1840 He acquires a new white poodle and names her Atma, after the world-soul of the Brahmins. He is attracted to Eastern religions in general and Brahmanism in particular (he reads a few pages of the Upanishads every night). He describes Brahmins as, ‘the noblest and oldest of people’, and threatens to sack his cleaning lady, Margaretha Schnepp, when she disregards orders not to dust the Buddha in his study.
He spends increasing amounts of time alone. His mother worries about him: ‘Two months in your room without seeing a single person, that is not good, my son, and saddens me, a man cannot and should not isolate himself in that manner.’ He takes to sleeping for extended periods during the day: ‘If life and existence were an enjoyable state, then everyone would reluctantly approach the unconscious state of sleep and would gladly rise from it again. But the very opposite is the case, for everyone very willingly goes to sleep and unwillingly gets up again.’ He justifies his appetite for sleep by comparing himself to two of his favourite thinkers: ‘Human beings require more sleep the more developed … and the more active their brain is. Montaigne relates of himself that he had always been a heavy sleeper; that he had spent a large part of his life in sleeping; and that at an advanced age he still slept from eight to nine hours at a stretch. It is also reported of Descartes that he slept a great deal.’
1843 Schopenhauer moves to a new house in Frankfurt, number 17 Schöne Aussicht, near the river Main in the centre of town (English translation: Pretty view). He is to live in the street for the rest of his life, though in 1859, he moves to number 16 after a quarrel with his landlord over his dog.
1844 He publishes a second edition and a further volume of The World as Will and Representation. He remarks in the preface: ‘Not to my contemporaries or my compatriots, but to mankind I consign my now complete work, confident that it will not be without value to humanity, even if this value should be recognized only tardily, as is the inevitable fate of the good in whatever form.’ The work sells under 300 copies: ‘Our greatest pleasure consists in being admired; but the admirers, even if there is every cause, are not very keen to express their admiration. And so the happiest man is he who has managed sincerely to admire himself, no matter how.’
1850 Atma dies. He buys a brown poodle called Butz, who becomes his favourite poodle. When a regimental band passes his house, Schopenhauer is known to stand up in the middle of conversations and put a seat by the window from which Butz can look out. The creature is referred to by the children of the neighbourhood as ‘young Schopenhauer’.
1851 He publishes a selection of essays and aphorisms, Parerga and Paralipomena. Much to the author’s surprise, the book becomes a bestseller.
1853 His fame spreads across Europe (‘the comedy of fame’, as he puts it). Lectures on his philosophy are offered at the universities of Bonn, Breslau and Jena. He receives fan mail. A woman from Silesia sends him a long, suggestive poem. A man from Bohemia writes to tell him he places a wreath on his portrait every day. ‘After one has spent a long life in insignificance and disregard, they come at the end with drums and trumpets and think that is something’ is the response, but there is also satisfaction: ‘Would anyone with a great mind ever have been able to attain his goal and create a permanent and perennial work, if he had taken as his guiding star the bobbing will-o’-the-wisp of public opinion, that is to say the opinion of small minds?’ Philosophically minded Frankfurters buy poodles in homage.
1859 As fame brings more attention from women, his views on them soften. From having thought them ‘suited to being the nurses and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted, in a word, big-children, their whole lives long’, he now judges that they are capable of selflessness and insight. An attractive sculptress and an admirer of his philosophy, Elizabeth Ney (a descendant of Napoleon’s Maréchal), comes to Frankfurt in October and stays in his apartment for a month making a bust of him.
‘She works all day at my place. When I get back from luncheon we have coffee together, we sit together on the sofa and I feel as if I were married.’
(Ill. 19.7)
1860 Increasing ill-health suggests the end is near: ‘I can bear the thought that in a short time worms will eat away my body; but the idea of philosophy professors nibbling at my philosophy makes me shudder.’ At the end of September, after a walk by the banks of the Main, he returns home, complains of breathlessness and dies, still convinced that ‘human existence must be a kind of error.’
Such was the life of a philosopher who may offer the heart unparalleled assistance.
2
A contemporary love story
WITH SCHOPENHAUERIAN NOTES
A man is attempting to work on a train between Edinburgh and London. It is early in the afternoon on a warm spring day.
(Ill. 20.1)
Papers and a diary are on the table before him, and a book is open on the armrest. But the man has been unable to hold a coherent thought since Newcastle, when a woman entered the carriage and seated herself across the aisle. After looking impassively out of the window for a few moments, she turned her attention to a pile of magazines. She has been reading Vogue since Darlington. She reminds the man of a portrait by Christen Købke of Mrs Høegh-Guldberg (though he cannot recall either of these names), which he saw, and felt strangely moved and saddened by, in a museum in Denmark a few years before.
(Ill. 20.2)
But unlike Mrs Høegh-Guldberg, she has short brown hair and wears jeans, a pair of trainers and a canary-yellow V-neck sweater over a T-shirt. He notices an incongruously large digital sports-watch on her pale, freckle-dotted wrist. He imagines running his hand through her chestnut hair, caressing the back of her neck, sliding his hand inside the sleeve of her pullover, watching her fall asleep beside him, her lips slightly agape. He imagines living with her in a house in south London, in a cherry-tree-lined street. He speculates that she may be a cellist or a graphic designer, or a doctor specializing in genetic research. His mind turns over strategies for conversation. He considers asking her for the time, for a pencil, for directions to the bathroom, for reflections on the weather, for a look at one of her magazines. He longs for a train crash, in which their carriage would be thrown into one of the vast barley-fields through which they are passing. In the chaos, he would guide her safely outside, and repair with her to a nearby tent set up by the ambulance service, where they would be offered lukewarm tea and stare into each other’s eyes. Years later, they would attract interest by revealing that they had met in the tragic Edinburgh Express collision. But because the train seems disinclined to derail, and though he knows it to be louche and absurd, the man cannot help clearing his throat and leaning over to ask the angel if she might have a spare ballpoint. It feels like jumping off the side of a very high bridge.