In a year later, Nietzsche was taken to an asylum, dead at the top. He lingered on until Nineteen Hundred, when his body, too, died, died there at Weimar, the home of Goethe and the home of Franz Liszt—another of life's little ironies. It is an obvious thing to say that Friedrich Nietzsche was insane all the time. The fact is, he was not. He was a great, sincere and honest soul, intent on living the ideal life. He wrote thoughts that have passed into the current coin of all the thinking world. When he praised Wagner to the skies and afterwards damned him to the lowest depths of perdition, he was sane, and did the thing that has been done since Cain slew his brother Abel. Take it home to yourself—haven't the best things and the worst that have ever been said about you, been expressed by the same person?
The opinion of any one person concerning any man of genius, or any product of art, is absolutely valueless. Whim, prejudice, personal bias, and physical condition color our view and tint our opinions, and when we cease to love a man personally, to condemn his art is an easy and natural step. What was before pleasing is now preposterous.
Of course, it is all a point of view—a matter of perspective, and most of us are a trifle out of focus. When we change our opinions we change our friends.
As a prescription for preserving a just and proper view, and living a sane life, I would say, climb a tree occasionally, and hoot like an owl and caw like a crow; stand on your head and yell at times like a Comanche.
Robert Louis Stevenson says, "A man who has not had the courage to make a fool of himself has not lived."
The man who does not relax and hoot a few hoots voluntarily, now and then, is in great danger of hooting hoots and standing on his head for the edification of the pathologist and trained nurse, a little later on.
The madhouse yawns for the person who always does the proper thing. Impropriety, in right proportion, relieves congestion, and thus are the unities preserved. And so here the great Law of Compensation, invented by Ralph Waldo Emerson, comes in: The sane, healthy man, who occasionally strips off his dignity and hoots like an owl, or rolls naked in the snow, will surely be called insane by the self-nominated elect, but his personal compensation lies in the fact that he knows he is not.
nd now look upon the face of this man! Even so, and upon every face is written the record of the life the man has led: the loves that were his, the thoughts, the prayers, the aspirations, the disappointments, all he hoped to be and was not—all are written there—nothing is hidden, nor can it be. Here was one born in poverty, nurtured in adversity, and yet uplifted and sustained by homely friendships and rugged companions who dumbly guessed the latent greatness of their charge.