Lead on! thou hast thy sorrow still!
George Brandes “discovered” Nietzsche in the last year of his conscious life, after he had written his greatest works, unrecognized, repulsed by his few former friends, suffering in solitude, yet with superhuman enthusiasm casting new worlds, slaughtering old gods, fighting mediocrity. His letters of that year reveal the final act of the greatest of world-tragedies—the Nietzsche-Tragedy; they grant us a glimpse into the torn soul of the joyous martyr.
I lived for years in extreme proximity of death. This was my great good fortune. I fought myself, I outlived myself....
... After all, my illness has been of the greatest use to me: it has released me, it has restored to me the courage to be myself.... And, indeed, in virtue of my instincts, I am a brave animal, a military one even.... Am I a philosopher, do you ask?—But what does that matter!...
How he created his greatest work, Zarathustra:
Each part in about ten days. Perfect state of “inspiration.” All conceived in the course of rapid walks: absolute certainty, as though each sentence were shouted to one. While writing the book, the greatest physical elasticity and sense of power.
In his first letter to Brandes, Nietzsche wrote:
How far this mode of thought has carried me already, how far it will carry me yet—I am almost afraid to imagine. But there are certain paths which do not allow one to go backward and so I go forward, because I must.
And the path led him to the inevitable end. His mind reached the summit of the heights and burst into bleeding fragments over the yet not comprehending world. In the last letter but one we see “signs of powerful exaltation,” as Brandes chooses to name the obvious symptoms of megalomania. January 4, 1889, is the date of an unstamped, unaddressed letter written on a piece of paper ruled in pencil:
To the friend Georg—When once you had discovered me, it was easy enough to find me: the difficulty now is to get rid of me....