Arthur Schopenhauerright, too early

Hegel was the most famous philosopher in Berlin. Schopenhauer was 32 and certain that Hegel was a fraud. He booked the same slot, and waited. Five people came. Then fewer. He gave up lecturing entirely and did not hold a post again.

He spent the next twenty-five years in Frankfurt, alone apart from a series of poodles all named Atma, publishing books almost nobody bought. His masterwork sold so poorly the publisher pulped most of the run. He was in his sixties before anyone agreed with him in public, and he enjoyed it enormously and said so.

Then he won. Wagner set him to music, Tolstoy called him the greatest genius among men, and Nietzsche found a copy in a secondhand shop and described the next two weeks as an earthquake. Almost every author we publish who came after him read him first.

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”

Arthur Schopenhauer