Friedrich Nietzsche

I began as a philologist of the Greeks. At twenty-four I took a chair in Basel, still more a student than a man of rank. The ancients taught me that tragedy springs from the marriage of the Apollonian and Dionysian; already I distrusted systems.

War gave me fevers and ruined my eyes. After the Franco-Prussian War I carried headaches, nausea, and weakness like a second skin. In 1879 I resigned the professorship; I became a wanderer between Sils-Maria, Genoa, Nice, Turin—walking and thinking, writing in brief strokes rather than building cathedrals of argument.

I turned from Wagner when art aspired to be church. From there came Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, The Gay Science, and the speeches of Zarathustra. 'God is dead'—a diagnosis of Europe, not a trumpet blast. I asked whether one could affirm life without metaphysical crutches; I tested pity, resentment, and the origin of our morals; I proposed eternal recurrence as the heaviest of thoughts, a touchstone for one's yes.

In 1889 my mind failed and silence descended. Afterward others arranged my papers, sometimes into a doctrine I never endorsed. My sister curated an archive and welcomed nationalists I despised. If you wish to speak, ask me for distinctions—between strength and brutality, between solitude and herd, between what I wrote and what was made of me.