作者|斯蒂芬·茨威格(Stefan Zweig,1881.11.28—1942.2.22.)
Austrian novelist, poet, playwright, biographer
Friedrich Nietzsche's tragedy is a one-man show: there is no other character in this brief scene of his life than himself. In each of the avalanche-like collapses, the lone combatant stands alone under the thunderstorm of his fate, no one standing beside him, no one approaching him, not a single woman with a gentle presence to ease the tension. All movement was merely emitted by him and fell back to him: the few figures who had appeared in his shadow at the beginning accompanied his hero in a silent gesture of surprise or panic, and gradually retreated as if he were facing some dangerous person. No one dared to approach or fully step into this circle of fate, Nietzsche always spoke alone, fought alone, and endured pain alone. He doesn't speak to anyone, and no one answers him. What's even more terrifying: no one listens to him.
Nietzsche's only heroic tragedy has no people, no partners, and no audience: it has no real stage, no scenery, no stage sets, no costumes, it seems to be staged in a vacuum of ideas. Basel, Southburg, Nice, Solent, Sears Maria, Genoa, these place names are not his real home, but just empty milestones on both sides of the road he flies over with flaming wings, cold backgrounds, wordless watercolors. In fact, there has always been only one setting for this tragedy: alone, alone, that frightening loneliness that is neither silent nor responsive, a loneliness like an impenetrable glass clock that his mind carries, around him and above his head, a loneliness without flowers, colors, sounds, animals and people, a loneliness without even God, a loneliness of indifference and dead silence in the primordial world before or after all time. But what makes his desolation and loneliness so terrible, so horrible and so absurd, is inconceivable that this glacial and desert-like loneliness should take place spiritually in an Americanized country of 70 million people, in a new Germany with the rumbling of railroads and telegrams, in a culture of morbid curiosity, which throws 40,000 books a year into the world, searches for problems in hundreds of universities every day, and stages tragedies in hundreds of theaters, But they have heard nothing, they know nothing, they have not felt anything about this greatest drama that has taken place among themselves, in their inner circles.
Because it was at the greatest moment of his tragedy that Friedrich Nietzsche no longer had an audience, an audience and a witness in the German-speaking world. At first, when he was a professor on the podium, when Wagner's light still made him clear and conspicuous, when he first began to talk, his words could still attract a little attention. But the more he analyzes himself, the more he analyzes the times, the less he causes reactions. As he performs the heroic monologue, his friends and strangers stand up one by one, frightened by his increasingly wild background shifts, by the growing frenzied exuberance of this lonely man, who has left him alone and horribly on the stage of his fate. Gradually, the tragic actor became more and more restless, speaking entirely to nothingness, his voice getting louder and louder, more and more like shouting, more and more of a brotherhood, just to provoke a little repercussion, or at least some dissent. He created a kind of music for his words, a music of the rushing Dionysus - but no one listened to him anymore. He forced himself to put on a burlesque, to force himself to laugh sharply, harshly, hard, to make his sentences jump wildly, to gag just to be able to attract an audience for his terrible seriousness with artistic pleasure – but no one applauded. At last he invented a dance, a dance in the shadow of a sword, and he performed this new deadly art in front of people with scars and blood, but no one could grasp the meaning of this slapstick and the wounded passion behind this hard-packed ease. With no audience, no repercussions, this unprecedented spiritual drama that has been given to our declining century ends in the face of empty benches. No one paid even the slightest attention to how the spinning top of thought, which was spinning rapidly at the top of its strength, leaped majestically for the last time, and finally staggered to the ground: "Before death before eternity".
This "being with oneself", this "facing oneself" is the deepest meaning and the only sacred suffering of Friedrich Nietzsche's life tragedy: never before has there been such a great abundance of thoughts, such an inflated madness of feelings, such a great emptiness of the world, and this metallic impenetrable silence. He was never blessed with a brilliant opponent, so this strong will had to "dig into himself", and he had to "dig into himself" to get responses and objections from his own chest and his own tragic soul. Not from the world, but in a bloody tear, this madman of fate tore that burning passion from his own skin like Hercules tore off the shirt of Nessus, only to be able to stand naked before the ultimate truth, to stand before himself. But what kind of cold surrounds this nakedness, what kind of silence surrounds this spirit, what kind of terrible sky of clouds and lightning and thunder covers this "murderer of God", and now, since no opponent has found him, and it is difficult for him to find an opponent, he has no choice but to attack himself, "Be a man of self-knowledge and an executioner of oneself without mercy!" "Expelled from his own time and world by his own demons, even from the very frontiers of his own essence,
Shaken by an unknown frenzy,
Trembling before the sharp, icy arrows,
I'm being chased by you, ah thought!
You unspeakable, masked terrible mind!
He sometimes shuddered when he looked back with a gaze of utter horror, for he found that his life had thrown him so far away from everything that had existed and had ever lived. But there was no turning back from such a super-powerful start: he was in full consciousness and at the same time in the extreme excitement of self-absorption to fulfill the fate of Empedoclesles, foretold for him by Hölderlin, whom he loved.
There is no sky in the hero's landscape, no audience in the grand show, silence, an increasingly powerful silence surrounds the terrible cry of spiritual loneliness - this is the tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Had it not been for his own intoxicated reluctance to say yes to it, and for the sake of its uniqueness to choose and love this one and only cruelty, we would have abhorred this tragedy as one of nature's many senseless cruelties. For he willingly and soberly established this "special life" from a safe life with the deepest intuition of tragedy, and challenged the gods by the power of courage alone to "test in himself the greatest danger of the human being in which he could live." “χαιρετεδαιμονε?！” "Hello, devil!" Nietzsche and his linguistics friends proclaimed their power with a blasphemous cheer on a night of college student merriment: at midnight on a ghost-infested day, they poured full glasses of red wine out their windows on the sleeping streets of Baselville as a tribute to the unseen ghosts. It was just a brilliant joke to push one's own game with deep feelings: but the devils heard the cheers and followed the man who invited them, until this overnight game turned into a magnificent tragedy of fate. But Nietzsche never stopped this terrible demand, which seized him forcefully and carried him at a gallop: the more forcefully the hammer chiseled upon him, the more the hard stone of his will made a pleasant sound. On the red-hot anvil of pain, with each double blow, the formula used to wrap his spirit with a layer of hard armor was forged stronger and stronger, "the great formula of man, the love of fate: that man does not want anything else, does not want to go forward, does not want to go back, does not want to hide in any eternity." It is not just to bear the inevitable things, not to conceal them, but to love them. His passionate love of power overwhelmed his cry of pain with unrestrained momentum: he collapsed to the ground, crushed by the silence of the world, torn apart by himself, eroded by all the bitterness of pain, but he never raised his hands, and fate had to give up on him at last. But he also prayed for something more, for greater suffering, for deeper loneliness, for more complete suffering, for the great richness of his powers; He raised his hands not in resistance, but in supplication, in a heroic solemn supplication: "O providence of my soul, whom I have called fate, you are among me!" Above me! Please protect me and leave me a great destiny! ”
Whoever knows how to pray so greatly, will be heard.