Happy Birthday, Dear Complicated Nietzsche

Throughout my twenties, I regarded Nietzsche as closer to my temperament than living friends and family, a kind of spiritual ancestor who doubled up as mentor. As an impressionable youth, represented everything I longed to be: philosopher, poet, jester, sculptor of the self, moralist, consummate artist and yes, also (despite his too-loud protestations) a mystic.

If the great contrarian were alive, today, he would turn 174 years old. Of course, to a large extent, Nietzsche is alive today. I am reminded how much he is not what he seems to be. And how much it is he who is to blame for this confusion. For example, reading a collection of writings called Conversations with Nietzsche, you encounter the complicated man behind the mask, recollections of contemporaries who actually spoke with him and share their impressiosn.

Lou Andreas-Salomé, the woman whom Nietzsche referred to as his “twin soul,” was twenty-one when they met. He was thirty-seven. Nietzsche was smitten like he never had been before and never would be again. Salomé was particularly constituted to hear Nietzsche, and what she recognizes immediately upon engaging him is his “religious” temperament. One experienced from him, she writes, the sense “that he will step forth as the proclaimer of a new religion, and then it will be such a one as recruits heroes to be its disciples.”

Early on in their conversations, Nietzsche confides to Salomé that he considers himself a “tertium quid,” which means “a disembodied third person or entity.” It composes, Nietzsche told her. “I am neither mind nor body. . . .” People forget this, but Nietzsche penned more than a few poems during his tenure as furious world guardian and crisis-hour moralizer. “And my soul,” the Gondola poem reads, “a stringed instrument, / Sang, touched by invisible hands.”

It is this song that bursts from Nietzsche’s lips when he has gone mad and is being escorted on a night train to the clinic. Imagine his escort, a friend who was sent to retrieve him, a sensitive person who believes he is doing a good deed, a service to one troubled beyond bearing by the sight of a world so unashamed of the baseness of its enterprise, a world so shocking with self-deceit, a world so violent.

Imagine the other passengers. There must have been some. Middle class. Tired. Deep within the play of their own private lives. At the sound of his sudden exaltation, inclining slightly toward him. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche had written, “The most fortunate author is one who is able to say as an old man that all he had of life-giving, invigorating, uplifting, enlightening thoughts and feelings still lives on in his writings, and that he himself is only the gray ash, while the fire has been rescued and carried forth everywhere.”

Yes, Nietzsche lives... Happy Birthday, dear old friend _/|\_

Nietzsche painting by Edvard Munch

Salome photograph

Nietzsche: Getty images