When the Only Company You Trust Is Your Own | 3 Hours of Nietzsche For Sleep

On the fourth of July 1881 a former professor of classical philology, two years out of his chair at Basel and living on a pension of three thousand francs a year, arrived at Sils-Maria, a Romansh-speaking farming village on a neck of land between two lakes in the Upper Engadine, eighteen hundred metres up. That August, walking by Lake Silvaplana, he stopped near a large pyramidal rock and afterwards wrote a note: six thousand feet beyond man and time. He came back every summer from 1883 to 1888, to a back room in the Durisch family's house, about three metres by four, at about a franc a day. Tonight is three hours of Nietzsche for the nights when the only company you trust is your own. It follows the ten years after Basel - no home, two trunks, rented rooms, meals with strangers - and stops at the road out of the valley in September 1888. It asks whether preferring your own company is a symptom, and what a life built around solitude cost and gave. The chair at Basel at twenty-four and the resignation in 1879. The headaches, the eyes, a hundred and eighteen days lost in a bad year. Genoa, a room above the port, a spirit stove, Daybreak and The Gay Science. The Fex valley, the walking, six to eight hours a day, and the notebooks. The boulder and the Chaste peninsula. Franz Overbeck, Peter Gast, Malwida von Meysenbug, Paul Ree, Erwin Rohde. Rome in 1882, Lou Salome, Tautenburg, the Lucerne photograph, Elisabeth's letters, and the first part of Zarathustra written at Rapallo in ten days. Nice and the earthquake of 1887. Beyond Good and Evil self-published in 1886, about a hundred and fourteen copies sold in a year, then the Genealogy. Georg Brandes lecturing in Copenhagen in 1888, and the post carriage down the valley on 20 September. It will not tell you that solitude is a cure, or offer his life as a model; his freedom was bought by having nobody, and in 1883 he wrote to Overbeck that the solitude had become dangerous. It argues that being alone and being lonely are different conditions, that the distress usually comes from the comparison rather than the room, and that a man who was often happy alone still needed two people who wrote back. Read in a calm voice, at low volume, for sleep and for rest. SOURCES AND FURTHER READING Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885) - Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil (1886) - Friedrich Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) - Friedrich Nietzsche The Gay Science (1882) - Friedrich Nietzsche Twilight of the Idols (1889) - Friedrich Nietzsche Ecce Homo (1908) - Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche in His Works (1894) - Lou Salome CHAPTERS 0:00 - Your own company 6:27 - Two kinds of alone 12:07 - The resignation 17:49 - What was actually wrong 23:12 - The arithmetic of the pension 28:41 - A man with no address 34:22 - Genoa 39:35 - The economy of a boarding house 44:56 - Finding Sils-Maria 50:06 - The valley 55:13 - The room 1:00:57 - The day 1:06:35 - The walking 1:12:36 - The notebooks 1:18:06 - What he ate 1:22:14 - The bad days 1:27:42 - The boulder 1:33:02 - The peninsula 1:38:14 - The post 1:43:52 - Overbeck 1:49:22 - Peter Gast 1:54:44 - The others 2:00:21 - Lou Salome, 1882 2:05:24 - What actually damaged him 2:11:39 - Nice 2:15:56 - The books nobody bought 2:20:58 - The first reader 2:26:06 - The last summer 2:31:49 - What it cost 2:38:04 - What it gave 2:43:30 - The test 2:49:01 - What transfers 2:55:05 - The thing about the room 2:59:57 - The letters at the end 3:04:52 - The hour 3:08:38 - Sleep now PhiloPsych Sleep - serious philosophy and psychology, delivered gently, for minds that think too much at night. New long-form essays for deep rest, drawn from the thinkers who sat with the same questions you carry into the dark. A note on the record. The cause of his illness has never been established: the old certainty of syphilis has been seriously challenged, and migraine, a tumour, a vascular disorder and a retinal condition have all been proposed. Neither he nor Lou Salome ever described the proposal near Lake Orta, and of what Elisabeth reported about her, some may have had a basis and most was constructed. The book long presented as his masterwork was assembled by his sister from the unpublished notebooks, Peter Gast shaped the posthumous editions with her, and later scholarly editions had to undo much of it. The story stops on 20 September 1888 on purpose and does not follow him past it. You do not have to settle any of it tonight. #nietzsche #friedrichnietzsche #silsmaria #solitude #philosophyforsleep #psychologyforsleep