederick II. But Fate lay behind it all: I had to return again to Rome. In the end I was obliged to be satisfied with the Piazza Barberini, after I had exerted myself in vain to find an anti-Christian quarter. I fear that on one occasion, to avoid bad smells as much as possible, I actually inquired at the Palazzo del Quirinale whether they could not provide a quiet room for a philosopher. In a chamber high above the Piazza just mentioned, from which one obtained a general view of Rome and could hear the fountains plashing far below, the loneliest of all songs was composed--'The Night-Song'. About this time I was obsessed by an unspeakably sad melody, the refrain of which I recognised in the words, 'dead through immortality.'"