Friedrich Nietzschethe hammer and the tightrope

The migraines took days at a time and left him half-blind, vomiting, unable to read. So he stopped writing at a desk. He wrote walking instead: six to eight hours a day through the Alps around Sils-Maria, filling pocket notebooks, which is why so much of him arrives in fragments and hammer blows rather than paragraphs. The style is not a pose. It is what a man can write while moving.

He sold almost no books. He paid for some of them himself. The one that made him famous was assembled after his collapse by his sister Elisabeth, an actual antisemite who edited her brother — a man who broke with Wagner partly over antisemitism — into something the Nazis could quote. Untangling that is still ongoing work.

He collapsed in a Turin street at 44, reportedly with his arms around a horse's neck, and never wrote another sentence. He lived eleven more years and understood none of them.

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

Friedrich Nietzsche