11
Nietzsche offered another alpine metaphor. A few steps from his room in Sils-Maria a path leads to the Fex Valley, one of the most fertile of the Engadine. Its gentle slopes are extensively farmed. In summer, families of cows stand reflectively munching the almost luminously rich-green grass, their bells clanging as they move from one patch to another.
(Ill. 22.13)
Streams trickle through the fields with the sound of sparkling water being poured into glasses. Beside many small, immaculate farms (each one flying the national and cantonal flags) stand carefully tended vegetable gardens from whose loamy soils sprout vigorous cauliflowers, beetroots, carrots and lettuces, which tempt one to kneel down and take rabbit-like bites out of them.
If there are such nice lettuces here, it is because the Fex Valley is glacial, with the characteristic mineral richness of soil once a glacial mantle has retreated. Much further along the valley, hours of strenuous walking from the tidy farms, one comes upon the glacier itself, massive and terrifying. It looks like a tablecloth waiting for a tug to straighten out its folds, but these folds are the size of houses and are made of razor-sharp ice, and occasionally release agonized bellows as they rearrange themselves in the summer sun.
(Ill. 22.14)
It is hard to conceive, when standing at the edge of the cruel glacier, how this frozen bulk could have a role to play in the gestation of vegetables and lush grass only a few kilometres along the valley, to imagine that something as apparently antithetical to a green field as a glacier could be responsible for the field’s fertility.
Nietzsche, who often walked in the Fex Valley carrying a pencil and leather-bound notebook (‘Only thoughts which come from walking have any value’), drew an analogy with the dependence of positive elements in human life on negative ones, of fulfilment on difficulties:
When we behold those deeply-furrowed hollows in which glaciers have lain, we think it hardly possible that a time will come when a wooded, grassy valley, watered by streams, will spread itself out upon the same spot. So it is, too, in the history of mankind: the most savage forces beat a path, and are mainly destructive; but their work was none-the-less necessary, in order that later a gentler civilization might raise its house. The frightful energies – those which are called evil – are the cyclopean architects and road-makers of humanity.
12
But frightful difficulties are sadly, of course, not enough. All lives are difficult; what makes some of them fulfilled as well is the manner in which pains have been met. Every pain is an indistinct signal that something is wrong, which may engender either a good or bad result depending on the sagacity and strength of mind of the sufferer. Anxiety may precipitate panic, or an accurate analysis of what is amiss. A sense of injustice may lead to murder, or to a ground-breaking work of economic theory. Envy may lead to bitterness, or to a decision to compete with a rival and the production of a masterpiece.
As Nietzsche’s beloved Montaigne had explained in the final chapter of the Essays, the art of living lies in finding uses for our adversities:
We must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of discords as well as of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only some of them, what could he sing? He has got to know how to use all of them and blend them together. So too must we with good and ill, which are of one substance with our life.
And some 300 years later, Nietzsche returned to the thought:
If only we were fruitful fields, we would at bottom let nothing perish unused and see in every event, thing and man welcome manure.
How then to be fruitful?
13
Born in Urbino in 1483, Raphael from an early age displayed such an interest in drawing that his father took the boy to Perugia to work as an apprentice to the renowned Pietro Perugino. He was soon executing works of his own and by his late teens had painted several portraits of members of the court of Urbino, and altarpieces for churches in Città di Castello, a day’s ride from Urbino across the mountains on the road to Perugia.
But Raphael, one of Nietzsche’s favourite painters, knew he was not then a great artist, for he had seen the works of two men, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Leonardo da Vinci. They had shown him that he was unable to paint figures in motion, and despite an aptitude for pictorial geometry, that he had no grasp of linear perspective. The envy could have grown monstrous. Raphael turned it into manure instead.
In 1504, at the age of twenty-one, he left Urbino for Florence in order to study the work of his two masters. He examined their cartoons in the Hall of the Great Council where Leonardo had worked on the Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo on the Battle of Cascina. He imbibed the lessons of Leonardo and Michelangelo’s anatomical drawings and followed their example of dissecting and drawing corpses. He learned from Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi and his cartoons of the Virgin and Child, and looked closely at an unusual portrait Leonardo had been asked to execute for a nobleman, Francesco del Giocondo, who had wanted a likeness of his wife, a young beauty with a somewhat enigmatic smile.
The results of Raphael’s exertions were soon apparent. We can compare Portrait of a Young Woman which Raphael had drawn before moving to Florence with Portrait of a Woman completed a few years after.
(Ill. 22.15)
(Ill. 22.16)
Mona had given Raphael the idea of a half-length seated pose in which the arms provided the base of a pyramidal composition. She had taught him how to use contrasting axes for the head, shoulder and hands in order to lend volume to a figure. Whereas the woman drawn in Urbino had looked awkwardly constricted in her clothes, her arms unnaturally cut off, the woman from Florence was mobile and at ease.
Raphael had not spontaneously come into possession of his talents; he had become great by responding intelligently to a sense of inferiority that would have led lesser men to despair.
The career path offered a Nietzschean lesson in the benefits of wisely interpreted pain:
Don’t talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name all kinds of great men who were not very gifted. They
acquired
greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it) through qualities about whose lack no man aware of them likes to speak: all of them had that diligent seriousness of a craftsman, learning first to construct the parts properly before daring to make a great whole. They allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.
Raphaeclass="underline" studies for Niccolini-Cowper Madonna; Niccolini-Cowper Madonna (Ill. 22.17)
(Ill. 22.18)
Raphael had been able – to use Nietzsche’s terms – to sublimate (sublimieren), spiritualize (vergeistigen) and raise (aufheben) to fruitfulness the difficulties in his path.