30
PARTISAN REVIEW
His childhood headaches were bad enough to keep him in bed, and
from the age of nine, he missed a great deal of schooling through
illness. He was twelve when he started to have troubl e with his eyes. He
had inherited myopia from his father, and for six years, from the age of
fourteen, he was at Schulpforta, a converted monastery with windows
that admitted too little daylight, while additional eyestrain may have
been caused by the feeble oil lamps the boys had on their tables in the
evenings. During his six years at the school he suffered frequently from
headaches, catarrh, stomachache, rheumatism, a sore throat, and
hoarseness; he had protracted spells in the sanatorium,/ and twice he
was sent to convalesce at home. The pupils of·his eyes-like his
mother's-were of unequal size, and his father, who had suffered from
a mild ep ilepsy, died when he was thirty-five from "softening of the
brain."
It
may have been syphilitic, and he may have infected his wife,
causing her pupils to become unequal in size (which is one of the
disease's symptoms), so that Nietzsche may have been infected while in
the womb, but the ev idence is not conclusive. We know that a quarter
of his father's bra in had been affected by the softening, but we do not
know in which area.
At the university and during Nietzsche's year of military service,
his health was generally better until he damaged his breastbone against
the pommel of his saddle when jumping myopically onto his horse.
The serious physical decline began when he was twenty-six-at the
beginning of his third year as professor of classical philology at the
University of Basel, when he began to suffer from insomnia, stomach–
ache, hemorrhoids, and exhaustion. H e was given sick leave, but the
headaches soon resumed, together with the eye trouble. Writing
to
congratulate his mother on her forty-ninth birthday, he warned her
"not to follow the absurd example of your es teemed son, who has
started ailing far too early in life, and already, like a little old man , is
grateful for each day he is not reminded of indiges tion and pains.... "
During his thirti es the headaches became worse, sometimes lasting for
as long as six days. Sometimes he wou ld start to vomit bile and go on
vomiting all day. He felt convinced that all the physical symptoms
"were deep ly intertwined with spiritual crises, so that I have no idea
how medicine and diet could ever be enough to restore my health ." The
secret was "to acquire a certain hardness of the skin, because of the
great inner vulnerability and capacity for suffering."
The history of malaise is integral to the history of madness.
It
might at first seem to us, as it might at first have seemed to him, that,
with his inescapa ble ill hea lth, he could afford to go mad: he would
