/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.23512242]

>Taking everything into consideration, I could never have survived my youth without Wagnerian music. For I was condemned to the society of Germans. If a man wish to get rid of a feeling of insufferable oppression, he has to take to hashish. Well, I had to take to Wagner. Wagner is the counter-poison to everything essentially German—the fact that he is a poison too, I do not deny. From the moment that Tristan was arranged for the piano—all honour to you, Herr von Bülow!—I was a Wagnerite. Wagner's previous works seemed beneath me—they were too commonplace, too "German." ... But to this day I am still seeking for a work which would be a match to Tristan in[Pg 44] dangerous fascination, and possess the same gruesome and dulcet quality of infinity; I seek among all the arts in vain. All the quaint features of Leonardo da Vinci's work lose their charm at the sound of the first bar in Tristan. This work is without question Wagner's non plus ultra; after its creation, the composition of the Mastersingers and of the Ring was a relaxation to him. To become more healthy—this in a nature like Wagner's amounts to going backwards. The curiosity of the psychologist is so great in me, that I regard it as quite a special privilege to have lived at the right time, and to have lived precisely among Germans, in order to be ripe for this work. The world must indeed be empty for him who has never been unhealthy enough for this "infernal voluptuousness": it is allowable, it is even imperative, to employ a mystic formula for this purpose. I suppose I know better than any one the prodigious feats of which Wagner was capable, the fifty worlds of strange ecstasies to which no one else had wings to soar; and as I am alive to-day and strong enough to turn even the most suspicious and most dangerous things to my own advantage, and thus to grow stronger, I declare Wagner to have been the greatest benefactor of my life. The bond which unites us is the fact that we have suffered greater agony, even at each other's hands, than most men are able to bear nowadays, and this will always keep our names associated in the minds of men. For, just as Wagner is merely a misunderstanding among Germans, so, in truth, am I, and ever will be. Ye lack two centuries of psychological and artistic discipline, my dear countrymen!... But ye can never recover the time lost.

[Anonymous No.23512804]

[Anonymous No.23512808]

[Anonymous No.23512811]

[Anonymous No.23512897]

>>23512242
Well, we both know trying to pull an intervention on Nietzsche is a lost cause. If hookers and wanking to oneitis of the month is how he does his best work then you and I probably wouldn't have been able to talk him out of it. I have never seen any sort of Nietzschean argument for autoerotic asphyxiation, but it wouldn't shock me if something ever came to light denoting he did it.

[Anonymous No.23513223]

Excerpts from Nietzsche's letters from 1882 to 1883:

>Certainly those were the best days of my life, the ones I spent with him at Tribschen and through him in Bayreuth (1872, not 1876)… And the disillusionment and leaving Wagner – was not that putting my very life in danger? Have I not needed almost six years to recover from that pain?
>I have had such experiences with this man and his work, and it was a passion which lasted a long time – passion is the only word for it. The renunciation that it required, the rediscovering of myself that eventually became necessary, was among the hardest and most melancholy things that have befallen me
>I have been since 1876 more a battlefield than a man
>First, one has the difficulty of emancipating oneself from one's chains; and, ultimately, one has to emancipate oneself from this emancipation too! Each of us has to suffer, though in greatly differing ways, from the chain sickness, even after he has broken the chains.
>With this book [Zarathustra] I have stepped into a new Ring
>Finally, if I am not completely mistaken about my future, it is through me that the best part of the Wagnerian enterprise will live on—and that’s what is almost droll about the affair.
>I am better now and I even believe that Wagner's death was the most substantial relief that could have been given me just now. It was hard for six years to have to be the opponent of the man one had most reverenced on earth, and my constitution is not sufficiently coarse for such a position. After all it was Wagner grown senile whom I was forced to resist; as to the genuine Wagner, I shall yet attempt to become in a great measure his heir (as I have often assured Fräulein Malvida, though she would not believe it).
>It's already beginning, what I prophesied for a long time, that in many pieces I will be R.W.'s heir.—
>Wagner was by far the fullest human being I have known, and in this respect I have had to forgo a great deal for six years. But something like a deadly offence came between us; and something terrible could have happened if he had lived longer.

[Anonymous No.23513278]

>Strictly speaking, you are, aside from my wife, the one prize I have received in life
- Wagner's letter to Nietzsche, 1872.

>I gather from your brief allusions that our old friend Nietzsche has been holding himself aloof from you as well. There is no doubt that very striking changes have taken place in him; but anyone who observed him and his psychic spasms years ago could almost be justified in saying that a long-dreaded and not entirely unpredictable catastrophe had now overtaken him. I have retained sufficient friendship for him not to read his book – which I glanced through as I was cutting the pages – and can only wish and hope that he will thank me for it some day.
- Letter to Franz Overbeck, 24 May 1878

>How could I ever forget this friend of mine [Nietzsche] who was driven from me so forcefully? Although I constantly had the feeling that, at the time of his association with me, Nietzsche’s life was ruled by a mental spasm, and although it was bound to strike me as odd that this spasm could have produced so spiritually radiant and heart-warming a fire as was manifest in him to the astonishment of all, and although, finally, the ultimate decision which he reached in the inner development of his life filled me with the utmost horror when I saw how intolerable a pressure that spasm was finally causing him – I must no doubt also admit that in the case of so powerful a psychic process it is simply not possible to argue along moral lines and that one’s only response can be a shocked silence.
- Letter to Franz Overbeck 19 October 1879

>I lack the ability to keep bad experiences in mind; with Nietzsche, for instance, I can think only of his friendly aspects
- Cosima Diaries quoting Wagner, 28 December 1881

[Anonymous No.23513693]

Is this the daily Christcuck cope thread?

[Anonymous No.23514253]

>>23513693
It's a Nietzsche thread.