The Portable Nietzsche (83 page)

These numbers refer to the Musarion edition.

A fragment published posthumously.

“Discord.”

“Overbearing.”

A fragment published posthumously.

“War of all against all.”

“Friends of truth.”

Wagner liked to be called “master.”

Published as section 874 of
The Will to Power
by Nietzsche's executors.

“Know thyself!”

Published as part of
The Will to Power
by Nietzsche's executors.

Nietzsche's sister's husband.

Published as part of
The Will to Power
by Nietzsche's executors.

An allusion to Nietzsche's
The Wagner Case
(1888), a polemic.

“The spirits increase, vigor grows through a wound.”

That is,
The Antichrist.

There is a German proverb: “Idleness is the beginning of all vices.”

panem et circenses,
“bread and circuses”—here changed by Nietzsche into “bread and Circe,” art being compared to the Homeric sorceress.

“One cannot think and write, except sitting.”

“Contest.”

“Self-caused.”

^“
The most real being.”

That is, Kantian.

“Zarathustra begins.” An echo of the conclusion of
The Gay Science
(1882): Nietzsche had used the first section of the Prologue of
Zarathustra
, his next work, as the final aphorism of Book Four, and given it the title:
Incipit tragoedia.

“One must kill the passions.”

The Trappist Order.

“Believe him who has tried!”

“Beer.”

“Slander.”

“I am my own heir.”

“As if he had accomplished his mission. ‘Though the power is lacking, the lust is nevertheless praiseworthy.'”

Quotation from Luther's most famous hymn,
Ein feste Burg
. In its original context,
Reich
refers to the kingdom of God.

“Intellectual love of God.”

Quotation from
The Magic Flute
.

“Either children or books.”

“I shall see myself, I shall read myself, I shall go into ecstasies, and I shall say: Is it possible that I should have had so much
esprit
?”

Wagner himself calls Parsifal “the pure fool.”

“It is unworthy of great hearts to pour out the confusion they feel.”

“Most real being.”

“More enduring than bronze.”

Varro's satire on the model of Menippus the Cynic.

See p. 668.

The coinage of a man who neither smoked nor drank coffee.

“Original sin.”

Literal translation of the Greek
idiotes,
cf. section 29, p. 601.

L'esprit souterrain
was the title of the first volume by Dostoevski that Nietzsche pickled up in 1887, in French translation.

Pandora's box.

The last three words were suppressed by Nietzsche's sister when she first published
The Antichrist
in 1895, in Volume VIII of the Collected Works. They were first made public by Hofmiller in 1931, to prove that Nietzsche must have been insane when he wrote the book. But he was, of course, thinking of Dostoevski's
The Idiot
. The references to Dostoevski in section 31 below and in section 45 of
Twilight of the Idols
should also be noted. The word “idiot” assumes a sudden significance in Nietzsche's work after his discovery of Dostocvski: see section 5 of
The Wagner Case
; section 7 in Chapter 2 of
Twilight of the Idols;
sections 11, 26, 31, 42, 51-53 of
The Antichrist;
section 2 of “The Wagner Case” in
Ecce Homo;
sections 2 and 3 of
Nietzsche contra Wagner
; the letters to Brandes and Strindberg, dated October 20 and December 7, 1888; and note 734 in
The Will to Power.

“Bringer of ill tidings” (see section 39).

Nietzsche quotes Luther's translation, and some departures from the King James Bible were found necessary in this quotation because some of its phrases are echoed in subsequent sections.

‟God, as Paul created him, is the negation of God.”

Although Nietzsche seems to have in mind a well-known etymology of the Hebrew “Havvah” (“Eva” in German), not one of the Hebrew words for snake resembles this name. Genesis 3:20 links the name with life, and the only other verse in which it figures is Genesis 4:1.

See the last quotation in section 45.

See pp. 204-205.

Judaism conceived as a poison. See note, p. 570.

I Cor. 7:2,9

Nietzsche refrains from completing the sentence, having left no doubt about his meaning: “hate the Germans.”

“How far, for heaven's sake?” Crispi was Italian prime minister.

In
Don Giovanni
.

“Flaubert is always hateful; the man is nothing, the work is all.”

The famous Swiss writer (1819-1890) whom Nietzsche admired.

Allusion to a Schiller ballad.

“To understand all is to despise all.”

Cf. C. A. Bernoulli's
Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche
(1908), which also contains brief accounts of the Prado and Chambige trials, and E. F. Podach's
Nietzsches Zusammenbruch
(1930), which features a facsimile of the letter.

But postmarked Turin, January 5.

“Are we content? I am the god who has made this caricature.”