"Here is the sea," he wrote, "here we may forget the town. Though its bells are still ringing the Angelus—that sad and foolish, yet sweet sound at the parting of day and night—only another minute! Now all is hushed! There lies the broad ocean, pale and glittering, but it cannot speak. The sky is glistening in its eternal mute evening glory, in red, yellow, green hues; it cannot speak either. The small cliffs and crags, projecting into the sea—as though trying to find the most lonely spot—not any of them can speak. This eternal muteness which suddenly overcomes us is beautiful and awful; it makes the heart swell...."[4]
How often has he celebrated this hour, when, as he says, the humblest fisherman "rows with golden oars." Then he collected the fruits of the day; he wrote the thoughts which had come to him, clothed in the form and the music of their words. He continued the researches which he had begun at Venice. What is human energy? What is the drift of its desires? How are the disorders of its history, the quagmire of its manners, to be explained? He now knows the answer, and it is this, that the same cruel and ambitious force thrusts man against man, and the ascetic against himself. Nietzsche had to analyse and to define this force in order to direct it; this was the problem which he set himself, and he was confident that he would one day resolve it. Willingly he compared himself to the great navigators, to that Captain Cook who for three months navigated the coral-reefs, fathom-line in hand. In this year 1881, his hero was the Genoese, Christopher Columbus, who, when no land had yet appeared, recognised on the waves meadow grasses which had been carried into the open sea by some unknown river, the waters of which were milky and still free from salt.
"Whither do we wish to go?" he wrote. "Do we long to cross the sea? Whither does this powerful desire urge us which we value above all our other passions? Why this mad flight towards that place where every sun has hitherto sunk and perished? Will they, perhaps, one day, relate of us that we also steered westward, hoping to reach an unknown India, but that it was our fate to suffer shipwreck on the Infinite? Or else, my brothers, or else?"
Nietzsche liked this lyrical page; he placed it at the end of his book as a final hymn. "What other book," he wrote, "concludes with an Or Else?"
By the end of January he had finished his work. But he was not able to re-copy his manuscript; his hand was too nervous, his eyesight too weak. He sent it on to Peter Gast. On the 13th of March the copy was ready, and Nietzsche announced it to the publisher.
"Here is the manuscript, from which I find it hard to part.... Now, hurry, hurry, hurry! I shall leave Genoa as soon as the book is out, and till then I shall live on cinders. Be quick, hurry up the printer! Can't he give you a written promise that by the end of April, at the latest, I shall have my book in hand, ready, complete?... My dear Herr Schmeitzner, let us all, for this once, do our best. The contents of my book are so important! It is a matter involving our honour that it be faulty in nothing, that it come into the world worthy and stainless. I conjure you, do that for me; no advertising. I could tell you a great deal more about it, but you will be able to understand it all by yourself when you have read my book."
The publisher read the manuscript, but understood it ill; he displayed no enthusiasm. In April, Nietzsche, still at Genoa, was still waiting for his proofs. He had hoped to surprise his friends by despatching an unexpected piece of work, and had said nothing to anyone, Peter Gast excepted. At last he renounced the pleasure of having a secret. "Good news!" he wrote to his sister. "A new book, a big book, a decisive book! I cannot think of it without a lively emotion...." In May, he rejoined Peter Gast in a village of Venetia, Recoaro, at the foot of the Alps. His impatience grew every day. The delays of his publisher prevented him from clearing up the new thoughts which already pressed hard on him.
The Dawn of Day—this was the title which he finally selected—appeared at the most unfavourable time of the year, in July.
[1] Lit. torchlike.