The Philosopher in the Distant Solitude of the Woods

Thoreau required of any writer a simple and sincere account of his life, and no doubt if Friedrich Nietzsche had been able to write straightforwardly of the ugly growths and parasitic creepers infecting the dense forest of his relationship with his mentor Richard Wagner, All Too Human would not have been written or would have been very different.




I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there was a serious but welcome visitor, a gentle, perceptive soul who would have been an ideal companion in the woods, a young man named Friedrich Nietzsche who at one time came through the village, through snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the trees, and shared with me some long winter evenings. One of the last of the philosophers--one of my Waldensian friends.

At that time I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond.

Now I conserve pathologically precise memories of my encounters in that by now remote world: well, . . . I had last seen him a weedy youth, timid and deferential, much given to clicking of heels and bowing. Now in stalked a wiry, tough man with a masterful air whose first act was to deposit on the table a draft copy of a book with the marks of a great destiny, a collection of aphorisms that bears the title Human, All-Too-Human.

I asked him if he would like me to contribute to this book. If he would, he should tell me a story and, if he would allow me to make a suggestion, it should be our kind of story, in which you thrash about in the dark for a week or a month, it seems that it will be dark forever, and you feel like throwing it all up and changing your trade; then in the dark you espy a glimmer, proceed groping in that direction, and the light grows, and finally order follows chaos.

The young man stood in silence. He would never reply.

I wish I could say that I had supplied him with ideas as much as with support. All that was futile. We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone.

He embraced me then. "Good luck, good luck." I never saw him again.

There was nothing we could do but part, because neither of us had anything to give the other and neither of us could be fair to the other.

He never said just how he went about creating a new personality, but it was a difficult process.

Today I know that it is a hopeless task to try to dress a man in words, make him live again on the printed page, especially a man like my dear young friend. He was not the sort of person you can tell stories about, nor to whom one erects monuments--he who laughed at all monuments: he lived completely in his deeds, which were nothing less than the adventures of an unworldly young recluse and when they were over nothing of him remains nothing but words, precisely.

I kept Prof. Nietzsche's book on my table through the summer, though I looked at a page or two only now and then.

One thing more, which I might later forget:I finally left the distant solitude of the woods, where I was living quietly and peacefully. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.