When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom
“Her very words to me!”
Nietzsche slumped down in the chair. “She flaunts all convention, except one—when it comes to men and sex, she’s as chaste as a Carmelite!”
Breuer nodded. “Yes, but I think perhaps we misinterpret the messages she sends. She’s a young girl, a child, unaware of the impact of her beauty upon men.”
“There we disagree, Josef She is entirely aware of her beauty. She uses it to dominate, to suck men dry, and then move on to the next one.”
Breuer pressed on. “Another thing—she flaunts convention with such charm that one can’t help becoming an accomplice. I surprised myself by agreeing to read a letter Wagner wrote you, even though I suspected she had no right to possess it!”
“What! A letter from Wagner? I never noticed one was missing. She must have taken it during her Tautenberg visit. Nothing is beneath her!”
“She even showed me some of your letters, Friedrich. I felt immediately drawn into her deepest confidence.” Here Breuer felt he was taking perhaps the greatest risk of all.
Nietzsche jerked upright. The cold compress fell from his eyes. “She showed you my letters? That vixen!”
“Please, Friedrich, let’s not awaken the migraine. Here, drink this last cup and then lean back and let me replace the compress.”
“All right, Doctor, on these matters I follow your advice. But I think the danger is over—the visual flashes have disappeared. Your drug must be taking effect.”
Nietzsche drank the remaining lukewarm coffee in one swallow. “Finished—enough of that—that’s more coffee than I drink in six months!” After slowly twisting his head around, he handed Breuer the compress. “I don’t need this now. My attack seems to be gone. Amazing! Without your help it would have progressed into several days of torment. A pity”—he ventured a glance at Breuer—“I can’t carry you with me!”
Breuer nodded.
“But how dare she show you my letters, Josef! And how could you have read them?”
Breuer opened his mouth, but Nietzsche held up his hand to silence him. “No need to answer. I understand your position, even the way you felt flattered by being chosen as her confidant. I had the identical reaction when she showed me love letters from Rée and from Gillot, one of her teachers in Russia who also fell in love with her.”
“Still,” Breuer said, “it must be painful for you, I know. I would be devastated to learn that Bertha had shared our most intimate moments with another man.”
“It is painful. Yet it’s good medicine. Tell me everything else about your meeting with Lou. Spare me nothing!”
Now Breuer knew why he had not told Nietzsche about his trance vision of Bertha walking with Dr. Durkin. That powerful emotional experience had released him from her. And that was precisely what Nietzsche needed-not a description of someone else’s experience, not an intellectual understanding, but his own emotional experience, strong enough to rip away the illusory meanings he had heaped upon this twenty-one-year-old Russian woman.
And what more powerful emotional experience than for Nietzsche to “eavesdrop” upon Lou Salomé as she entranced another man with the same artifices she had once turned on him? Accordingly, Breuer searched his memory for every minute detail of his encounter with her. He began to recount to Nietzsche her words: her wish to become his student and protégée, her flattery, and her desire to include Breuer in her collection of great minds. He described her actions: her preening, her turning her head first one way, then the other, her smile, her cocked head, her open and adoring gaze, the play of her tongue as she moistened her lips, the touch of her hand as she rested it on his.
Listening with his great head rolled back, his deep eyes closed, Nietzsche seemed overcome by emotion.
“Friedrich, what were you feeling as I spoke?”
“So many things, Josef.”
“Describe them to me.”
“Too much to make sense of.”
“Don’t try. Just chimneysweep.”
Nietzsche opened his eyes and looked at Breuer, as though to reassure himself that there would be no further duplicity.
“Do it,” Breuer urged. “Consider it a physician’s orders. I am well acquainted with someone similarly afflicted who says it helped.”
Haltingly, Nietzsche began. “As you talked about Lou, I remembered my own experiences with her, my own impressions—identical—uncannily identical. She was the same with you as she was with me—I feel stripped of all those pungent moments, those sacred memories.”
He opened his eyes. “It’s hard to let your thoughts talk—embarrassing!”
“Trust me, I can personally testify that embarrassment is rarely fatal! Go on! Be hard by being tender!”
“I trust you. I know you speak from strength. I feel——” Nietzsche stopped, his face flushed.
Breuer urged him on. “Close your eyes again. Perhaps it will be easier to talk without looking at me. Or lie down on the bed.”
“No, I’ll stay here. What I wanted to say is that I’m glad you met Lou. Now you know me. And I feel a kinship with you. But at the same time, I feel anger, outrage.” Nietzsche opened his eyes as if to ascertain that he had not offended Breuer, and then he continued, in a soft voice, “I feel outraged by your desecration. You’ve trampled on my love, ground it into the dust. It’s painful, right here.” He tapped his fist upon his chest.
“I know that spot, Friedrich. I, too, felt that pain. Remember how upset I got every time you called Bertha a cripple? Remember——”
“Today I am the anvil,” Nietzsche interrupted, “and it is your words that are hammer blows—crumbling the citadel of my love.”
“Keep going, Friedrich.”
“That’s all my feelings—except sadness. And loss, much loss.”
“What have you lost today?”
“All those sweet, those precious private moments with Lou—gone. That love we shared—where is it now? Lost! Everything ground down to dust. Now I know I’ve lost her forever!”
“But, Friedrich, possession must precede loss.”
“Near the Lake of Orta”—Nietzsche’s tone grew softer yet, as if to keep his words from trampling his delicate thoughts—“she and I once climbed to the top of the Sacro Monte to watch a golden sunset. Two luminous coral-tinted clouds that looked like merging faces sailed by. We touched softly. We kissed. We shared a holy moment—the only holy moment I have ever known.”
“Did you and she ever speak again of that moment?”
“She knew of that moment! I often wrote her cards from afar referring to Orta sunsets, Orta breezes, Orta clouds.”
“But,” Breuer persisted, “did she ever speak of Orta? Was it for her also a holy moment?”
“She knew what Orta was!”
“Lou Salomé believed I should know everything about her relationship to you, and therefore took pains to describe each of your meetings in the greatest detail. She omitted nothing, she claimed. She spoke at length of Lucerne, Leipzig, Rome, Tautenberg. But Orta—I swear to you!—she mentioned only in passing. It made no particular impression on her. And one other thing, Friedrich. She tried to recall, but she said that she didn’t remember if she had ever kissed you!”
Nietzsche was silent. His eyes flooded with tears, his head hung down.
Breuer knew he was being cruel. But he knew that not to be cruel now would be crueler yet. This was a singular opportunity, one that would never come again.
“Forgive my hard words, Friedrich, but I follow the advice of a great teacher. ‘Offer a suffering friend a resting place,’ he said, ‘but take care it be a hard bed or field cot.’ ”
“You’ve listened well,” Nietzsche replied. “And the bed is hard. Let me tell you how hard. Can I make you understand how much I have lost! For fifteen years, you’ve shared a bed with Mathilde. You’re the central person in her life. She cares about you, touches you, knows what you like to eat, worries if you’re late. When I extrude Lou Salomé from my mind—and I realize that nothing l
Nietzsche’s eyes focused not on Breuer but rather inward, as if he were reading from some internal text.
“Do you know that no other woman has ever touched me? Not to be loved or touched-ever? To live an absolutely unobserved life-do you know what that is like? Often I go for days without saying a word to anyone, except perhaps ”Guten Morgen’ and “Guten Abend’to my Gasthaus owner. Yes, Josef, you were right in your interpretation of ‘no slot.’ I belong nowhere. I have no home, no circle of friends to whom I speak daily, no closet full of belongings, no family hearth. I don’t even have a state, for I have given up my German citizenship and never remain in one place long enough to get a Swiss passport.”
Nietzsche looked piercingly at Breuer, as if he wished to be stopped. But Breuer was silent.
“Oh, I have my pretenses, Josef, my secret ways of tolerating aloneness, even glorifying it. I say that I must be separate from others to think my own thoughts. I say that the great minds of the past are my companions, that they crawl out of their hiding places into my sunshine. I scoff at the fear of solitude. I profess that great men must undergo great pain, that I have flown too far into the future, and that none can accompany me. I crow that if I am misunderstood or feared or rejected, then so much the better—it means I am on target! I say that my courage in facing aloneness without the herd, without the illusion of a divine provider, is proof of my greatness.
“Yet over and over I am haunted by one fear——” He hesitated for a moment, then plunged ahead. “Despite my bravado about being the posthumous philosopher, despite my certitude that my day will come, despite even my knowledge of eternal return—I am haunted by the thought of dying alone. Do you know what it’s like to know that when you die, your body may not be discovered for days or weeks, not until the aroma beckons some stranger? I try to soothe myself. Often, in my deepest isolation, I speak to myself. Yet not too loudly, for I fear my own hollow echo. The one, the only one, who filled this hollowness was Lou Salomé.”
Breuer, finding no voice for his sorrow, or for his gratitude that Nietzsche had chosen to confide these great secrets in him, listened silently. Within him, the hope grew stronger that he might, after all, still succeed in being the doctor for Nietzsche’s despair.
“And now, thanks to you,” Nietzsche wound up, “I know that Lou was merely illusion.” He shook his head and stared out the window. “Bitter medicine, Doctor.”
“But, Friedrich, to pursue truth, don’t we scientists have to renounce all illusion?”
“TRUTH with capital letters!” Nietzsche exclaimed. “I forget, Josef, that scientists have still to learn that TRUTH, too, is an illusion—but an illusion without which we can’t survive. So I shall renounce Lou Salomé for some other, yet unknown, illusion. It’s hard to realize she’s gone, that there’s nothing left.”
“Nothing left of Lou Salomé?”
“Nothing good.” Nietzsche’s face was pinched in disgust.
“Think about her,” Breuer urged. “Let images appear to you. What do you see?”
“A bird of prey—an eagle with bloody claws. A wolfpack, led by Lou, my sister, my mother.”
“Bloody claws? Yet she sought help for you. All that effort, Friedrich—a a trip to Venice, another to Vienna.”
“Not for me!” Nietzsche replied. “Maybe for her own sake, for atonement, for her guilt.”
“She doesn’t strike me as one burdened by guilt.”
“Then perhaps for the sake of art. She values art—and she valued my work, work already done and work yet to come. She has a good eye—I’ll credit her with that.
“It’s strange,” Nietzsche mused. “I met her in April, almost exactly nine months ago, and now I feel a great work quickening. My son, Zarathustra, stirs to be born. Perhaps nine months ago, she sowed the seed of Zarathustra in the furrows of my brain. Perhaps that’s her destiny—to impregnate fertile minds with great books.”
“So,” Breuer ventured, “in appealing to me in your behalf, Lou Salomé may not be the enemy, after all.”
“No!” Nietzsche pounded the arm of his chair. “You said that, I didn’t. You’re wrong! I’ll never agree that she had concern for me. She appealed to you on her own behalf, to fulfill her destiny. She never knew me. She used me. What you’ve told me today verifies that.”
“How?” Breuer asked, though he knew the answer.
“How? It’s obvious. You told me yourself, Lou is like your Bertha—she’s an automaton, playing her role, the same role, with me, with you, with one man after the other. The particular man is incidental. She seduced both of us in the same way, with the same female deviousness, the same guile, the same gestures, the same promises!”
“And yet this automaton controls you. She dominates your mind: you worry about her opinion, you pine for her touch.”
“No. No pining. No longer. What I feel now is rage.”
“At Lou Salomé?”
“No! She’s unworthy of my anger. I feel self-loathing, anger at the lust that forced me to crave such a woman.”
Is this bitterness, Breuer wondered, any better than obsession or loneliness ? Banishing Lou Salomé from Nietzsche’s mind is only part of the procedure. I need also to cauterize the raw wound left in her place.
“Why such anger at yourself?” he asked. “I remember your saying we all have our wild dogs barking in the cellar. How I wish you could be kinder, more generous to your own humanity!”
“Remember my first granite sentence—I’ve recited it to you many times, Josef—‘Become who you are’? That means not only to perfect yourself but also not to fall prey to another’s designs for you. But even falling in battle to another’s power is preferable to falling prey to the woman-automaton who never even sees you! That is unforgivable!”
“And you, Friedrich, did you ever really see Lou Salomé?”
Nietzsche jerked his head.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“She may have played her role, but you, what role did you play? Were you, and I, so different from her? Did you see her? Or did you, instead, see only prey—a disciple, a plowland for your thoughts, a successor? Or perhaps, like me, you saw beauty, youth, a satin pillow, a vessel into which to drain your lust. And wasn’t she also a spoil of victory in the grunting competition with Paul Rée? Did you really see her or Paul Rée when, after you met her for the first time, you asked him to propose marriage to her in your behalf? I think it wasn’t Lou Salomé you wanted, but someone like her.”
Nietzsche was silent. Breuer continued, “I shall never forget our walk in the Simmeringer Haide. That walk changed my life in so many ways. Of all that I learned that day, perhaps the most powerful insight was that I had not related to Bertha, but instead to all the private meanings I had attached to her—meanings that had nothing at all to do with her. You made me realize that I never saw her as she really was—that neither of us truly saw one another. Friedrich, isn’t that true for you as well? Perhaps no one is at fault. Perhaps Lou Salomé has been used as much as you. Perhaps we’re all fellow sufferers unable to see each other’s truth.”
“It is not my desire to understand what women wish.” Nietzsche’s tone was sharp and brittle. “It’s my wish to avoid them. Women corrupt and spoil. Perhaps it is simply enough to say that I am ill suited for them, and leave it at that. And, in time, that may be my loss. From time to time, a man needs a woman, just as he needs a home-cooked meal.”
Nietzsche’s twisted, implacable answer plunged Breuer into reverie. He thought of the pleasure he drew from Mathilde and his family, even the satisfaction he drew from his new perception of Bertha. How sad to think that his friend would be forever denied such experiences! Yet he could think of no way to alter Nietzsche’s distorted view of women. Perhaps it was too much to expect. Perhaps Nietzsche was right when he said that his attitudes toward women had been laid down in the first few years of his life. Perhaps these attitudes were so deeply e
Suddenly, in the chair beside him, Nietzsche took off his spectacles, buried his face in his handkerchief, and burst into sobs.
Breuer was stunned. He must say something.
“I wept too when I knew I had to give up Bertha. So hard to give up that vision, that magic. You weep for Lou Salomé?”
Nietzsche, his face still buried in the handkerchief, blew his nose and shook his head vigorously.
“Then, for your loneliness?”
Again, Nietzsche shook his head.
“Do you know why you weep, Friedrich?”
“Not certain,” came the muffled reply.
A fanciful idea occurred to Breuer. “Friedrich, please try an experiment with me. Can you imagine your tears having a voice?”
Lowering his handkerchief, Nietzsche looked at him, red-eyed and puzzled.
“Just try it for a minute or two,” Breuer urged gently. “Give your tears a voice. What would they say?”
“I feel too foolish.”
“I felt foolish, too, trying all the strange experiments you suggested. Indulge me. Try.”
Without looking at him, Nietzsche began, “If one of my tears were sentient, it would say—it would say”—here he spoke in a loud, hissing whisper—“ ‘Free at last! Bottled up all these years! This man, this tight dry man, has never let me flow before.’ Is that what you mean?” he asked, reverting to his own voice.
“Yes, good, very good. Keep going. What else?”
“What else? The tears would say”—again the hissing whisper—“ ‘Good to be liberated! Forty years in a stagnant pool. Finally, finally, the old man has a housecleaning! Oh, how I’ve wanted to escape before! But no way out—not until this Viennese doctor opened the rusty gate.’ ” Nietzsche stopped and daubed his eyes with his handkerchief.
“Thank you,” said Breuer. “An opener of rusty gates—a splendid compliment. Now, in your own voice, tell me more about the sadness behind these tears.”