RONALD HAYMAN
35
Nietzsche's experience, as
In
the next section, which dithyrambically
characterises both life and wisdom as flirtatious girls. "Wholeheartedly
I love only life-and, verily, never more than when I hate it."
He is attracted
to
Wisdom, but she is so much like life: She has her
eyes, her smile and even her little golden fishing-rod ... One's thirst
for her is never slaked, one glimpses her through veils, reaches
through nets ... She is volati le and wayward. I have often seen her
bite her lip and comb her hair the wrong way.
Obliquely, perversely, he is declaring his love for Lou, provoking
himself in order to subdue himself, and when he asks whether it is not
foolish still to be a live, he is reaffirming the burden of his depress ion.
" In the details (of the book) there is an incredible amount of personal
experience and suffering, intelligible only to me. Many pages struck
me as almost
bloodstained."
In the earlier books the lengthy sections
dea ling with women and marriage contain no such evidence of desire,
the writing being mostly based on personal observation, or on Scho–
penhaueriar:. misogyny, but not on personal experience.
Nietzsche's sexual dri ve seems to have been abnormally low. Whil e
at school he told his friend Paul Deussen that he was going to need at
least three women, but Deussen was finally left with the impress ion
that Nietzsche remained a virgin throughout his life. And we have the
evidence of Professor Hersing, who had been a member of the same
student fraternity, Franconia, that Nietzsche was " not a student who
liked having fun. There was no sign of any need to sow wi ld oats." In
the fourth book of
Zarathustra
he was to write caustically about mal e
sexual abstinence. Zarathustra says that he always suspects the motives
of men who embrace chastity, while Nietzsche took H6lderlin and
Leopardi to task for "contradicting the simplest facts, e.g., the fact that
a man sometimes needs a woman just as he sometimes needs a well–
cooked meal." But Nietzsche himself seemed to need neither women
nor well-cooked meals as often as most men do. Though Freud had not
yet formulated his ideas about sublimation, Nietzsche anticipates them
in what is patently a rationalisation of his self-denial:
Every artist knows how damaging intercourse is in states of great
spiritual tension or preparation; those with the greatest power and
the best instincts do not need
to
learn this from experience, from
unfortunate experi ence. For the benefit of the evolving work their
"maternal " instinct disposes ruthlessly of all other stored or accumu–
lated energy, all animal vigour.
