Friedrich Nietzsche had not seen the Engadine since that summer of 1881 in which he had conceived the Eternal Return and the words of Zarathustra. In the clutch of these memories and of the sudden solitude, carried away by a prodigious movement of inspiration, he wrote in ten days the second part of his work.
It was bitter. Friedrich Nietzsche could no longer repress the rancours, the menace of which he had felt last winter; he could no longer unite force to sweetness; "I am not a hunter of flies," Zarathustra used to say, and he disdained his adversaries. He had spoken as a benefactor, and he had not been heard. Nietzsche put into his mouth another speech: "Zarathustra the judge," he wrote in his short notes; "the manifestation of justice in its most grandiose form; of justice which fashions, which constructs, and which, as a consequence, must annihilate."
Zarathustra the judge has only insults and lamentations upon his lips. He sings this nocturnal chant which Nietzsche, at Rome, had one evening improvised for himself alone:
"I am light; alas if I were night! But this is my solitude, to be always surrounded by light."
This is no longer the hero whom Friedrich Nietzsche had created so superior to all humanity; it is a man in despair, it is Nietzsche, in short, too weak to express anything beyond his anger and his plaints.
"Verily, my friends, I walk among men as among the fragments and members of man.
"To see men broken and scattered as though they lay over a butcher's shambles, this is to my eye the most frightful thing.
"And when my eye fleeth from the present to the past, it ever findeth the same: fragments, members, and frightful catastrophes—but no men!
"The present and the past upon the earth—alas, my friends, these are to me the most unbearable things; and I could not live were I not a visionary of what must come.