If most works of literature are less fine than Le Rouge et le noir, it is – suggested Nietzsche – not because their authors lack genius, but because they have an incorrect idea of how much pain is required. This is how hard one should try to write a noveclass="underline"
The recipe for becoming a good novelist … is easy to give, but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says ‘I do not have enough talent.’ One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes every day until one has learnt how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one’s eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present, one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer … one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost for instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise
for some ten years
; what is then created in the workshop … will be fit to go out into the world.
The philosophy amounted to a curious mixture of extreme faith in human potential (fulfilment is open to us all, as is the writing of great novels) and extreme toughness (we may need to spend a miserable decade on the first book).
It was in order to accustom us to the legitimacy of pain that Nietzsche spent so much time talking about mountains.
10
It is hard to read more than a few pages without coming upon an alpine reference:
Ecce Homo
: He who knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of heights, a
robust
air. One has to be made for it, otherwise there is no small danger one will catch cold. The ice is near, the solitude is terrible – but how peacefully all things lie in the light! how freely one breathes! how much one feels
beneath
one! Philosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary living in ice and high mountains.
On the Genealogy of Morals
: We would need
another
sort of spirit than those we are likely to encounter in this age [to understand my philosophy] … they would need to be acclimatized to thinner air higher up, to winter treks, ice and mountains in every sense.
Human, All Too Human
: In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.
Untimely Meditations
: To climb as high into the pure icy Alpine air as a philosopher ever climbed, up to where all the mist and obscurity cease and where the fundamental constitution of things speaks in voice rough and rigid but ineluctably comprehensible!
He was – in both a practical and spiritual sense – of the mountains. Having taken citizenship in April 1869, Nietzsche may be considered Switzerland’s most famous philosopher. Even so, he on occasion succumbed to a sentiment with which few Swiss are unacquainted. ‘I am distressed to be Swiss!’ he complained to his mother a year after taking up citizenship.
Upon resigning his post at Basle University at the age of thirty-five, he began spending winters by the Mediterranean, largely in Genoa and Nice, and summers in the Alps, in the small village of Sils-Maria, 1,800 metres above sea-level in the Engadine region of south-eastern Switzerland, a few kilometres from St Moritz, where the winds from Italy collide with cooler northern gusts and turn the sky an aquamarine blue.
Nietzsche visited the Engadine for the first time in June 1879 and at once fell in love with the climate and topography. ‘I now have Europe’s best and mightiest air to breathe,’ he told Paul Rée, ‘its nature is akin to my own.’ To Peter Gast, he wrote, ‘This is not Switzerland … but something quite different, at least much more southern – I would have to go to the high plateaux of Mexico overlooking the Pacific to find anything similar (for example, Oaxaca), and the vegetation there would of course be tropical. Well, I shall try to keep this Sils-Maria for myself.’ And to his old schoolfriend Carl von Gersdorff, he explained, ‘I feel that here and nowhere else is my real home and breeding ground.’
Nietzsche spent seven summers in Sils-Maria in a rented room in a chalet with views on to pine trees and mountains. There he wrote all or substantial portions of The Gay Science, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals and Twilight of the Idols. He would rise at five in the morning and work until midday, then take walks up the huge peaks that necklace the village, Piz Corvatsch, Piz Lagrev, Piz de la Margna, jagged and raw mountains that look as if they had only recently thrust through the earth’s crust under atrocious tectonic pressures. In the evening, alone in his room, he would eat a few slices of ham, an egg and a roll and go to bed early. (‘How can anyone become a thinker if he does not spend at least a third of the day without passions, people and books?’)
Today, inevitably, there is a museum in the village. For a few francs, one is invited to visit the philosopher’s bedroom, refurbished, the guidebook explains, ‘as it looked in Nietzsche’s time, in all its unpretentiousness’.
(Ill. 22.10)
Yet to understand why Nietzsche felt there to be such an affinity between his philosophy and the mountains, it may be best to skirt the room and visit instead one of Sils-Maria’s many sports shops in order to acquire walking boots, a rucksack, a water-bottle, gloves, a compass and a pick.
(Ill. 22.11)
A hike up Piz Corvatsch, a few kilometres from Nietzsche’s house, will explain better than any museum the spirit of his philosophy, his defence of difficulty, and his reasons for turning away from Schopenhauerian deer-like shyness.
At the base of the mountain one finds a large car park, a row of recycling bins, a depot for rubbish trucks and a restaurant offering oleaginous sausages and rösti.
(Ill. 22.12)
The summit is, by contrast, sublime. There are views across the entire Engadine: the turquoise lakes of Segl, Silvaplana and St Moritz, and to the south, near the border with Italy, the massive Sella and Roseg glaciers. There is an extraordinary stillness in the air, it seems one can touch the roof of the world. The height leaves one out of breath but curiously elated. It is hard not to start grinning, perhaps laughing, for no particular reason, an innocent laughter that comes from the core of one’s being and expresses a primal delight at being alive to see such beauty.
But, to come to the moral of Nietzsche’s mountain philosophy, it isn’t easy to climb 3,451 metres above sea-level. It requires five hours at least, one must cling to steep paths, negotiate a way around boulders and through thick pine-forests, grow breathless in the thin air, add layers of clothes to fight the wind and crunch through eternal snows.