"What you give to your readers," he wrote, "you can scarcely surmise, for you live in your own mind. But a voice like yours is one which we never hear, either in life or in books. And, as I read you, I continue to experience what I experienced at your side in the time of our comradeship: I feel myself raised into a higher order of things, and spiritually ennobled. The conclusion of your book penetrates the soul. You can and you should, after these discordant harmonies, give us yet softer, yet diviner strains.... Farewell, my dear friend, you are always he who gives, I am always he who receives...."
Nietzsche was happy. "Thanks, dear friend," he wrote on the 28th of December, 1879; "your old affection sealed anew—it is the most precious gift which these Christmas days have brought me." But his answer was brief, and the last two lines of his letter give the reason: "My condition has again become terrible, my tortures are atrocious; sustineo, abstineo; and I am astonished at it myself."
This very strong language contains no exaggeration. His mother and sister, who saw him suffer, bear witness to the awful days through which he passed. He accepted suffering as a test, as a spiritual exercise. He compared his destiny to that of men who were great in sorrow—Leopardi, for instance. But Leopardi was not brave, for, in his sickness, he defamed life, and—Nietzsche discovered this hard truth—an invalid has not the right to be a pessimist. Or the Christ. But even Christ weakened upon the cross. "Father, Father!" He cried out, "why hast Thou forsaken Me?" Friedrich Nietzsche had no God, no father, no faith, no friends. Every prop he had taken from himself, and yet he did not bend. To complain, even in a passing manner, would be to avow defeat. He refused to make the avowal. Suffering did not overwhelm him; on the contrary, it instructed him, and animated his thought.
"The enormous tension of the intellect, bent on the mastery of pain," he writes, "shows everything in a new light: and the unspeakable charm of every new light is often powerful enough to overcome all the allurements of suicide, and to make the continuance of life appear as most desirable to the sufferer. Scornfully he reviews the warm and comfortable dream-world, wherein the healthy man moves unthinkingly; scornfully he reviews the noblest and dearest of the illusions in which he formerly indulged; this contempt is his joy, it is the counterpoise which enables him to hold his own against physical pain, a counterpoise the necessity of which he now feels.... Our pride revolts as it never did before: joyfully does it defend life against such a tyrant as pain, that tyrant that would force us to testify against life. To stand for life in the face of this tyrant is a task of infinite fascination."[3]
Friedrich Nietzsche supposed that his end was close at hand. On the 14th of January, wishing to give a last indication of his thought to some friend, he wrote Fräulein von Meysenbug a letter which is a farewell and a spiritual testament. What an effort it must have cost him!
"Although to write is one of the fruits which is most strongly forbidden me, still I want you to have one more letter from me, you whom I love and venerate like a beloved sister—it will be the last! For the awful and almost incessant martyrdom of my life gives me a thirst for death, and, according to certain signs, I am now near enough to that access of fever, which shall save me, to be permitted to hope. I have suffered so much, I have renounced so many things that there is no ascetic, of any time, to whose life I have not the right to compare my life in this last year. Nevertheless I have acquired a great deal. My soul has gained in purity, in sweetness, and I no longer need religion or art for that. (You will remark that I have some pride; that is because in my state of entire abandonment I have been able finally to discover my intimate sources of consolation.) I think that I have done the work of my life as a man may to whom no time is left. But I know that for many men I have poured out a drop of good oil, that many men will be guided by me towards a higher, a more serene, and lucid life. I give you this supplementary information: when my humanity shall have ceased to be, men will say so. No sorrow has been or will be able to induce me to give false evidence on life, as I know it.
"To whom should I say all this if not to you? I think—but it is immodest to say so—that our characters resemble each other. For instance: both of us are brave, and neither distress nor contempt has been able to turn us from the path which we recognised as the right path. And both of us have known, in us, around us, many a truth, the dazzling splendour of which few of our contemporaries have perceived—we hope for humanity and, silently, offer ourselves in sacrifice for it, do we not?
"Have you good news of the Wagners? For three years I have heard nothing of them. They, too, have forsaken me. I knew for long that Wagner would separate from me as soon as he should have recognised the difference of our efforts. I have been told that he writes against me. Let him: all means must be used to bring the truth to light! I think of him with a lasting gratitude, for I owe him some of the strongest incitements towards spiritual liberty. Madame Wagner, as you know, is the most sympathetic woman whom I have met. But our relations are ended, and assuredly I am not the man to resume them. It is too late.
"Receive, dear friend, who are a sister to me, the salutation of a young old man to whom life has not been cruel, although it has come about that he desires to die."