Hans Olde, from โDer kranke Nietzscheโ (โThe ill Nietzscheโ), JuneโAugust 1899. Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv Weimar.
After two vodka tonics and a cosmo, my ninety-year-old grandmother lifts her glass and says, โBut you know that Nietzsche is my boyfriend?โย
โHe is?โ
โHeโs my boyfriend.โ
Itโs all rightโweโve shared boyfriends before. The actor Javier Bardem. Errol Louis, anchor at NY1. Her new neighbor. Her many doctors. She tells me that Nietzsche is her boyfriend because Nietzsche also hates the German composer Richard Wagner. I tell her Nietzsche hates a lot of people. She nods. โThatโs good in a man.โย
Earlier in our dinner Iโd mentioned I was finally reading Nietzscheโs Twilight of the Idols and The Antichristโtwo white-hot texts that serve, in part, as the ecstatic summation of much of Nietzscheโs previous work. Both works glow with special invective. The usual targets are abused (Socrates, Kant, et cetera). So are George Sand, George Eliot, and, of course, generally happy people: โNothing could make us less envious than โฆ the plump happiness of a clean conscience.โ Itโs in Twilight that Nietzsche announces, โThe man who has renounced war has renounced a grand life.โ
Would he be a good boyfriend? Heโd be a fierce one, often railing at the โradical and mortal hostility to sensuality.โ Heโd remind you: โWhen a man is in love he endures more than at any other time; he submits to anything.โ Would he wink? Probably not.ย
Freud claimed, apparently, that Nietzsche โhad a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live.โ In these final writings it is clearer than ever how Nietzscheโs โhateโ evolves out of a prolonged annoyance at knowing peopleโand history and philosophical systemsโbetter than they know themselves. You sense the loneliness of this awareness. Nietzsche needs his supernatural, self-generating heat, lest his flame down there wither in the wild pits of instinct. (โNothing ever succeeds which exuberant spirits have not helped to produce.โ) If he was your lover, heโd remind you, his torch high, that โone must be superior to mankind in force, in loftiness of soulโin contempt.โ Those who cannot achieve this are โmerely mankind.โย
I look at my grandmother, whose awarenessโas Nietzsche might recommendโseems to recede from the outside world as it advances internally. She closes her eyes. I think sheโs slipped under when she points at me. โFirst itโs our Spanish fellow. Then that other fellow. Then Nietzsche.โย
โSophie Madeline Dess, author of โZalmanovsโ
A friend whose taste I trust recently recommended Denton Welchโs 1945 novel In Youth Is Pleasure, a beautiful little book and one of my favorite discoveries of 2022. Welchโs writing is impressionistic, playful, homoerotic, dreamy, often hilarious, and at times ecstatic. What plot there is centers on the fifteen-year-old Orvil Pym, who is spending the summer holiday with his father and brothers at a hotel in Surrey several years before the outbreak of World War II. Orvilโs mother has died; his feelings for his siblings and for his father (who has bestowed upon him the nickname โMicrobeโ) range from vague fondness to childish terror and loathing. Often Orvil is left alone. He eats pรชche Melba (โโItโs like a celluloid cupid dollโs behind,โ said Orvil to himself. โThis cupid doll has burst open and is pouring out lovely snow and great big clots of bloodโโ); he spies jealously on a schoolmaster reading Jane Eyre to two boys, one of whom appears to be taking a particular kind of gratification from the experience; he desecrates a church with libidinal glee, throwing himself on a brass statue and kissing its face โjuicily.โ At the end of the day, Orvil always seems to be consuming oozing cakes in the hotel dining room, dressed in mud-stained clothes.ย
This is a lonely book, and a remarkable one for the way in which its sensuality emerges: from inside this loneliness. Orvil takes an aestheteโs pleasure in the physical world but also in the eruptions of his own consciousness; much of the novelโs eroticism arises from his encounters with a kind of other within the self. Desire, enchantment, the delights of reverie and of metaphorโthese spring from within. Floating alone along a river, Orvil thinks, โIโm like one of those Baked Alaskas โฆ one of those lovely puddings of ice-cream and hot sponge.โ Here, loneliness can be devastating, mischievous, grotesque, monstrous, thrillingโbut it is never grim.
โAvigayl Sharp, author of โUncontrollable, Irrelevantโ