Four Essays

Four Essays

Gary Freedman
In dreaming of his evening’s work, he did not set himself any important goals. A
simple passion for ink, an attraction to the pen and the occupation of writing,
possessed him.

—Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago.

 Contents

The Rubenstein Gallery 1

The Clocktower: Reminiscences of an Old Man 7
A Psychoanalytical Literary Parody 13
Royal Tunneling While Under Anesthesia 21
Me & Nietzsche 30
 The Rubenstein Gallery
New York, June 1980.

"Do you want me to show it to you," Evan Rubenstein repeated as

we sipped Perrier in the glass-pyramid vaulted atrium of the
Rubenstein Gallery on east 73rd street in Manhattan, the mid-
summer late afternoon light streaming into the granite-walled
space, a sleek and stark interior belying the building’s ornate
nineteenth-century brownstone facade, the mirrorlike reflections
on the polished hood of the nearby grand piano drawing my
attention, the chamber echoing with the undulating tones of one
of Robert Schumann’s Symphonic Études, performed on a
Bechstein grand once owned by famed Schumann interpreter,
Alfred Cortot, a French pianist with a brilliant technique, as a
select crowd of moneyed visitors passes through a metal detector
at the entrance in the arched vestibule, “it’s the piece by
Scherbakov I told you about, Posthumous Variation V, painted
during the artist’s last year at his home in Hampstead, Inner
London,” Rubenstein explained, “I can show it to you,” he added
as I handed the empty Perrier bottle to a gallery attendant and
joined Rubenstein, whose eminence in the New York art scene
has formidable underpinnings, to visit the Scherbakov exhibition,
to view a collection of self-portraits painted in a multitude of
styles over many years, creating an autobiographical narrative
transmuted into art, together with Vera, the artist’s indomitable
daughter who continues to live in London where her late father, a
Russian-born naturalized Frenchman, a respected art dealer as
well as one of the great expressionist painters of the twentieth
century, who emigrated to the British capital after the Second

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World War . . . Vera, an emotionally-disengaged old maid who
idealized her incomparable father, sought to promote his vision
of art as a truth-telling enterprise that depicted, often in garish
acrylic, the interior psychic truth of the artist’s subjects as well as
the inherently disquieting imperfection of the human body, the
awkwardly warped jumble of flaccid musculature and convoluted
contours of bulging flesh of the middle-aged grumbling mortal,
with an intensely executed fealty to visual subtext, reality
reconstructed on canvas as hyperreal aesthetic exposé, the artist
convincing others, as Picasso said, “of the truthfulness of his lies”
with the clinical dispassion of the psychoanalyst regenerating the
passions and afflictions of his pitiable patients, with an eye tuned
to the inner self of the subject, seeking the nuts and bolts of
another human’s soul while gazing at his subjects with evenly
hovering attention, Vera explaining that her father was guided by
a search for the persuasive authenticity that lies behind the mask
of the model’s corporeal presence, dense renderings of the inner
life, sifting and shifting the details of the subject’s organic
deportment, giving notice to everything while neglecting nothing,
to compose a naïvely astute representation of the Mind Inside,
rejoicing in the ideal of artist-as-truth-seeker (Scherbakov
frequently admonishing his students, Nous, les artistes, devons être
des chercheurs de verité! “We artists need to be truth seekers!”), an
unbiased reporter of temperament and character . . . and then it
came time for Vera Scherbakov together with Rubenstein, her
confidant and adviser—a self-consciously Jewish gallerist with a
note-perfect instinct for the next big thing in art—and myself to
make our way to the Scherbakov showing on the gallery’s second
level, Rubenstein leading us up the ample stairwell, through the

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dimly-lit corridor, along entrances to a cluster of exhibition rooms
each with a character of its own, some sprouting newly erected
tentative walls designed to showcase the work of up and coming
artists, past workmen clumsily poised on ladders, applying a fresh
coat of deep-toned flat latex to recent construction, with well-
heeled onlookers coming and going, ignoring the occasional
disorder, here and there the scent of fresh flowers, set in stands,
swelling the air . . . and in short order we arrived—Scherbakov at
last!—Vera Scherbakov immediately pointed to her father’s final
self-portrait, Posthumous Variation V, completed weeks before he
died, a somber meditation in large stroke, dark-hued pure
tincture (red, blue, green, brown, black), a self-revelation baring
the secret colors of his end-nearing months in London, the
subject’s gnarled hand suggesting uninterrupted and inescapable
tension, in the background a vase, filled with Black Baccara roses
and Karma Choc dahlias, complementing Scherbakov’s
astonishing head—punctuated by an unfocused duplicitous gaze—a
vase-like repository of Scherbakov’s mental torment and strained
inspiration (his imagination grown weary), near the end of his
life, an ugly portrait, conspicuously ambivalent, questioning and
unyielding, yet acutely observant, the face of a crank, a head full
of malign thoughts and thwarted sadism, and, intrigued I stared
at the portrait for a time, aware of an uncanny impression,
forbidden yet alluring . . . I had to know more about this man! . . .
Miss Scherbakov, sensing my curiosity, spoke of her father’s years
in Paris during the Second World War, his art gallery on the rue
Amelot with a studio on the top floor, her father’s inseparable
friend and business partner, Emmanuel Godin, with whom
Konstantin Scherbakov, missing his alter ego in Paris, shared a

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voluminous correspondence, written in French, after emigrating
to London . . . Miss Scherbakov, aware of my work as an art
historian and intuiting a common bond, then suggested that I
undertake an annotated translation of her father’s unpublished
letters to his friend, Godin, a collection of letters sold to her by a
Parisian bookseller at a hefty price, and, on the spot, I accepted
her proposition.

London, February 1981.

“Would you like me to pour you another cup of tea?” Miss
Scherbakov asked, as we sat, on a gray winter day, in the study of
the Scherbakov home in Hampstead, London, a storeroom of
memories where her father lived out the last months of his life
after escaping from German-occupied Paris in 1943, extremely ill,
an exile, alone in an alien culture, in the very study where he
died—in the company of his daughter and a doctor vying in their
grief—looking out over a plush cluster of peonies, rhododendron,
and irises in the garden overshadowed by autumnal foliage, Vera
Scherbakov, a small, hauntedly gaunt-faced, thoughtfully
perceptive lady seated across from me in her father’s frayed
wingback chair, amid a trove of antiquities acquired by her father
over a lifetime of collecting, now told me why she wanted to see
me, her concerns raised by a letter I had written to her just days
before alerting her to a discovery I made while working on the
annotated translation of her father’s letters written to his friend
and business partner, Emmanuel Godin, following a trip to Paris
where my research into French archival resources and inquiries
made to a narrow circle of Parisian art dealers who knew

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Konstantin Scherbakov revealed that his art gallery on rue
Amelot had dealings with Nazi plunder during the World War,
laundering works of art seized from Jewish owners at the time of
the Holocaust, paintings stolen as a result of the organized Nazi
looting of European countries, both Scherbakov and Godin
having extensive transactions with Nazi looting organizations,
obtaining seized Jewish-owned paintings and selling them in their
gallery to unsuspecting Parisians and foreign buyers, and, as I
spoke to my host, who was inordinately proud of being her
father’s daughter—her father's legacy laying heavy on her
shoulders—Miss Scherbakov listened, coldly reticent, seemingly
dumbfounded by my confrontation, as I recounted her father’s
long-buried, illicit commercial intercourse with Nazi
functionaries, while I, consumed by a pressing desire to play a
role in a drama of historical importance, painted a staggering
portrait of the long-buried crime, an embodiment of evil, carried
out under the banal cloak of routine trade, unfastening lids of
boxes as it were, reconfiguring a chaotic patchwork of self-evident
forensic facts . . . and then, with growing displeasure, Miss
Scherbakov replied in firm, evenly pitched tones, politely urging
me to direct my interests elsewhere, but after a moment, in a
brisk, emphatic rebuke, her gnarled expression betraying an
inescapable inner rigidity, she charged me with a desecration of
her father’s memory and held out steadfastly in defense of
Konstanin Scherbakov, a master-hand of audacious soul secrets
whose art derived from a search for truth—a truth seeker who
ironically harbored a dark secret of his own—and, in that
moment, seeing her response (and wondering how this canny
woman could not have known about her father’s covert

5
trafficking in stolen art) and grasping I had stumbled upon
something that was better left alone, I knew that proceeding
further posed unforeseen risks, and, sure enough, this was made
even more apparent when, weeks later, Evan Rubenstein,
accusing me of a “certain psychopathic personality charm,”
advised Miss Scherbakov by telephone to terminate her
connections with me and insisted that the collection of her
father’s letters be destroyed.

6
 Wagner was indisputably a genius, but apart from that an absolute shit.
—W.H. Auden
The Clock Tower: Reminiscences of an Old Man
February 12, 1883. The day before Wagner’s death of a heart attack. The
Renaissance Clock Tower strikes three times on a mild winter
afternoon in Venice’s St. Mark’s square while the figure of a black-
capped old man, unrecognized and unseen by the passers-by, sits
motionless at a table in the long shadow of the arcade at the north
side of the piazza looking up at the Tower, then gazes at the loggia
of the Doge’s palace and the immense square, a “panorama of
anarchy” where crowds of joyfully idle tourists mingle with hasty
pedestrians, children dashing in and out, and small throngs of café
musicians in the canopied restaurants that ring the plaza play
opera tunes, but for the old man lost in meditative
contemplation, it seems as though time has stopped, his life
scattered in mostly forgotten fragments of conversation . . . and, as
time passes, a tall and stately gentleman already advanced in years,
holding a folder and attired in a snug-fitting, long black cassock,
his long white hair reaching his shoulders, emerges from one of the
narrow alleys and comes into the square, purposely striding
towards the black-capped figure, and, after an enthusiastic
embrace, sits beside him, the two men there standing out alone
against their surroundings, seemingly isolated from them, and
when the long-haired cleric takes a deck of playing cards from his
pocket and places them on the table I can see they are friends, and
my curiosity aroused by the scene I witness, I walk toward them,
taking a nearby seat that allows me, a phantom observer, to

7
eavesdrop on their conversation, as both men keep their eyes on
their cards, held fanlike in their left hands, and from what I am
able to gather they are both musicians, “Brother Franz” (the Abbé
Liszt), a concert pianist, composer and would-be priest, who, in a
powerful and soft voice, speaks of good books and bad composers,
and attempts to show his friend, Richard Wagner his latest
composition, while Wagner, all movement and expressiveness,
rambles on about his stay in Venice decades earlier and bemoans
the petty worries of dawn-to-dusk life, all the while eyeing the King
and Queen of Hearts he holds in his steady grip, each man
adhering to his own world, his own opinion, but gaining
satisfaction in the memory of an infinity of shared aspirations and
mutual exploits, the outward expression of each man’s protean
internal states perfectly mirroring the ever-changing vitality of the
surrounding external spectacle . . . the bell tolls again in the
square—two hours have passed and the two gentlemen part ways,
the weak February sun hanging low over the horizon.
July 30, 1886. The day before Franz Liszt’s death of a heart attack. In
the late evening, Franz Liszt sits quite alone, secure in the liberation
of the night, in his smoke-filled library, tall shelves reaching the
ceiling, among a clutter of books, periodicals, and stacks of
papers—an oil portrait and several pencil sketches of Beethoven
on one wall, plaster casts of Beethoven’s hands in a display case
near the door—and, raising his eyes from the desk at which he
revises the concluding measures of his latest piano composition, he
ejaculates, “my watch!” fumbling for his gold timepiece that had
slipped out of his pocket while he is playing with the chain and

8
now, dead watch in hand, he winds and closes it, setting it down
next to the snuff box, but even without the watch he knows it is
getting on towards midnight by the wall-mounted clock, and, then,
lost in his own thoughts, without really knowing what he is
thinking about, the past rises before his eyes played backward in
memory as he peers down at a half-emptied case of old, rot-eaten
books densely laden with dust perched near his feet, and, as he
inspects them, his far-off thoughts assume the form of a thread of
images as he recalls the book stalls in the assortment of cities he
has traveled to, iconographic recollections of the cities in which he
found so many things . . . What images return, as in a near death flash
of mind, Liszt is inundated with a profusion of retrospections!
. . . yes, it was in the year 1858, in Lucerne, Switzerland, that a
forty-five-year-old married professional musician and part-time
grifter with one more mistress than he could comfortably afford,
took off for Venice, escaping the boneyard of banalities that was
his life, braced for rest and relaxation and consumed with the urge
to beget a money-making potboiler—abandoning real love for a
made-up tryst between two dramatis personae, one mythic Lord
Tristan and one mythic Queen Isolde (as well as her fictive cuckold
husband, one King Marke), a two-party cast poetically reflecting on
the themes of love and death while seeking the liberation of a
libidinous nocturnal adventure—Wagner, stealing away by train,
and entering the Serene Republic in the dead of night, safe from
the onerous discord of a quarrelsome marriage to a mundane,
headache-wracked and opium-addicted wife (an hysteric ever
preoccupied with monetizing the genius of her philandering

9
husband) and relieved of the muted “resentment” of a “shocked”
flesh-and-bone cuckold husband named Otto, a retired wealthy silk
merchant sitting on a shit-flood of discretionary cash—some of
which he spends on patronizing struggling artists, a measure of
status in Otto’s rarified social circle—“tremendously annoyed” by
the obtrusive presence of his young wife, Mathilde’s much-older
“special friend” at his country estate, the theatricality of The Affair
not lost on the participants who sensed they were actors in a
familial fugue that was barely tenable outside a spicy novel, Wagner
setting himself up in the upper floor of the late sixteenth-century
Palazzo Giustiniani overlooking the Grand Canal, attiring a rented
suite of luxuriant rooms with plum satin wall hangings and costly
Persian rugs, the accouterments of a make-believe, dream-besotted
artifice, all of which were financed by the aforementioned flesh-
and-blood cuckold husband who was naively oblivious to Wagner’s
insolently venal opportunism—an opportunism that betrayed the
texture of a man sapped of conscience—embarks on composing
his opera, bounding from one fecund musical idea to another, at
times feeling lost and bewildered in a wild tumult of unbounded
creativity, exalting in the anxious delights of his symphonic
brilliance, and, at the same time dreaming of worthy immortality
via artistic invention, searching out brainstorms as he ambles up
and down his rented-with-money-borrowed-from-his-finger-
painting-mistress’s-filthy-with-money-husband palatial
surroundings, now and again going to the piano to strike a few
gamely bold avant-garde chords with his nimble fingers,
manufacturing transcendent passions out of the piddling events of

10
a humdrum love affair, turning over page on page of old music
manuscripts of which, I, Franz Liszt, was the author, for inspiration
with little scruple for plagiarism, filling stacks of blank music sheets
with indecipherable scribbles, venturing into new paths of dense
and profound tonal harmony that would, in due course, rewire the
very foundations of music, devoting the mornings to work after a
daily tub of perfumed bath salts, followed by a midday meal, a walk
in the afternoon—on occasion inspecting the Venetian book
stalls—leisure time with familiar acquaintances in the evening,
and, to be sure, the occasional rigged card game, and, above all,
solitude, blessed solitude, all the while, unbeknownst to him,
under covert police surveillance by the authorities pursuant to an
arrest warrant issued by the Kingdom of Saxony ten years earlier
for manning the barricades in a failed attempt to topple the
government, an intrigue befitting a bad spy paperback, for the time
being enthusing over the glory and majesty of his work in progress,
a four-hour musical contrivance, a tedious dramatic excursus on
the “lamentations of bliss” and the morbid histrionics of joint
death, devoid of pleasing melody or discernable plot but featuring
an orchestral depiction of an adulterous orgasm in the second act,
accompanied by the frenzied shrieks of the mythic lovers caught in
flagrente delicto (a cataclysm aided by Queen Isolde’s lady-in-waiting
failing to keep watch) by the aforementioned fictive cuckold
husband, King Marke, stunned by his young wife’s carnal
shenanigans with a mattress-hopping feudal knight, audacious
stage-play happenings sure to arouse the ire of meddlesome
censors, and, in the course of events, on the afternoon of August

11
6, or, maybe, it was the 5th, I can’t be sure, Wagner summons a
young musician, an uninspiringly obsequious little man, one of my
third-string piano pupils, to his hotel room, inviting him to look
through the score of Tristan, near completion, the visitor gathering
that the manuscript runs to a great many pages, Wagner, at almost
torturesome pains to bring it to perfection, while the bemused
visitor, scrutinizing the opera’s opening phrase and perplexed by
the lack of an identifiable key, gasps, “Eh? What’s that? A minor?”
and Wagner replying, “more or less,” going on to explain, “It’s my
opening phrase, and it gave me trouble, no end of trouble,” and, in front
of this less than shining audience, the chimes of the Palazzo San
Marco bell tower striking three times in the distance, Wagner
writes in the final bars, with neither agony nor ecstasy, but simply
pure exhaustion weighing on his overwrought brain.
The virtuoso pianist and composer, Franz Liszt succumbed to a fatal heart attack
at the age of 74 in 1886, during a performance, at Wagner’s Bayreuth opera
festival, of Tristan und Isolde, a work written by his lifelong friend and son-in-law,
Richard Wagner, who was two years younger than Liszt. Years earlier, in the 1860s,
Wagner had carried on an affair with Liszt’s married daughter, Cosima, twenty-
four years his junior, wrecking her marriage to the pianist and conductor, Hans von
Bülow, father of her children. The affair ruptured Liszt’s friendship with Wagner
for several years, but the two eventually reconciled.

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 A Psychoanalytical Literary Parody

After the 15-year correspondence [between Freud and Wilhelm Fliess] that saw
only the Freud letters survive for publication in an edited form, the two friends
broke bitterly—Fliess once asserting that Freud was plotting to murder him by
pushing him off a precipice during one of their walks. No credence is given to
Fliess's fear, which the few scholars who now know of the episode consider a
figment of Fliess' paranoia.
—Ralph Blumenthal, Scholars Seek the Hidden Freud in
Newly Emerging Letters.

A great hall—a number of guests, whom we are receiving—

among them Irma, whom I immediately take aside, as though to answer her
letter, and to reproach her for not yet accepting the "solution." I say to her: "If
you still have pains, it is really only your own fault."- She looks pale and puffy. .
. . Now my friend Otto, too, is standing beside her, and my friend Leopold
percusses her covered chest, and says "She has a dullness below, on the left," and
also calls attention to an infiltrated portion of skin on the left shoulder (which I
can feel, in spite of the dress). . . . M says: "There's no doubt that it's an
infection, but it doesn't matter; dysentery will follow and the poison will be
eliminated." . . . We know, too, precisely how the infection originated. My friend
Otto, not long ago, gave her, when she was feeling unwell, an injection of a
preparation of . . . trimethylamine (the formula of which I see before me, printed
in heavy type). . . . One doesn't give such injections so rashly. . . . Probably, too,
the syringe was not clean.

—The Dream of Irma’s Injection, Dreamt by Sigmund Freud on the night of July
23, 1895 within days of his wife’s thirty-fourth birthday while the couple was on
holiday in Kahlenberg.

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 Half asleep,
Straight from the ball to bed he goes,
Whilst Petersburg from slumber deep
The drum already doth arouse.
—Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin.

How had it come about that the boarders regarded him with a half-malignant
contempt? . . . Had he brought it on himself by some eccentricity or absurdity,
which is less easily forgiven or forgotten than more serious defects?
—Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot.

He has at last been unmasked and arrested, thanks to the indefatigable zeal of
the public prosecutor.
—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables.

In a deceptively interminable moment of “retrospective illusion,”

the drawn-out corridor of his life loomed in bounteous measure,
blurred yet uncannily recognizable, emerging in its ordinariness
and near monastic abnegation, its cynical penury, its adaptability
but, unknown to him at the time, its vulnerability to a what, in
the end, would prove to be an ironically star-crossed fate, as Jean-
Valéry Onéjeane gazed out of the window of his mellow, dusk-lit
room, a man aspiring to barter his anonymity for enduring fame,
brooding on his decades as an outsider, unruffled by the
disapprobation of his associates, oppressed by voiceless guilt and
obsessive reproaches, a modern Oedipus racked by unconscious,
cruelly aggressive impulses and forbidden sexual longings, a
passage of days endured and nurtured as only a disaffected
individualist, protective of a life detached from the security of
social convention, would nurture a solitary existence isolated
from emotional involvement with others, about to commence an

14
aboundingly uncertain escape from oppressive enmeshment in a
life heretofore lived in the tumult of other people’s dreams, ready
to discover life all over again on his terms, thinking back to a
young adulthood mired in disappointed aims, preserved by the
paralysis of inertia, in those early years holding in abeyance the
far-flung but obscure schemes shaping in his dreams and quelling
the expectations of the ghost of his father, Jacob, who, like his
biblical namesake (who expected his dream-interpreter son to
come to high honors), was preoccupied with cultivating Jean-
Valéry’s potential to inscribe his singular mark on the world,
while that son, waiting, with only nominal mindful awareness of
the authentic inevitability of his mission, aspired to fulfill his
implausibly self-important ambition to create a one-of-a-kind
impression in the book of life . . . and so it was, as a stranger,
shunning the sting of the mundane and fleeing the animosity of
members of his narrow social circle, who, consumed with the
contagion of rumor, viewed Jean-Valéry’s curious, brooding
eccentricity with contempt, he ventured forth, an exile from his
origins (for him, a dead universe of antecedents without a
subjective sense of a beginning)—lacking identity papers, a
nameless fugitive from the suspicions of his peers, a novice
imposter incomprehensibly pursuing ambiguous possibilities in
middle age, without a noteworthy personal history, he made his
way by rail, past bleak lands and mountains covered in “forgetful
snow,” to the far reaches of Austria, where, at the gate to the
borough of Kahlenberg, a muddy, humdrum, unworldly town,
the immense gateway doors open-and-accessible upon his arrival
as if the entrance to the precinct was meant for him alone, filled
with anxious apprehensions mingled with an expectancy of future

15
happenings, oblivious to the unavoidable inscrutableness of his
situation, while renouncing the constraints of his former
humiliatingly onerous obscurity, his mind filled with a pell-mell
welter of technicolor imaginings and passing madnesses, in search
of redemption as well as a new-found place in the world, all the
while concealing the bottomless repository of his insufficiencies,
summoning a venturesome courage to embark on new tasks, the
inchoate components of the enterprise, built up as an
accumulation of unconscious designs, slowly taking shape in his
mind, he walked on into the unknown, past an empty sentry box
at the city gate, the under-zealous watchman having withdrawn
for the time being out of boredom or perhaps a need to relieve
himself, and, in due course, as if something shifted in the world,
he came upon an isolated Great Hall, a place of entertainment,
with numerous guests ambling about, hypnotized by piped-in hip
hop instrumentals, and, feeling as if he were a player in someone
else’s dream, he encounters a young woman of beauty and
intelligence named Irma L., whom he recognizes (at this moment
sipping an unpleasant-smelling pineapple liqueur), seated
together with Jean-Valéry ’s adolescent friend from the Academy,
Otto (now a medical doctor of stature in the community) and
Otto’s slow and thoughtful colleague, Leopold, and, startled,
Jean-Valéry approaches the trio, while Irma, engaged in a tête-à-
tête conversation with Otto (of obvious eager heterosexual
attraction), appears to ignore Jean-Valéry, who would like to
answer a letter Irma, as a wistful and melancholic girl of
seventeen, had sent Jean-Valéry nearly two decades earlier, but
which Jean-Valéry had ignored . . . whereupon Jean-Valéry
hesitates in the face of Irma’s intimacy with Otto, causing him to

16
ponder sundry matters, to wit, Was it a retribution of fate that Irma,
a woman Jean-Valéry had spurned years before, was, in this setting,
fondly attached to Otto? . . . Was Jean-Valéry’s jealousy aroused by his
recognition that Otto had captured the amorous attention of Irma, who
shared his humble origins, but was presently a mature and prepossessing
woman of means? and, at this moment, Jean-Valéry, seeking every
opportunity to reproach himself for thoughtlessly abandoning his
former would-be love, retreats from his wordless encounter with
Irma and walks to the edge of the Great Hall thinking, “I must rid
myself of these three” as he grows irritated with the notion that Irma
and Otto, idly chattering, are trading intemperate slanders about
him (but, in point of fact, the pair were discussing Dr. M.’s
proposed solution to Irma’s intractable bodily ailments), and,
standing alone, gazes from afar, as if in admonishment, at Irma,
his one-time fledgling love, as a liveried waiter enters the Great
Hall with a celebratory cake and sausages to honor Irma on the
occasion of her thirty-fourth birthday.

Later in the Evening

Wearied by a long drawn out railway journey to Kahlenberg and

struggling introspectively with the aforedescribed disagreeable
events at Irma’s birthday ball, the half-asleep Jean-Valéry rents a
room from an obliging lodging house proprietor, one Frau
Wranik, an elderly widow with an objectionable penchant for
surreptitiously entering her boarders’ rooms to methodically rifle
through their papers, who runs Pension Zum Edlen Hirschen, a
hovel down the road from the Great Hall, where, in fever and
restlessness, he sets aside a fatiguing book he had been reading

17
titled, A Philosophical Treatise on the Greek Tragedies of Sophocles,
having embraced the European metaphysical ideas of his time,
and stretches dead tired, on a hard couch, awaiting the long-
desired hour of sleep, which does not come, but descending into
a kind of somnolent condition, he enters the nightfall world of
unruled-passions-sheathed-in-symbolistic-images, the dream state,
where he finds himself a guest at a gathering, at a modest Russian
country estate on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, held to celebrate
the name-day of a young woman named Tatiana, who, hours
earlier, had written an amorous letter to Jean-Valéry, a lovesick
advance that Jean-Valéry had dismissed, and, oppressed by
feelings of boredom at this gathering of friends, flirts and dances
with Tatiana’s younger sister, Olga, a sexually-precocious nymphet
who is affianced to Jean-Valéry’s best friend, Wilhelm F. (whom,
rumor had it, may have been the target of Jean-Valéry’s cruel
intent), while Wilhelm, inflamed by jealousy, challenges Jean-
Valéry to a duel and, in the dream’s denouement, neither man
having the courage to stop the carelessly-incited affair of honor,
the dreamer fatally wounds his best friend, all in all, a distasteful
nocturnal drama from which Jean-Valéry, now a vagabond
boarder in search of a celebrated destiny worthy of his early
pretensions, awakens in his burnt orange wall-papered rented
room, haunted by twilight thoughts, forthwith records said dream
in his journal, and, in the ensuing days, consumed with the
insoluble subjective mystery of his dusk-to-dawn imaginings and
bent on breaching the veil of surface reality, he reflects, in
constructive solitude, upon the complex intimacies between that
involuntary night-time stage-picture and the lived events of the
previous evening (when he encountered Irma at the Great Hall),

18
summoning up obscure things coming from a great depth in time
within himself, meditating on a labyrinth of implausibly tenuous
connections—a convergence of memories, remote associations,
vivid intuitions, fantastic moods—conniving with his psychic
follies, tracing the cadence of lost time and evoking meanings
hidden out of sight (at the same time an intractable inner agency
keeps him away from the truth of things), while speculating that
his soon-to-be-celebrated (so he fancied) published elucidation of
the concealed life of the dream—revealing the secret behind the
curtain of illusion, as it were, unraveling the ageless riddle of the
significance of dreams—held the promise of satisfying his thirst,
as well as his father’s mandate, to come to high honors.

Two years later. An extraordinary saga reaches its close.

Scene: Jean-Valéry Onéjeane has been brought in handcuffs to an

interrogation room at police headquarters in Kahlenberg, where he is
questioned by Inspector Sigmund Dürf about the mysterious
disappearance of his friend, Wilhelm F. An informant, one Frau
Wranik, a woman utterly indifferent to the privacy of her paying guests,
had apprized the police of suspicious writings she found in her lodger’s
room, including letters written by Wilhelm F. to Jean-Valéry as well as
a manuscript penned by Jean-Valéry titled, “Die Verborgene Bedeutung
von Träumen” (The Hidden Meaning of Dreams), which laid bare
Jean-Valéry’s jealousy of and cruel intentions toward Wilhelm F. and
his frustrated sexual desire for one Irma L., as revealed in an essay Jean-
Valéry had written about one of his dreams.

Jean-Valéry Onéjeane: What am I supposed to do?

19
Inspector Sigmund Dürf: I am here to accompany you on a
journey, Herr Onéjeane, a journey through those parts of your
life that bear on your relationship with your friend, Wilhelm F.,
the motive for your decision to move to Kahlenberg, your
infatuation with Irma L. and your evident jealousy of Otto, how
it came about that your fellow boarders regarded you with
unseemly disdain, your absurd desire to attribute hidden
meaning to your dreams, ultimately to shed light on the
disappearance of Wilhelm F. . . . and, as I accompany you on
this journey you will imagine that we are both passengers on a
railway car, that you will say whatever goes through your mind,
acting as though you were a traveler sitting next to a window of
that railway car and describing to me the changing views which
you see outside, putting yourself in the position of an attentive
and dispassionate self-observer who reads off your thoughts and
recollections, making it your duty to be completely honest and
also not to hold back any idea from communication even if you
feel it is too unimportant or irrelevant to what is being looked
for.

Jean-Valéry Onéjeane: I understand.

Inspector Sigmund Dürf: I am impelled to learn the truth. You

will help me in that endeavor. Now let us begin.

20
 Friday, October 31, 1980.
Royal Tunneling While Under Anesthesia
The extravagantly-overpriced diffraction enhanced x-ray images of
the sigmoid colon of His Royal Highness Prince Charles, whose
anesthesia-induced anachronistic hallucinations grew ever more
florid minute by minute as the future king lay motionless but
horrifyingly semi-conscious on an examining room gurney,
facilitated the endoscopic probe of the royal patient, predawn on a
foggy Halloween, by the cigar-smoking gastroenterologist Dr.
Leopoldo Bloom, an expatriate Cuban Jew from Havana attired in
gray slacks and black loafers, affiliated with the King's College
Hospital Department of Gastroenterology, accessible by the
Elephant & Castle Station of the London tube, a few years before
(or was it after?) his ill-fated marriage to Diana and far removed
from the beaten track in Denmark Hill, Camberwell in the
Borough of Lambeth, and unashamedly billed to a beleaguered
National Health Service perpetually at risk of default, bolstered the
inescapable inference that the tubulovillous polyps flourishing in
the colon of the spellbindingly feckless (or, at least, feck-deficient)
heir to the British throne (and discovered only by chance following
a brutal bout of explosive diarrhea), were the likely after-effect of
Charles often snacking mid-morning and mid-afternoon (and
sometimes just before bed) on white pizza with mortadella ordered
by the Prince’s liveried Portuguese footman, Raüll Augusto de
Almeida Solnado inside the gilded confines of a decaying
Buckingham Palace from Pizzeria Pellone London in Clapham
Town, the Prince of Wales having succumbed to the dietary

21
enticement of hyped-up gourmet Italian cheese processed to less
than rigorous EU standards and used in the production of
overbaked and overpriced Neapolitan pizza delivered to off-the-
beaten-track neighborhoods throughout the British capital with
preposterous names like Belsize Park, Muswell Hill, or Mildmay
Ward to ingenuous customers oblivious to the untoward health
consequences of a diet high in cholesterol and near-rancid virgin
olive oil, that most assuredly, that is to say, without a clinamen of
the possibility of negation, tastes better in the heart of Florence
than in the over-populated precinct of Golders Green, unlike
melts-in-your-mouth-not-in-your-hands M&M's Milk Chocolate
Purim Candy, whose cloying piquancy is enhanced when
consumed on the far side of London by the conservative Jewish
population of upwardly mobile young Professionals like solicitor-
turned-comedian, Neil the Comic, who, one small schlep away
from becoming a big cheese partner at his burgeoning law firm,
forsook his professional calling for the chance to entertain other
upwardly mobile young professionals at coffeehouses-turned-night-
clubs like Big Belly, Vauxhall and Peckham, or Top Secret Comedy
Club in Covent Garden, where Gucci-adorned gold digging girls
from working class neighborhoods like Brixton or Tottenham as
well as easy college girls, plying their well-honed talents in search
of a higher station in life, enjoying a night on the town with twenty-
something rising-star, Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. (M&M)
investment analysts awash in North Sea oil investment-scheme
cash, import/export bankers with freshly-minted finance degrees,
not to mention up-and-coming concupiscent immigrant

22
Manchester United footballers with multi-million pounds
windfalls, all imbibing American brewed beer satisfying EU
regulations, savored the evening’s entertainment in darkened
comedy rooms while wearing stratospherically-expensive cutting-
edge-technology-augmented-reality-infrared-night-vision glasses,
which added a dense, often surreal layer of bluish-green
phosphorescence to the stage presence of superfluous television-
sitcom-writers-turned-standup-comedians who had, I must
emphasize, never failed in their former occupation as script writers
to irritate English comedic sensitivities with wearisomely
counterfeit plots stitched together with potboiler vaudevillian
contrivances from Depression era, Catskill-inspired storylines
composed in clichéd dialogue in imitation of the early modern
English theater scene dominated by Saxon Shakespeare and
company, storyline contrivances worthy of lesser illiterate sods or,
for that matter, half-literate intemperate Episcopalian clerics who,
drunk on kosher-for-Passover Communion wine, could never
account in their sacred texts for the fact that the value of North Sea
oil venture capital investments to shareholders would no doubt
have been greater if the asset funds had been allocated to finance
a profitably state-of-the-art London tube line to Golders Green that
would wind its way under the homes of Galician Jewish and Sunni-
Hanafi Pakistani immigrants of that Jewish-Muslim suburb,
clearing subterranean geological obstructions forty feet below the
surface by means of tunnel boring machines, conversationally
called “moles,” through soggy, dull and lifelessly infertile acres of
below ground real estate, carefully preserving the archaeological

23
remains of richly decorated domiciles of ancient Latin provenance,
just as, in the modern city of Rome itself, excavation work on
subway Line C, which winds its way around the Colosseum, by
earphone-adorned, operatically sophisticated Italian laborers has
uncovered Caesar-era relics, said mafia-controlled union crews
entertaining themselves with vibrantly throbbing and auditorily
invigorating sonorities of vintage recordings of Verdi's late operas,
like Aida and Falstaff, sung in Sicilian dialect, musical dramas
premiered in the late 19th-century in Milan’s acclaimed La Scala
while Italian school children, eating less-than-ripe pomegranates
and singing tunes in the Piazza del Duomo that were made popular
between the world wars at about the same time Mussolini made
the trains run on time, tunes like Palombo non Mancava Mai
All'appuntamento del Venerdì Pomeriggio, hungrily prepared for
summer vacations on the volcanic-ash-sprinkled beaches of
Sorrento near the old Fabbrica di Cioccolato, and tradesmen,
hoping for a quick buck, looked forward to Festa della Repubblica
(Republic Day) sales in the recesses of Milan’s fashionably
ostentatious Rinascente Milano Piazza Duomo Department Store
that would undoubtedly boost profits, which, speaking
optimistically, might well exceed the billions of wasted taxpayer
dollars that could have been used more advantageously to pay off
a colossal national debt if only Prime Minister Tony Blair and his
two-bit Texan sidekick had not invaded Iraq and told the British
electorate that treasury revenues should, in the interest of national
security, subsidize Hebrew National hot dogs sold in bombed-out
Baghdad Halal supermarkets, where cantaloupes, pomegranates-

24
with-shiny-red-jewels-like-vestibular-bulbs, and overripe Crenshaw
melons, paid for with funds withdrawn from the underfunded
Bank of New York Mellon of the UK in violation of EU banking
regulations governing British firms doing business with Arabic-
speaking Syrian provinces overrun with Isis martyr brigades
alongside their conspiratorial cohorts, ready to die for the
Caliphate, who stored gunpowder (for the purpose of fabricating
Improvised Explosive Devices) in the basement tunnels of a palace
in Northern Syria once owned by Mehmed the Conqueror, while
a reflective coterie of Scottish cattle farmers in Newmeadow—also
known as Drumduan Farm (home to the largest Holstein cattle
herd in the Highlands), shunning Bonfire Night celebrations
commemorating the foiling of Guy Fawkes’ foredoomed Gun
Powder Plot in early November 1605—inexplicably recalled the
long-past days of the far-distant Spanish Civil War when Scotland-
born Kilmarnock footballer Peter Canero’s grandfather, speaking
Spanish with a Scottish-Gaelic accent, together with his retinue of
libidinous Castilian rogues, were encamped in the exercise yard of
the overcrowded Salamanca prison, scoundrels held illegally on
suspicion of engaging in terrorist acts and awaiting the outcome of
a habeas petition that might allow them to flee Franco-era Spain to
freedom in Scotland, and failing in their plea for intercession by
bowler hat-attired members of the Monster Raving Loony Party in
Whitehall, who, in reality, lacked the power under international
law to intervene on behalf of Spanish discontents skedaddling away
from Fascist dictatorships, managed, in said Spanish prison in
Salamanca, to follow the news emanating from London of fellow

25
travelers charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism and
befittingly hauled before Old Bailey, where courtrooms were filled
to the brim with less than enthusiastic spectators, yawning over the
testimony of wildly-incomprehensible Castilian-dialect defendants,
who had been apprehended one murky night in the shallow end
of the Thames not a ways off from Harrods, a department store
currently owned by the state of Qatar via its sovereign wealth fund,
the Qatar Investment Authority, under a befogged London sky that
resembled an impressionistic nocturnal scene depicted in oil with
naturally restrained vigor by a morbidly-melancholy and half-blind
Joshua Reynolds, who, one New Year’s eve centuries past, sought
refuge in an outdoor cafe near Trafalgar Square after watching the
final-night-of-the-year fireworks and drank a bottle of overwarm
Heineken that had lost its fizz and rambled on about
Gainsborough’s Blue Period, or some such thing, and, all the
while, strained to block out from hearing, while lounging in the
reveler-filled Square, a vexatiously reprobate Cockney fiddler in
gray pinstripe pants, tin cup in hand, who stood his ground in
competing with the Welsh-speaking waiter for more-than-
acceptable tips in pre-de-Saxonized Britain, gratuities he would
ultimately conceal from HM Revenue & Customs, and recalled a
night at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden when he
squinted through superincumbent cataracts to feverishly observe,
like a breathless hunter stalking his prey, the sexually-lurid
genuflections of obviously fecund Phi Beta Kappa honors
graduates of the Royal Ballet School, recently returned from an
American tour, having pranced in tutus before fervently engrossed

26
spectators on the stages of Philadelphia’s Academy of Music and
San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House, dancers whose failed
attempts to lend a British voice to efforts to impeach President
Trump ahead of the 2020 presidential primaries in Midwest states
adjacent to the Mississippi, where tea leaves read by a fortune-teller
named Professor Marvel had predicted a cataclysmic tsunami in
the Great Lakes that would trigger excessive price instability in the
mozzarella cheese futures market, risking calamitous
unemployment among Chicago Mercantile Exchange investment
analysts, and topple several of the more historically-worthwhile of
Frank Lloyd Wright's now crumbling and out-of-date high-rise
buildings that still tower, so I've heard, over a downtown Chicago
whose hopelessly confused streets were badly designed by Yale-
educated urban planners, while Mrs. O’Leary’s unenlightened and
hideously-attired Holsteins ramble aimlessly toward Millenium
Park, cows decked out in ill-fitting dark blue pullovers emblazoned
in gold letters with the phrase “Lake Michigan,” a reference to an
inland sea, formed in the last ice age, now made unnavigable by
unrestrained melting glacial ice masses, for no other reason than
that the weak-kneed President of the United States, kowtowing to
West Virginia coal operators, repudiated the Paris Climate
Agreement, basing his ill-advised treaty abrogation on lines filched
from Robert Frost’s poem, Mending Walls, lines like “Something
there is that doesn’t love a wall,” banded together with a mishmash
of the unlikeliest of verses authored by the aforementioned
doggerel maven, Robby Blizzard, lines that made contemptibly-
ungifted poets, shirking their poetic Duty and Responsibility as set

27
forth in the Rhyming Poet's Code (as amended and annotated),
question whether this nation or any nation so dedicated and so
consecrated could long endure ninety miles from a Cuba whose
asylum-infatuated Habaneros thirsted for emancipation and mint-
infused mojitos in Miami Beach (that is to say, liberation from a
Havana crowded with souvenir-hunting, peak-season Russian-
speaking tourists who had only recently been released from
Lubyanka Prison), desperate Cuban migrants willing to suffer the
absurdly soaring cost of living in South Florida that would make
Mexican rum more expensive than the imported-from-Peru
Tequila typically retailed in the Pearl of the Antilles, say, in
discount liquor shops in Baracoa or Trinidad, itinerants destined
to compete for places in queues at the entrance of the Pleasure
Emporium on South Collins Avenue where hordes of
impoverished Latino customers, anticipatorily waiting in front of
Spanish-language bookstores selling pirated magazines filled with
vintage black-and-white pornographic pictures, were in danger of
being overcome by vasovagal syncope in the afternoon glare of the
conflagrant sun and, defying the temptation to rest in adherence
to a traditional Jewish siesta observed by Judeo-Espanyol-fluent
Cubanos, prayed for an end to the embargo of Cuban cigars that
were, at that particular juncture, sitting in mortgaged container
ships in sunny Havana while Fidel Castro could not assume that
relations with the United States would improve over time, through
patient diplomatic dialogue mediated by the American
Ambassador to Russia who, at the very moment (“the moment in
and out of time,” as it were), tiring of Russian legal jargon, Greek

28
Orthodox Biblical passages, and the Satirical Poems of the
Caliphate, was restless to get back home to his long-suffering wife
in Ithaca—if only Castro's brother, Raul could learn to tie his
shoelaces.

29
 Me and Nietzsche
He confessed to being bored by his contemporaries . . .

—Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the Politics
of Psychoanalysis.
One exception was Fritz Tegularius, whom we may well call, . . .

—Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.

. . . past all parallel—

—George Gordon, Lord Byron, Excerpt from “Don Juan.”

. . . Joseph Knecht's closest friend throughout his life. Tegularius, destined by
his gifts for the highest achievements but severely hampered by certain
deficiencies of health, balance, and self-confidence, was the same age as Knecht
at the time of Knecht's admission to the Order—that is, about thirty-four—and
had first met him some ten years earlier in a Glass Bead Game course. . . .

For a characterization of Tegularius we may use a page from Knecht's

confidential memoranda which, years later, he regularly drew up for the
exclusive use of the highest authorities. It reads:

"Tegularius. Personal friend of the writer. Recipient of several honors at school

in Keuperheim. Good classical philologist, strong interest in philosophy, work
on Leibniz, Bolzano, subsequently Plato.

—Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.

His sensitive temperament . . .

—Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.

30
. . . made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one,
which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and
hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of
being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his
equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on
his dignity.

—Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

He was as solitary and self-preoccupied as his father was garrulous; as serious
and introspective as his father was effervescent and glib.

—G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading

American Judges.
His father . . .

—Franz Kafka, The Judgment.

. . . the old doctor . . .

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Guardian Angel.

. . . thought his son given to “looking at life as a solemn show where he is only a
spectator”; William James . . .

—G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading

American Judges quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
. . . Henry’s brother . . .

—H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines.

31
. . . found in him a “cold-blooded, conscious egotism and conceit.”

—G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading

American Judges.
A timid adolescent, as sensitive as he was withdrawn, . . .

—Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.

. . . a person who had never learned to relate to another person, not even as a
child . . .

—Ayke Agus, Heifetz As I Knew Him.

. . . he no doubt felt the need of a rigorous context, an orderly and protective
society.

—Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.

The most brilliant and gifted Glass Bead Game player I know. He would be
predestined for Magister Ludi were it not that his character, together with his
frail health, make him completely unsuited for that position. T. should never
be appointed to an outstanding, representative, or organizational position; that
would be a misfortune for him and the office. His deficiency takes physical
form in states of low vitality, periods of insomnia and nervous aches,
psychologically in spells of melancholy, a hunger for solitude, fear of duties and
responsibilities, and probably also in thoughts of suicide. Dangerous though his
situation is, by the aid of meditation and great self-discipline he keeps himself
going so courageously that most of his acquaintances have no idea of how
severely he suffers and are aware only of his great shyness and taciturnity. . . ."

—Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.

32
In the person of Fritz Tegularius, Hesse has given us his interpretation of the
brilliant but unbalanced character of Friedrich Nietzsche.

—Theodore Ziolkowski, Foreword to Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The

Glass Bead Game.

The young Nietzsche . . .

—Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Anthony Mario Ludovici, The young

Nietzsche.
. . . was shy and quiet and kept to himself. He was not the sort one befriended
easily. Some found him very solemn.

—Tom Wells, Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg.
I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of
the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, . . .

—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.

. . . he wrote to his sister in Basel:

—Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.

. . . when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to
participate in my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavor
to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but
that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company
of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You
may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I
have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as
of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my

33
plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother!

—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.

Nietzsche's loneliness was caused by his inner plight, for only the very few were
receptive to what he said, and perhaps he wasn't aware of even these few. Thus,
he would rather be alone than together with people who did not understand
him.

—Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.

He remained alone, because he found no second self.

—Barry Cooper, Beethoven quoting Grillparzer’s Funeral Oration..

In his solitude, he had new ideas and made new discoveries; since they were
based on his most personal experiences, but at the same time concealed them,
they were difficult to share with others, and they only deepened his loneliness
and the gulf between him and those around him.

—Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.

To live alone one must be an animal or a god — says Aristotle. There is yet a
third case: one must be both — a philosopher.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.

Nietzsche's favorite philosophers—Socrates, Pascal, Spinoza, and
Schopenhauer—were all "primarily concerned with the cure of sick souls," and
for Nietzsche "a genuine philosopher was essentially a physician of the interior
self." Nietzsche believed that the well won't care for the sick; true healers also
had to be sick.

—E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank.

34
I myself am convinced that . . .

—K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius: The Fictitious Case of Tausk Contra
Freud.
. . . had he been healthy, it is doubtful he could have created as much, or as
well.

—Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka: Representative Man.

Nietzsche was too self-analytical not to be aware of the parallels between himself
and the Jewish philosopher . . .

—Colin Wilson, Spinoza—The Outsider in Speculum Spinozanum 1677-

1977.
. . . Benedict de Spinoza

—Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics: Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the

Affects.
Both were 'sickly recluses'; both were 'outsiders', rejected by their own
community, living in rented rooms on a low income, devoting themselves to
the life of the mind.

—Colin Wilson, Spinoza—The Outsider in Speculum Spinozanum 1677-

1977.
At the age of twelve he kept a diary, the kind an adult might have kept, written
in a well-adjusted, reasonable, well-behaved way.

—Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.

35
I live in the suburbs with my mother and my sister and my grandmother, . . .

—Rich Cohen, Lake Effect.

. . . he wrote . . .

—Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.

. . . almost a prisoner but full of road dreams and the constant anticipation of adventures
in strange cities. At night, I pore over maps and imagine every highway and hill and out
of the way town. I approach big cities in my mind. I explore every back street and alley.
From the tops of tall buildings I enjoy crystal views of streets spilling into the country.
Sometimes the streets are filled with traffic and sometimes they are deserted and I am
alone.

—Rich Cohen, Lake Effect.

His writing kept alive the illusion of liberation because on a symbolic level he
actually did take steps in the direction of truth and freedom.

—Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.

In fact two . . .

—Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.

. . . separate individuals . . .

—Truddi Chase, When Rabbit Howls.

. . . two different Nietzsches talked about loneliness. The one was his mother’s
son . . .

—Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.

36
. . . a “laughed-at ‘mama’s boy’” . . .

—Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A

Psychological Study.
. . . the only male in a household of women—

—Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.

The other was a fearless explorer and a military strategist on his philosophical
quest, . . .

—Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.

. . . who spoke of . . .

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

. . . life in military metaphor—as a war with battles, retreats, campaigns . . .

—Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and

Deprivation.
. . . one for whom solitude was powerfully symbolic.

—Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.

He was alone with his past, his present and his future. Alone! He needed to be.
The strongest must pause when the precipice yawns before him. The gulf can be
spanned; he feels himself forceful enough for that; but his eyes must take their
measurement of it first; he must know its depths and possible dangers.

—Anna Katharine Green, Initials Only.

37
When he became an expert in the use and manipulation of his . . .

—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

. . . own egotism, . . .

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.

. . . he conceived a notion of space that allowed him to navigate . . .

—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

. . . unknown currents . . .

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.

. . . across unknown seas, to visit uninhabited territories, and to establish
relations with splendid beings without having to leave his study.

—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Friedrich Nietzsche . . .

—Desmond Stewart, Theodor Herzl: Artist and Politician. A Biography of

the Father of Modern Israel.
. . . was truly a hero of the nineteenth century, that era when the tale of lonely
outsiders—reviewing life and society in the obscurity of a study and plotting new
policies in the reading room of a public library—was often more fascinating and
significant than the story of crowned heads, prime ministers, illustrious
generals, and captains of industry.

—Amos Elon, Herzl.

38
His room . . .

—Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.

. . . a quiet room for a . . .

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.

. . . closet metaphysician, . . .

—Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.

. . . was more than a place for work, . . .

—Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.

. . . this wonderful place . . .

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.

. . . Nietzsche’s place . . .

—Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.

. . . was to him a . . .

—Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.

. . . retreat . . .

—Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August.

. . . a banqueting room of the spirit, a cupboard of mad dreams, a storeroom of
revelations.

—Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.

39
Nietzsche . . .

—Edward R. Tannenbaum, 1900: The Generation Before the Great War.

. . . as we have seen, . . .

—Daniel J. Boorstin, Cleopatra’s Nose: Essays on the Unexpected.

. . . had a good mind and was an excellent writer.

—Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.

He looked at the world with the eyes of a Henry James, noting the subtlest of
feelings in himself and those around him.

—Charles B. Strozier, Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst.

Ever since his schooldays he had dreamed of composing a book about life
which would contain, like buried explosives, the most striking things he had so
far seen and thought about.

—Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.

The books he wrote are now among the classics of philosophy, but are highly
untypical of works that answer to that description. Primarily concerned to
convey insights rather than expound arguments or analyze other people’s
positions, they are usually written not in long chapters of extended prose but in
short, concentrated bursts, sometimes no more than aphorisms, separately
numbered.

—Bryan Magee, The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy.

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The internal tensions in . . .

—G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading

American Judges.
. . . Nietzsche . . .

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.

. . . ultimately led to a fatalistic dependence on paradox and impotence, and
this formed the basis of his . . .

—G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading

American Judges.
. . . philosophy.

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet.

Consciously or unconsciously, he perceived the opposing impulses in

himself, . . .

—G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading

American Judges.

. . . what he called the constitutional incapacity . . .

—Siegfried Hessing, Freud’s Relation with Spinoza.

. . . and gave up attempting to reconcile them. Whether man was inherently evil
or perfectible, whether change ever constituted progress, even whether he
himself existed—a question he took seriously—were unanswerable riddles. The

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easy solution was to acknowledge “ultimate Facts”—power, force, and change—

—G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading

American Judges.
The idea that came to him was that all religions and philosophies have so far
been mistaken about the highest good. It does not lie in moral virtue, or in self-
restraint, or even in self-knowledge, but in the idea of great health and strength.
This, says Nietzsche, is the fundamental constituent of freedom. Once man has
these the others will follow. For most of his evils—and his intellectual
confusions—spring from weakness.

—Colin Wilson, Spinoza—The Outsider in Speculum Spinozanum 1677-

1977.
Momentous for Nietzsche in 1865 . . .

—Robert Wicks, Friedrich Nietzsche.

. . . as he claims in his “Autobiographical Sketch,” . . .

—Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . was his accidental discovery of Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and
Representation (1818) in a local bookstore. He was then 21.

—Robert Wicks, Friedrich Nietzsche.

These notes . . .

—Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.

. . . “fragments of a grand confession”—

—Geoffrey Skelton, Wieland Wagner: The Positive Sceptic quoting Goethe.

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. . . were found later among his papers:

—Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.

I must be profoundly related to Byron’s Manfred:

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.

From my youth upwards my spirit . . .

—George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred.

. . . sought for the hidden metaphysical truth behind and beyond the
phenomena of this world, for the ideal.

—Theodor Reik, The Haunting Melody.

I lived then in . . .

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig.

. . . my small albergo, . . .

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.

. . . in a state of helpless indecision, alone with certain painful experiences and
disappointments.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig.

“Nothing more terrible could be imagined,” he wrote.

—Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August.

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What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to the way I
thought it ought to!

—Carl Gustav Jung, Commentary on “The Secret of the Golden Flower.”

This was an error.

—Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August.

One day . . .

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig.

—strangely enough,

—Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . I found . . .

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig

. . . Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818) in a . . .

—Robert Wicks, Friedrich Nietzsche.

. . . secondhand bookshop, picked it up as something quite unknown to me,
and turned the pages. I do not know what demon whispered to me, 'Take this
book home with you.' It was contrary to my usual practice of hesitating over the
purchase of books. Once at home, I threw myself onto the sofa with the newly-
won treasure and began to let that energetic and gloomy genius operate upon
me . . .

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

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Here I saw a mirror in which I beheld the world, life and my own nature in a
terrifying grandeur . . . here I saw sickness and health, exile and refuge, Hell
and Heaven.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig.

He never tired in his search after that transcendental and supernatural secret of
the Absolute and he did not recognize that the great secret of the
transcendental, the miracle of the metaphysical is that it does not exist.

—Theodor Reik, The Haunting Melody.

The very notion that . . .

—Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of

the Cosmos.
. . . one might imagine . . .

—Henry James, The Ambassadors.

. . . the strange sublunary poetry which lies in . . .

—John Russell Taylor, The Angry Theatre.

. . . a particle of an inch . . .

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.

. . . at the other end of a microscope . . .

—John Russell Taylor, The Angry Theatre.

45
. . . was so . . .

—Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of

the Cosmos.
. . . wantonly extravagant . . .

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.

. . . that even a century later . . .

—Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of

the Cosmos.
. . . the philosopher . . .

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.

. . . would be mocked for spending his . . .

—Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of

the Cosmos.
. . . whole life . . .

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.

. . . both interest and principal, . . .

—George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan.

46
. . . in a vain search for it.

—Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of

the Cosmos.
It had been the dream of his life to write with an originality so discreet, so well
concealed, as to be unnoticeable in its disguise of current and customary forms;
all his life he had struggled for a style so restrained, so unpretentious that the
reader or the hearer would fully understand the meaning without realizing how
he assimilated it. He had striven constantly for an unostentatious style, and he
was dismayed to find how far he still remained from his ideal.

—Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.

While he was lost in his work, life . . .

—Harold C. Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers.

. . . that miserable patch of event, that melange of nothing, . . .

—Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright quoting

Odets, Personal Notes.

. . . passed him by.

—Harold C. Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers.

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