Ronald Hayman
NIETZSCHE'S MADNESS
Someone who cannot come to terms with the life he is living needs
one hand to fend off his despair over his fate .
..
but with the other
hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees
different things from other people (and more things); after all, dead
as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor.
Kafka had read Nietzsche when he was about fifteen, and
passages like this in the diaries are not merely reminiscent of the
influence: they point to a profound affinity between the two men.
Nietzsche did not dislike himself or disapprove of himself so much
as Kafka, but both wanted to cancel the unsatisfactory present in
favour of the future .
In
Human All Too Human
(1878) Nietzsche
wrote: "The thinker- and similarly the artist- who has put the best of
himself into his work experiences an a lmost malicious joy as he
watches the erosion of his body and spirit by time.
It
is as if he were in a
corner watching a thief at his safe, while knowing that it is empty, his
treasure being elsewhere." He wanted to believe that his writing could
constitute a higher self, his pain-racked physical existence being no
more than a stepping-stone towards it. Fighting stubbornly against
headaches, pain in and around the eyes, vomiting, debility, exhaustion,
he evolved the idea of self-conquest, but there can be no self-conquest
without self-defeat. Like Kafka, he mortgaged his life to his writing,
and kept threatening himself with foreclosure. As he put it in one of
the brief autobiographica l dialogues in
The Gay Science (1882)
-You are moving fasler and fasler away from the living. Soon lhey
will cross you off lheir lisl.
- ll is the only way lO share the privilege of the dead.
- Whal priv il ege?
- NOl
lO
die any more.
