FOREWORD (Walter Kaufmann)
“Was Lou really that important?”
“The bulk of this volume is not out of proportion to the importance of its subject, for Frau Lou is more significant than Lou’s own books. In the case of most biographies the opposite may be taken for granted, but in this case the author’s reach exceeds the woman whose biography he offers us—in two ways.
First: not only does he deal with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud; we also encounter an amazing array of other German and Austrian writers and scholars. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Lou’s friendships approximate a Who Was Who of Central European intellectual life during the half-century between 1880 and 1930.”
“The whole literature on Lou’s troubled relationship to Nietzsche and Paul Rée is dated by Frau Lou.” “Lou, like Nietzsche’s sister, falsified the story. That the sister’s account was mendacious has been known for a long time, but everyone who discussed this episode without relying on the sister has invariably relied on Lou. Thus Binion makes a major contribution to the study of Nietzsche’s life and character.”
“In the last chapter we see the old Lou writing her memoirs, rewriting her life once more, fashioning a final version of events that she could not face as they had actually happened. Then we still get an account of the author’s source materials and the obstacles he faced when he visited her archives. It would be a rank abuse of his hospitality to tell this story in the Foreword, but it provides the perfect link between those last years in which Lou tried to forge her myth and this book in which the myth is finally exposed. Only after having read those pages can one fully appreciate Rudolph Binion’s immense accomplishment.”
KEY TO THE REFERENCE MATTER
“Dates are written the day first, then the month in Roman, then the year, thus: 7 VII 1897. Lou’s diary entries are cited by their dates preceded by a D, thus: D 7 VII 1897. The formula for a letter, whether published or unpublished, is addresseraddressee, date, thus: LouFreud, 27 IX 1912. Correspondents’ surnames or full names are used except in Lou’s and the following cases: B-H (Richard Beer-Hofmann); CG (Clara Gelzer); Clara (Clara Westhoff Rilke); EK (Ellen Key); Emma (Emma Wilm Flörke); FN (Friedrich Nietzsche); Frieda (Frieda von Bülow); Hanna (Hanna Bormann); Helene (Helene Klots Klingenberg); HVH (Hugo von Hofmannsthal); Ida O (Ida Overbeck); Lisbeth (Elisabeth Nietzsche, later Förster-Nietzsche); MVM (Malwida von Meysenbug); O (Franz Overbeck); RMR (Rainer Maria Rilke). An asterisk signifies an oral source, thus: *Franz Schoenberner.”
PREFACE
“Frau Lou is a psychoanalytic study of a near-mad near-genius of a woman.”
“Translating Lou was troublesome, for as she grew older her style carried the weight of her arguments more and more. Academic at first—even in her fiction—it acquired sonorous modulation and intricate articulation in her middle years. Then it went the way of compact allusiveness, as if aiming to compress all of Creation into a single, pious syllable. Tractable as is German diction, Lou strained it baroquely in the end. This compelled me to strain English even harder in order to convey her message intact. I moreover found best reason to quote her at her worst, for then her latent texts were most legible—especially when she was either solecistic or silly, which she rarely was.”
P A R T O N E . C H I L D H O O D
I. FATHER AND FATHER-GOD
Psicanalistas deviam ser proibidos de escrever biografias: “Litde Lelia was wretched amidst plenty as only a human being can be. Her trouble was psychic growing pains which fortunately can, and unfortunately must, be traced to their crude source. This was a craving for her father excited by excretion and attended by darkling visions of reentering his bowel-womb to repossess his penis.”
Mas essa bisonhice na escolha e interpretação dos temas não é o pior: estilo críptico e pouco pertinente para esse tipo de livro. Prosa poética de mau gosto. Quem entender se o que Binion descreve às páginas 6 e 7 são apenas eventos normais de infância ou cenas de estupro ganha uma balinha. Ex: “yet she was pleased to feel tiny and helpless over against him.”; “and if his strokes now felt punitive rather than voluptuous, she now had a father-god only too willing to commiserate over the sore spot.”
P. 8: “In drawing on actual people for her personages, she was opening up her ‘second world’ to the first. Yet beneath the surface, her personages were still mostly herself and her father, their fates still determined by her old father-romance.” Ainda não entendi uma linha da vida dessa garota…
“Probably rarely has a girl had everything so much her own way, averred her mother.”
“Autistic as ever, ‘awkward’ and ‘shy’ to boot, Lelia kept to herself throughout adolescence.” “Her one confidante her own age was her cousin Emma, who would daydream with her about true love.” “Lelia’s only other intimate was an uncannily clever and charming maiden aunt named Caro, who won her heart by treating her as the special girl she knew herself to be.”
ALICE ÀS AVESSAS: “Lelia ‘learned nothing’ at her gymnasium, the German Lutheran Petrischule, where at 16 she still wrote like a whimsical child of 10.”
II. GOD’S VICAR, GILLOT
“Constructions like Gillot’s were rife since Herder and Hegel had made history progressional and Bauer and Strauss had made Jesus historical.” Se isso foi 11:59, ainda estamos na meia-noite em ponto!
“Early in 1880 she went abroad with her mother to convalesce from nervous exhaustion.”
III. AFTER GILLOT
(…)
Ilegível!!!
P A R T T W O . Y O U T H
I. THE UNHOLY TRINITY
Parece que ela foi “aluna especial” ou “ouvinte” na universidade de Zurich porque não pôde se qualificar ao bacharelado.
“Paul Rée, a Schopenhauer adept in his student days, took a doctorate at Halle in 1875 with a dissertation on Aristotle’s Ethics and that same year brought out an anonymous collection of psychologistic bons mots: Psychologische Beobachtungen. In 1877 he came into his own as Positivist, Utilitarian and Darwinist all in one with an account of how conscience must have originated” Nie. tinha que fazer muitas concessões para ter amigos, já vejo!
“She took him out of her way home from Villa Mattei via the Coliseum, where she assured him beguilingly by moonlight that she was out for comradeship, not romance. Infatuated, Rée sent for help from his one close friend, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Rée had first met N. in 1873 through a common friend, the classicist and Kantian Heinrich Romundt, on arriving for a summer in Basel, where N. was professor and Romundt was visiting him. N. was then 28, Rée 23. With an old classmate of N’s, the dilettante Carl von Gersdorff, Rée attended N.’s course on the pre-Platonic philosophers.”
“in (…) 1876 (…) the two were both just then positivistically surmounting Schopenhauer’s influence,¹ N. in his Human, All Too Human and Rée in his derivation of conscience. So congenial did N. find Rée both philosophically and personally that, after ‘enjoying the lovely autumn’ for some days with him near Montreux, N. took him along on a winter’s sick leave spent in Sorrento with Malwida von Meysenbug – by her gracious provision.”
¹ À minha idade atual. Quão doloroso não foi para mim chegar a esse estágio já aos 20? Mas e então – o que fiz desses 12 anos de dianteira? “Progredi” realmente em algo mais?
“he is a moralist with the keenest vision – quite a rarity among Germans.” FN
“he developed into a genealogist of morals in point-by-point opposition to Rée.” “Perhaps I have never read anything to which I have said no to myself sentence by sentence, conclusion for conclusion, in such measure yet utterly without vexation or impatience.” Prefácio da Genealogia
“Gods were not natural forces divinized to the end of sanctifying official penalties, as Rée had it; they were tribal fathers to whom, by reason of the pain of being moral, a bad debt was felt to be owing – and growing. Moreover, religion did not merely underwrite official morality, but often enough rewrote it. For morality was transcending itself continually: today’s virtues were yesterday’s vices.” “N. too viewed the bad conscience as mankind’s mortal ailment, and at first too saw a quick individual remedy in the correction of certain intellectual errors, notably God and free will. He soon looked instead to a gradual ascendancy of mankind’s ‘intellectual conscience’, newly emergent, over mankind’s moral conscience, still at loggerheads with the herd-instinct. By 1882 he was dimly envisioning an inversion of values by ‘free thinkers’ (who would repent of their compassion, rancor and remorse [and of their repenting?]) preliminary to a transvaluation of values by a new, higher species of moral man.” Grifo meu.
“Rée harked back to premoral man, N. forward to postmoral man – to a final, as against primal, innocence to be achieved through self-mastery and self-knowledge. For only N.’s thinking was bold. Rée’s irreverent philosophy was one long writ of impeachment against a tyrannical conscience – his own.” “Each bore the marks of a pressing personal alternative: melancholia and paranoiac megalomania respectively.” “Yet all along, even as he played up Rée, he played down their differences. In HATH he called Rée ‘a master of soul-searching’ and again ‘one of the boldest and coldest thinkers’. (…) Subsequently he added: ‘Long live Réealism and my good friend!’.” Genial.
AOS 33 (estou a 2 dias do meu aniversário, 2021): “Two years later N. was released from his university duties with a decent allowance because of his health. Subject to dire headaches, eyeaches and nausea since 1873, with ever rarer interludes of euphoric relief, he suffered the worse for imagining his father’s fatal ‘softening of the brain’ to be hereditary. [a fonte aqui é uma carta a Brandes de 1888]”
Foi um projeto longamente cultivado por N. e Rée morarem e viverem juntos, porém nestes tempos de convalescença e de necessidade de eremitismo filosófico N. hesitou primeiro, para em seguida rechaçar tal projeto com firmeza: não era seu destino levar uma existência tão ‘epicurista’!
“N.’s distress on Rée’s account, while quite sincere, was only the outside story. The inside story was released to Malwida years afterwards, with a vengeance: <‘He’s a poor fellow, one must push him along’ – how often have I told myself this when his miserable, dishonest way of thinking and living revolted me. I have not forgotten the fury I felt in 1876 as I heard he would come along to you in Sorrento. And . . . in Sils-Maria I became ill at my sister’s news that he wanted to come up. [N. expressou sua vontade de não ser sob qualquer circunstância interrompido em seus trabalhos de verão, por carta, a Elizabeth.]>”
“On the outside, meanwhile, N. overrated Rée far more than was even his fond wont with friends. For Rée had no notion of N.’s mind beyond the narrow range of his own: all N. was contained for him in N.’s Réealistic sentence, ‘Every word is a prejudice’. And even within that narrow range N. was Rée’s master.” “By mail N. would exchange compliments with Rée but not ideas – for all Rée’s trying.”
Curiosamente, seu amigo também parecia sofrer dessa sinusite-dos-sábios: “I have had a headache now for some 14 months without even a minute’s let-up.’ Desabafo em carta, outubro de 1879.
E aqui eu muito agradeço Lou sequer estar sendo mencionada!
“He mothered N., nursed him, read to him to spare his eyes, but then stole his symptoms” Como não deve ter sido prato cheio e apetitoso para um psicanalista estreito escrever essas linhas!
“Both were precisionists with the pen, with a like penchant for epigram. N.’s prose was not lost to theory, however, but bacchanalianly live with it. It reveled in his thinking as he himself did; and amidst his solitude, his thinking ran riot with him. Timid as he was, it knew no taboos, so that he took wicked delight in it – while also shuddering at it as, beginning in August 1881, he conceived in turn the ‘eternal recurrence’, the ‘overman’, etc.”
“And then it was that N. chose to <return ‘to men’>, as he put it – to come down from the mountain so as ‘to become human again’, like his Zarathustra in The Gay Science, then in preparation.”
Rée teria enviada uma máquina de escrever a N., que quebrou no caminho.
N. dizia de si mesmo em suas cefaléias horrendas: 7/8 (sete oitavos) cego.
“Between times they went to see Sarah Bernhardt, who, overplaying Camille, burst a blood vessel on stage – ‘an unbearable impression.’”
“Your brother uses the typewriter all the time, only his blind groping for keys does give him lots of trouble.” Rée Lisbeth
“Greet the Russian girl for me, if that makes any sense: I am greedy for souls of that species. In fact, in view of what I mean to do these next 10 years, I need them! Matrimony is quite another story. I could consent at most to a 2-year marriage” N. escreve nessa mesma carta que logo após essa frase a máquina de escrever “parou”.
“Well before then, Lou was already counting N. in on her projected residential salon by reason of Rée’s and Malwida’s respective versions of him as the veriest positivist and veriest idealist.”
Gillot, o preceptor e quiçá proponente a marido de Lou, tendo enviado uma carta de censura sobre seus “projetos devassos” de se encontrar com dois homens (uau, arrebatadoramente imoralista!), Lou respondeu declarando sua emancipação, por assim dizer. Claro que nesse ínterim Rée foi sempre um joguete de seu coquetismo. Agora vinha mais um para diverti-la.
“As for his [Reé] taking her [Lou] home on foot after midnight, arm in arm: what if someone had recognized them?! ‘And what would R. have done had an officer or anyone else been unpleasant to you – fought a duel?!!’ Malwida”
“Malwida had glimpsed a first truth about Lou: she was not unmindful of sex and convention after all.”
O PRIMEIRO ENCONTRO (NA PRAÇA DE SÃO PEDRO, ROMA, ITÁLIA): “His hands incomparably beautifully and nobly wrought, his unusually small and delicately shaped ears, his fine, highly expressive mouth-lines, almost fully concealed by an ample moustache combed over them, his placid features in general together with his gentle laughter, his noiseless way of talking, his cautious, wistful gait, shoulders a little bent, his ultra-simple neat attire”
“His defective eyesight lent his features a quite special magic in that they did not reflect varying outer impressions but only what was passing through him internally. They looked inwards, yet at the same time into the distance”
“In return, N.’s eyes could barely make Lou out, while to his ears her voice was somewhat rasping.” Hahaha…
“‘It is unpleasant to be able to do nothing but plead in a matter so close to one’s heart’, she wrote Rée on April 25. [para N. postergar sua estada]”
“N. cannot answer for how he will feel tomorrow, but would like to introduce himself to your mother before we meet again at the lakes.”
“N. was not fit to leave before another week” “he explained to Lou that her chaste ménage à trois was not all that simple even with chaperon, as I should consider myself duty-bound to offer you my hand so as to protect you from what people might say; otherwise, etc. etc.” Que tempos!
“Between times N. presented himself to Lou’s mother, who warned him that Lou’s self-accounting was strictly fantastical; he listened with one sharp ear.”
Finalmente no começo de maio o trio se encontrou novamente.
“He spoke to her of the eternal recurrence, which made self-denial eternally foolish, and of his son-to-be, Zarathustra, due to transcend the slave morality of good-and-evil as the historic Zarathustra had transcended the master morality of good-and-bad.” Nunca um flerte foi tão imediatamente alto nível na História!
“Lou was just not his buxom type”
“Ida Overbeck later remembered him as then ‘most excited’ and ‘most hopefully confident’. For, she explained, ‘N. had given himself to the hope of having found his alter ego in Miss Salomé – of working with her, and through her help, toward his goals.’”
“That this photo was all Lou’s idea emerges from RéeLou (late May 1882): the Stibbe doctor would examine her as ‘revenge for the photographing: I shall be as stubborn (about it) as you (were)’, and from RéeLou (mid-June 1882): ‘Picture arrived yesterday. N. superb; you and I hideous, can dispute the prize for ugliness between us. You see, Lou, for once you were not right after all.’ FNLou (28 May 1882) was more gallant: ‘Oh the bad photographer! And yet: what a lovely silhouette atop the rack-waggon!’”
(*) “Natural science was presumably N.’s idea, but 1890a:224 is the sole source for the stock contention that he wanted to study it 10 years so as to ground the eternal recurrence physically (space and matter finite, time infinite), which is likely as fanciful as the neighboring one (ibid., 224-25) that, cursory study having disclosed the impossibility of ever grounding it, he clung to it only the faster (cf. Schlechta, Fall, 30ff.)” O que não é o tal do telefone sem fio, Mr. Graham!
O DISCRETO: “N. desired Lou’s ‘very existence’ to be kept secret from his mother and sister. Son and twice grandson of preachers, N. did not ridicule his family on account of its ‘Naumburg virtue’ without reverencing it on the same account, even unto fantasies of noble lineage: in nothing, declared Overbeck, was his ‘caprice’ more conspicuous. His sister, still his childhood sweetheart, had since HATH come to idolize his life as against his books, and he cherished her idolatry at heart even as he dreaded her jealousy.”
“At all odds, Rée was already on intimate Du terms with Lou in Lucerne behind N.’s (and everyone else’s) back – as a ‘little brother’ with his ‘little sister’, to be sure, yet even fraternally he craved Lou’s exclusive affection.”
“Rée’s aim of turning Lou over to N. was reversing itself: already he was aiming to turn her against N..”
II. FORM PILLAR TO POST
Paulão visivelmente agindo como fura-olho pelas costas via cartas: “I am and shall remain entirely your friend alone; I have no scruples about behaving a little crookedly, a little falsely, a little mendaciously and deceitfully toward anyone except you. Out of my friendship to you I make a cult; I regard as a sin – (what, Mr. Antimoralist?) – well, I mean: if I did or said anything false, dishonorable, unfriendly, crooked with respect to you, I would have a feeling just like the one believers may have after committing a great sin. And from this special uprightness I draw a justification for being false in general” Escreve como se falasse ao telefone…
“Are we really going to see each other again – or have I only dreamed it!” P.R.
“R. is from head to toe a better friend than I am or can be: mark well the distinction!”
“Your Flush of Dawn is now my only companion. It entertains me in bed better than would visits, shopping, and travel dust. Could I but say: see you soon! Only remain so cheerful and healthy, everything will turn out very well.”
“Let me know how you propose to arrange your time from Bayreuth on and what cooperation from me you are counting on. I now badly need mountains and forests: not only health but even more The Gay Science is driving me into solitude: I want to finish it.”
“Naumburg is a frightful place for my health.”
“But I would like to insist very strongly that you not get all wrapped up in N.’s work. I should have preferred your going your own way mentally, just to prove for once that, even in these highest realms of thought, a woman can stand alone and attain independent results.” Malwida – Não se estamos falando do maior filósofo da Europa moderna!
“Above all, I hope N. himself steers another course than in his latest writings”
“NEVER did I think that you should ‘read aloud and write’ for me, but I very much wished that I might be your TEACHER. To tell the whole truth: I am now seeking people who could be my heirs; I carry something around with me absolutely not to be read in my books – and am seeking the finest, most fertile soil for it. Observe my self-seeking!”
“I was downright bowled over by the fact of having acquired a ‘new person’ after overly strict seclusion and renunciation of all love and friendship.”
“tragically, N. alone in his day and age knew how far above that day and age he stood.”
“I am now still occupied with very fine matters of language: the final decision on the text requires the most scrupulous ‘listening’ to word and sentence. Sculptors call this work of finishing ‘ad unguem’.”
“As for Parsifal, on July 26 she stood through the first performance looking duly transfixed, tone-deaf though she was.”
“I hate it when someone does something commonplace and then calls it by a fine name. (…) this talk of their living together was sheer drivel; even assuming that the girl had been quite ideally pure-minded, her habits of life were so different from ours. Fritz is so painfully orderly, exacting, and ascetically inclined” EN
“Lou’s earliest Nietzschean apologists themselves (Bernoulli, Halévy, Andler, Hofmiller) all maintained that she was a passionate Wagnerite—indeed, that this was the root of the evil.”
“One day a bird flew by me, and I, superstitious like all solitary people who stand at a turning of their way, believed I had seen an eagle. Now the whole world is at pains to prove to me I am mistaken—and there is urbane European prattle about it. Who is better off now—I, who as they say was ‘fooled,’ who spent a whole summer in a lofty world of hope on account of this bird omen, or those who are ‘not to be fooled’?—And so forth. Amen. . . . —Now I am ‘a bit in the wilderness’ and pass many a sleepless night. But no despondency! And that demon was, like everything that now crosses by path (or seems to), heroic-idyllic.” FNPT (Peter Gast)
Relato de EN das palavras de Lou: “he’s a madman who doesn’t know what he wants, he’s a common egoist who wanted only to exploit her mental gifts, she doesn’t care a hoot for him but if now they didn’t go to a city together it would mean she weren’t ‘great’, that’s why Fritz doesn’t want to study with her—so as to shame her. What’s more, Fritz would be crazy to think she should sacrifice herself to his aims or that they had the same aims at all, she knew nothing of his aims. Besides, were they to pursue any aims together, 2 weeks wouldn’t go by before they were sleeping together, men all wanted only that, pooh to mental friendship! and she knew first-hand what she was talking about, she had been caught twice already in that kind of relationship. [com ‘papai-Deus’ e a porra dum padre-tutor!]”
“As I, now naturally beside myself, said that might well be the case with her Russians only she didn’t know my pure-minded brother, she retorted full of scorn (word for word): ‘Who first soiled our study plan with his low designs, who started up with mental friendship when he couldn’t get me for something else, who first thought of concubinage—your brother!’”
“utterly out of my element: never in my life had I heard such indecent talk (here I have reproduced it all with propriety at that). And a 21-year-old girl was saying these things, especially about men generally and my brother in particular, and when on top of it all she had proposed their living together!! What is one to think of such a girl?! In the evening, when we were in Tautenburg and Fritz was out looking for a place for us to stay, she broke out again in a fury against Fritz and became downright grossly indecent, as when she said full of derision: ‘just don’t go thinking that I care beans for your brother or am in love with him, I could sleep in the same room with him without getting worked up.’ Would you believe it possible? I too was altogether beside myself and shouted at her repeatedly: ‘Stop this indecent talk!’ ‘Pooh,’ she said, ‘with Rée I talk a lot more indecently.’ She had also told me Rée had told her that Fritz was thinking of a concubinage. So now I told her: All right, I would ask his mother, whereupon she was furious and threatened to get back at me, and she did. I was utterly miserable and didn’t sleep a wink. . . . Oh what a martyrdom for my sensibility the whole story was! . . . The moment she believed she could draw no further advantage from his fame she fell upon him like a wild animal and tore his good name and reputation to bits and trampled on them. . . . The girl is not out to marry Fritz, she just wants to become famous through him. She wants to marry only a rich man because she needs lots of money and has none.”
“Again Lisbeth’s account was in substance unquestionably faithful throughout. It depicted a veritable hysterical outburst on Lou’s part modulated by an impish impulse to make Lisbeth squirm in her straight laces. Lisbeth was indeed shocked—for life.”
AH, A TURMINHA DA PSICANÁLISE! “In after years Lou herself, even while officially scouting the whole vulgar incident, represented the contents of her tirade equivalently in diverse contexts; as to its form, in old age she projected the hysteria onto Lisbeth by having her vomit in shock”
“Heavens, she had never imagined I still had such retarded views, so what if he had intended concubinage? That would be nothing degrading surely, they were above conventionality so it couldn’t degrade Fritz and she hadn’t meant it to.” EN
“Rée, then heading for Helgoland to wait on Lou’s pleasure, did his best to sustain the lovers’ quarrel by mail. He took it out especially on Nietzsche’s shift of philosophical course. By mid-August, however, he was reduced to taking it out on his own jealousy. For through a diary installment Lou told him about having spent a radiant August 14 with Nietzsche away from Lisbeth ‘in the quiet, dark pine forest alone with the sunshine and squirrels’, adding: ‘Conversing with Nietzsche is uncommonly lovely . . . but there is quite special charm in the meeting of like thoughts and like emotions; we can almost communicate with half words. . . . Only because we are so kindred could he take the difference between us, or what seemed to him such, so violently and painfully. . . . The content of a conversation of ours really consists in what is not quite spoken but emerges of its own from our tacit exchanges. (…) But is it good for him to spend the whole day from morning to night in conversation with me, hence away from his work? When I asked him this today, he nodded and replied: But I do it so seldom and am enjoying it like a child. The same evening, though, he said: I ought not to live long in your vicinity. We often recollect our time together in Italy and . . . he said softly: monte sacro—I have you to thank for the most bewitching dream of my life.’ Lou came close to perceiving a sorry truth: in nothing was she so akin to Nietzsche as in her passion for half-spoken words that denied as well as implied their unspoken half.”
“What will become of him? He cannot again devote so much enthusiasm and energy to a cause.¹ A second love is no love. And will anything come of this one? Besides, there is subtle charm to the fact that one often does not clearly understand what he is saying and so supposes more behind it than is there.² Snailie [apelidinho mongolóide entre a puta e R.] will laugh and say pure envy is speaking out of me. Perhaps—”² O limitado Rée
¹ Os maiores livros de Nietzsche ainda estavam todos por ser escritos.
² Já devemos congratular este simplório pela astúcia de entender que havia algo que não podia entender na filosofia nietzschiana…
“And I’m somewhat jealous too meanwhile, naturally—understandably. . . . Just you wait, Snailie. [Smeagol] . . . Now that you’re friends again with Nietzsche, enough! More you don’t need, do you hear, Snailie?” Patético.
É a historiografia dos fortes? O que é ‘fortes’?
III. “A PITY FOREVER”
“TALK HAD set them asunder; talk brought them back together. Morning, noon, and night the two talked—in the pine forest, on an inn terrace beneath lindens, along precipitous chamois paths, in her room and in his. They talked of unholy things—of squeamishness about suffering as inhibited delight in it (‘we did not dare look at each other afterwards’) and, over a cognac (‘Ah, how foul it tasted!’, he exclaimed), of his potential for madness. More academically, he argued the original ascendancy of the ‘herd instinct’ over Rée’s constant: egoism. Yet religion was, he later remarked, ‘really our sole topic’. They discussed how each had relinquished his childhood faith—he all at once and effortlessly, she with a painful struggle of mind against heart.”
“Odd—how in our talks, without meaning to, we always wind up on the precipice; anyone listening to us would think 2 devils were conferring.” L.
“Nietzsche found Lou’s prose sorely wanting yet readily corrigible.”
“She labored her diary for his scrutiny too. ‘I have excessive confidence in his power as a teacher’, she entered on August 14. By August 18, however, he has ‘given up on being my teacher; he says I should never have such a prop’ – which on their terms meant never be a woman.”
“She resolved on Nietzsche as author, in lieu of woman as such, as the subject of her first full-scale study.” “She had caught him at the ideal moment: in transition – or, as he preferred, transcendence. After 6 years of impassioned positivistic self-restraint, he was about to burst into didactics and song. [?] With his help, she found that he would she himself (sic) a new philosophic purpose in order to deliver himself from the pain of instinctual discord whenever an old one lost its grip on him, and that he would face up to each new purpose as to ‘something cut off from himself and to be endured by him’ – whereas she would struggle painfully toward her one (unspecified) goal felt to be an innermost necessity.”
“So ended Lou’s Tautenburg diary. From merely romanticizing his every sign of fondness for her, she had gone on to divinize N. in her own likeness.”
“‘Two things my philosophy forbids me unconditionally: 1. regret, 2. moral indignation. Do be sweet again, dear Llama!’ Llama stayed sour, and Nietzsche shortly reported to Overbeck: I have the Naumburg virtue against me, there is a real break between us – and even my mother so forgot herself with one remark that I packed my things and left for Leipzig in the morning.’ He was to specify thereafter: ‘My mother called me a disgrace to my father’s grave.’”
“I have no call at all today for praise or blame – a further reason to write no letters.”
FNL “Read Sanctus Januarius once in context! There stands my entire private morality as the sum of my requirements for existence: they prescribe only an ought, in case I do not want to myself.”
“Lou at all odds read Sanctus Januarius – and blithely took the passage exhorting an estranged friend to be one with candor and good grace for a message to Rée. § Rée looked just a bit contemptible to Lou after Tautenburg – and felt rather more so. On a note of apology, he promised N. a frank talk in Leipzig. Under the same cover he announced that Lou had won him over to N.’s view that egoism had been celebrated before coming to be reviled: he was back at playing second fiddle, only now under Lou’s baton.”
“‘stellar friendship: our earthly ways have parted, but let us trust that, though we may yet become earthly enemies, our celestial orbits will cross again sometime’ Science. N. unquestionably had Wagner on his mind when penning this passage (though Hofmiller, without dissenting, located the germ of it in FNO, 14/11/81) – but R. may have already been at the back of his mind then and certainly was in 9/1882).”
“the oldest signification of ‘good’ was distinguished, powerful, rich, and of ‘bad’ lowly, weak, poor: this was Rée’s one new Nietzschean thesis since his Ursprung.” Ao que consta, Lou ‘convenceu’ Rée de que a filosofia de N. era mais correta que seu ponto de vista liberal-pragmático.
“With that, Rée was ready to crawl contritely out of the Trinity.”
“as I have lost my natural sister, a preternatural one is due me.”
“Between times, Lou was again N.’s self-willed schoolgirl. They discussed her plans for a study of religious history as well as her draft sketch of his life and works.”
Rée era o passivo da não-relação.
“I do not like feelings where they reconverge in their circulation, [?] for that is the point of false pathos, at which truth and integrity of feeling are lost. Is this what is estranging me from N.?” Ficou xonadinha e não quis dar o braço a torcer.
Lou “Maia”: ela e o véu – e nada mais!
Dedicatória no exemplar de HDH:
Freundin – sprach Kolumbus – traue
Keinem Genuesen mehr!
Immer start er in das Blaue,
Fernstes zieht ihn allzusehr!
Wen er liebt, den lockt erg erne
Weit hinaus in Raum und Zeit –
Über uns glänzt Stern bei Sterne,
Um uns braust die Wigkeit.”
“The Columbus theme in Nietzsche’s poetry goes back to his ‘Colombo’ of 1858, one of his many youthful poems about sailing the high seas – but the only actual sailing he ever did was that to and from Sicily in 1882.”
“Even writing letters to my sister is no longer advisable – except for those of the most innocuous sort (I sent her another letter full of merry verses lately).” Nietzsche a Overbeck, 27?/8/1883
“How shallow people are to me today! Where is there a sea left in which one can still really drown? I mean a person.”
“Then he moved on to Columbus’s city, from which he had originally sailed to meet Lou – in the wrong direction. He had come full circle.”
“All nearness makes one so insatiable – and in the last resort I am an insatiable fellow on the whole. – From time to time we will see one another again, won’t we?” NR
“Mind? What is mind to me! What is knowledge to me! I esteem nothing but impulses – and I would swear we have something in common here.”
de espírito-livre a corpo-livre lá vai um, lá vão dois, três abismos!…
“Affects are devouring me. Dreadful pity, dreadful disillusion, dreadful feeling of wounded pride – how can I stand it any longer? Isn’t pity a feeling out of hell? What should I do? Every morning I despair of lasting the day. I no longer sleep – what good does 8 hours’ walking do! Where do I get these violent affects from! Oh some ice! But where is there ice left for me? This evening I’ll take opium till I lose my mind.”
“A cat’s character: that of a beast of prey posing as a domestic animal. Nobleness as reminiscence about association with noble people; strong will, but with no great object; without diligence or cleanliness, without civil probity; cruelly misplaced sensuality. (…) Capable of enthusiasm for people without love for them, yet love for God: need for effusion (…) only some basic mishap in your upbringing and development has temporarily crippled your good will for this. Just think: that cat-egoism unable to love any longer, that professing nothing together with a feeling for life . . . and then knowledge as a pleasure among pleasures. And if I understand you at all: these are all voluntary and self-imposed tendencies with you – for as much as they are not symptoms”
A MACACA DE ZARATUSTRA: “In her loss of herself she was that strongest offense to him: ‘the caricature of my ideal.’”
“His sister – who, according to a draft to Malwida, ‘regards Lou as a poisonous reptile to be destroyed at all costs’” Só porque uma mulher não presta, não quer dizer que sua inimiga preste.
“Souls such as yours, my dear sister, I do not like: and I like them least when they are morally bloated.”
“For heaven’s sake, what do these little girls of 20 think who have pleasant feelings of love and nothing to do but be sick now and again and lie in bed?”
“Formerly I was inclined to take you for a vision, for the earthly apparition of my ideal. Observe: I have poor eyes. . . . Had I created you, I would have given you better health, to be sure, but first of all some things that matter far more”
“Twins spiritually, they were sexually the titillating reverse. Only the same taboo on both sides brought their mating to a stalemate as its sexual motive loomed lurid to them both” mating!
“I tense all my fibers for self-mastery – but I have lived in solitude and fed on ‘my own fat’ too long, so again I am the more readily racked by my affects. Could I but sleep!” NO
“Today something occurred to me in passing that made me laugh hard: she actually treated me like a 20-year-old student – a quite permissible approach for a girl of 21 – like a student who had fallen in love with her. But sages like me love only ghosts. Woe if ever I love a human being – I would soon go to ruin. Man is too imperfect a thing.”
“But Lou, what letters you write! Little vengeful schoolgirls write that way: what use have I for such paltry stuff? Do understand: I want you to raise yourself before me, not lower yourself still further.”
“In Lucerne I gave you my piece on Schopenhauer: I told you that my basic views were in it and that I believed they would be yours too. You should have read it and said no then: much would have been spared me.”
“What would you reply if I asked you: are you honest? are you incapable of duplicity? . . . In your mouth, such a poem as To Pain is a deep untruth. In such matters I hate all superficiality. Only a high purpose can make people of your sort bearable to others.”
“No, my dear Lou, we are nowhere near ‘forgiving’. I cannot shake forgiveness out of my sleeve after the offense has had 4 months in which to burrow into me. . . . Adieu, my dear Lou, I shall not see you again. Preserve your soul from such doings and make good with others (…) Adieu, dear Lou, I did not read your letter through, but I read too much already.”
“Fast upon his ‘adieu’ to Lou, and just 9 months after meeting her, he delivered the first book of So Spoke Zarathustra, written in a trance, as if from inner dictation, in 10 ‘absolutely serene and fresh January days’.” A melhor contribuição (maculada, fenomênica concepção) desta mulher ao mundo!
“Now on February 13, 1883, his first Zarathustra was ready for the printer – ‘in just the holy hour in which Richard Wagner died’, he later specified.”
“My severance from my family is beginning to appear to me as a true blessing; oh, if you knew all I have had to overcome on this score (since my birth)! I do not like my mother, and hearing my sister’s voice upsets me: I have always fallen ill when together with them.”
“With spring (…) the second book of Z. emerged.”
“As for the typewriter, it is on the blink like everything weak men take in hand for a while, be it machines or problems or Lous.” NLisb.
“Things are moving again. My sister wants her revenge on this Russian – well and good, only so far I have been the victim of her every initiative. She does not even notice bloodshed and the most brutal possibilities hardly an inch off.” NO – poderia estar falando da bestialidade alemã de décadas à frente, sem qualquer reparo!
“And do not worry about my false footing with my sister; the truth is that all my footings so far with everyone have been false: she was at least as much affronted as I was, with good right too, and if now she means to work it out for Lou to be sent back to Russia, she will be doing more good if she succeeds than I with my asceticism. Of a sudden Dr. Rée steps into the foreground: to have to relearn about someone with whom I shared love and trust for years is frightful.” NIda O.
“From all that I have now learned – of far too late! – these 2 persons, Rée and Lou, are not worthy of licking the soles of my shoes. Excuse the all too human metaphor! (…) Schopenhauer-style ‘pitying’ has so far always done the top damage in my life”
“About suicide – a thought that every lengthy letter from N. in over half a year has expressed – I feel quite as you do: nothing can make it acceptable except desperation.” OGast
“I would delight in giving you a lesson in practical morality with a few bullets: maybe in the best case I could manage to deter you once and for all from dealing in morality, which calls for clean hands, Dr. Rée, not clammy fingers!” NR
Ao irmão de Rée, teria dito algo que se aproxima, na tradução, a macaca fétida e esquálida com enchimento (falsos peitos). Adorável!
“Enmity is incompatible with my whole philosophy and way of thinking”
RE-JOYCE WITH YOUR INNER POSSIBILITIES!
o rato roebens (rói bem!) a (consciência da) roupa do rei de remorsuras e inteleitos
mas ao pai de todos os reis, a punição mais severa –
a impossibilidade da reconciliação com um seu igual em temperamento.
…posto que se aproveitam de minha nobreza!
“I no longer know how to live; it is on my mind continually.”
Se misturar com a ralé, Nietzsche, é da vida! – segue o jogo… Cada um à parte, com sua parte.
“Never before did I hate anyone – not even Wagner, whose perfidy went well beyond Lou’s. For the first time I feel humbled.” Imagina-te filho de um Wagner, e não de um pastor que morreu sem dar trabalho…
“long a stranger to practical life, I act 49 times out of 50 on a motive no one seeing me thinks of, so that I almost always arouse misunderstanding and wind up my own victim.”
engolindo e vomitando sapos como devora-se o pão de cada dia, mas não a ponto de estar cego a quem diabos sou ou devenho…
“Such pain (it was as if a knife had been put to all my sore spots at once!) is a high distinction. My body and soul are so constituted that I can suffer frightfully in both: and as for my soul, I was last year like someone who for many, many years running had experienced nothing: whence my soul was without any skin or natural protective device.”
“Given her energy of will and originality of mind, she was headed for something great; given her practical morality, though, she may well belong rather in a penitentiary or madhouse.” O clubinho das Quartas-Feiras não deixa de ser ambos: por fora, ‘something great’ (de acordo a pseudo-historiografia do séc. XX), porém um asilo ou penitenciária até a medula! Nada menos que profético, meu caro e jamais superestimado ídolo!
“you cannot imagine how this madness rages in my day and night.”
Ajude-me a sobreviver mais 15 meses! = foi ele, mas poderia ser eu neste fim de maio, o segundo maio da pandemia!
“The separation from you threw me back into the deepest melancholy, and the whole return trip I was lost to evil black sentiments, including true hate for my sister, who for one year now has deprived me of all self-control with ill-timed silence and ill-timed talk”
“He nonetheless left for Naumburg [cidade das duas víboras-de-família] a few days later – and there, in a month of being tirelessly chided and taunted, the crisis passed. Lisbeth had found ‘something absolutely distracting’: anti-Semitism, the highest lesson she had drawn from the Trinity fiasco. That month Naumburg celebrated her engagement to Bernhard Förster, who was laying plans for Aryan colony in Paraguay.”
“By April he had broken with Lisbeth again – this time ‘radically’, for ‘between a vengeful anti-Semitic goose and me, conciliation is impossible’.”
“Despite all this forfeiture, and for all his show of anguish and fury, he surmounted the sentimental casualty of ‘82 more rapidly, more fully, and more healthily than either of his 2 erstwhile consorts.” [!]
IV. LOU WITHOUT NIETZSCHE
– His is a beautiful mouth.
– But, Miss Salomé, how would you know? His mouth is overcast by a formidable moustache.
– Yes, but when he opens his mouth (and how often I did speak with him!) I see his lips perfectly.
“too odd a girl to be easily made out . . . a likable, winning, truly feminine being who renounces all womanly resources in the struggle for existence and instead takes up men’s weapons with a certain harsh exclusiveness. Sharp judging and, as it turns out, condemning of everything; no trace of mercy, so dear to woman; clear resoluteness in every word, yet her character only appears the more one-sided for being so resolute in its one direction; music, art, poetry are discussed, to be sure, but gauged by a strange standard: not pure joy over their beauty, pleasure in their form, comprehension of their substance, poetic enjoyment with heart and soul, no – only a cold, too often negative, corrosive philosophizing about them.” Ludwig Hütter, filósofo alemão, resumindo o caráter e a mente inócuos da ‘valley girl’ Lou a Malwida
“Fidelio was ‘not bad’ – to cite one small example.” (Ignora-se se se refere a Rée ou Lou – mas faz diferença?)
“I dislike that skepticism which picks holes in everything and yet can offer nothing positive.”
“Deussen¹ was, like Romundt, an old friend of N.’s, and Stein a new enthusiast – the one sort being then about as rare as the other.
¹ FN, Genealogy, III:17, called Deussen ‘Europe’s first real expert in Indian philosophy.”
“Nie.’s occult sway over ‘our friends’ brought home to her his superiority as nothing else could – to the detriment of her chosen alternative to him.”
“The Danish cultural historian Georg Brandes, later N.’s 1st notable publicist, evidently escaped detection.” (Aludindo provavelmente a sua possível origem judia – e Paul Rée era um anti-semita!)
“In the spring of 1883 Lou and Rée urged a friend of Brandes, the brilliant young sociologist and ardent Nietzschean of the first hour Ferdinand Tönnies, ‘with friendly-violent insistence’ to join them on a trip to the Engadin.”
Paulsen, outro amigo do “círculo”, a Tönnies: “though I by no means like leaving you alone to the Rées and Nietzsches, I much enjoy conversing with Rée but do not expect I could live close to them. There is something morbid there…”
TÖLisb., 1/9/1900: “I believe Georg Brandes also first heard his name [N.] from me, in the winter of 1879/80 at Friedrich Paulsen’s house”
Tödo mundo cai no cönto dessa sereia: “She is really an altogether extraordinary being: so much cleverness in a 21-year-old girl would almost make your flesh creep were it not for her truly tender disposition and utter demureness. She is a phenomenon that must be seen from close up to be believed. And a single look suffices to annihilate any thought of a ‘woman of loose ways’, as the preacher says: cut off both my hands if I am mistaken!”
“On July 26 Tönnies struck the first sour note by complaining of senility as he turned 28.”
“There, Lou forgave Tönnies only pro forma and would not see him alone, much less let him call her ‘dear Loulou’ as of old.” HAHAHAHAHA! O irônico é que Tönnies não cometeu nenhuma gafe ou indelicadeza (“dar em cima dela”, seria a 1ª suspeita de quem lê), não nesse sentido: para Lou e Rée, que o incumbiram de uma missão – ver Nietzsche e convencê-lo a arranjar as pazes entre os 3 – ele fracassou além do permitido ao sequer ter conseguido tocar no assunto durante sua visita. Diz em carta que “os olhos semi-cegos porém penetrantes do meu interlocutor me preveniram de qualquer iniciativa”.
“He bought Lou a copy of Zarathustra I and read to her from it. She was not a pleased father.” Hahahahaha!
“N.’s mid-summer fury [nas cartas cheias de invectivas, a ela, a Rée, ao irmão de Rée e à mãe de Lou! – sem falar das piores ainda, de Elizabeth] had left Lou doubly apprehensive of forcible repatriation” A família Nietzsche era tão influente a ponto de sujar a honra da virgenzinha e torná-la persona non grata na Alemanha? Ou Na Europa inteira, já que esses pseudo-intelectuais faziam viagens quase toda semana para diferentes pontos da Itália, principalmente… Aqui entendo o sentido: a mãe de Lou seria convencida a cortar as ‘finanças’ da idle girl…: “The point was to acquire a profession in any case and maybe even a livelihood just in case.”
Desnecessário dizer que ninguém do “círculo” apreciou o hoje imortal 1º volume do Zaratustra. O próprio circunspecto Peter Gast teria dito, tolamente: “Eu acho que a doença afeta sua escrita”.
“Sua tática defensiva (permanecer fora da Prússia por 18 meses e estabelecer-se profissionalmente) era válida somente contra a família Rée; mas ela se preocupava sumamente com a sua. Meio século depois ela ainda insistiria: ‘Eles tentavam me deserdar de volta para casa’ – acrescentando, incoerentemente, que sua família concordara, então, com seus planos de publicar um livro como meio de obter uma ‘permissão de residir no estrangeiro’.” “Im Kampf um Gott [o wannabe-book] – Um esforço por um Deus, um romance à dupla chave [double clef, seja lá o que isso significa] –, recounted Lou’s Nietzsche experience not only disguised, but modified in accordance with her attendant hopes and fears. Her narrator-hero was Kuno (Nico), a preacher’s son who, having lost the paternal Faith in his youth, seeks to override the resultant ‘inner conflict’ by setting himself successive intellectual tasks contrary to his inclinations.” E essa BABOSEIRA vem da pena de quem achou Zaratustra ruim? Ok.
“Lou’s allowance from home may have been cut in 1883 (in any case Rée escravoceta paid most of their way).”
No “romance” a personagem louaniana recusa uma proposta de Kuno em casamento; Kuno sai da cidade aliviado; Lou comete suicídio envenenando-se! Patético. E depois o romance se prolonga, com Kuno voltando e conhecendo uma filha sua com Lou, crescida, de quem esconde a identidade, e com quem tem um caso. Nauseante. Três vezes patético!
“Through Margharita’s inner misgivings over her cat-egoism, Lou was retracting her final, self-justificatory letters to N.; through Margharita’s noble shamming of depravity, Lou was roundly refuting N.’s final indictment of her; through M.’s suicide, Lou was living up to a remark of N.’s, proudly noted by her, about how a nature as ‘concentrated’ as hers really ought to issue in a deed.” Parabéns a Binion por analisar essa merda com tanto esmero – páginas e páginas!
“More immediately it was a secret message to N. (like ‘Märchen’s love-recognition at Nico-end’): the declaration of a love that could never be. In the spring of 1884 the hapless lovers communicated indirectly, probably through Romundt. N. learned that he had ‘actually done her much harm’ the preceding summer as also that she was in Meran with Rée and about to publish ‘something on religious affects’. She on her side heard that N. was ready to resume relations.”
“she was in Munich afterwards with Stein, whom she engaged to plead before N. for a reconcilement – and mention her novel to him. Then Stein visited Sils for 3 enchanting days beginning August 26. He not only mentioned the novel, but also, N. told his mother, ‘spoke with the highest regard of Dr. Rée’s character and of his love for me – which did me much good.’ As for the plea, it went unheard, having perhaps been inaudible.”
“Lou was back in Berlin by December, when her novel appeared. It brought Henri Lou, (?) besides rave reviews, a satchel-load of fan mail. One enthusiast declared: I and a whole circle of kindred spirits to whom I took your confession wish to express our warm and sincere gratitude’” Zzzzzz…
“My friend Ebbinghaus called it ‘nun’s fantasies’.” Deussen
“Overbeck himself judged it ‘the most astonishing book I have read this year.’ He subsequently sent it to N.’s old friend the classical philologist Erwin Rohde, who ‘read it with much interest. For all its great faults (its bodilessness, ghostly spirituality, etc.), it is enticing by virtue of the pure ardor and genuine sentiment bursting forth throughout.’” N. também leu o livrito.
“A mulher deseja se tornar independente, então ela começa a esclarecer o homem acerca da ‘mulher enquanto tal’: isso é um dos piores progressos no enfeiamento geral da Europa.” Além do Bem e do Mal
“Considero o verdadeiro amigo das mulheres aquele que assim as aconselha hoje: mulier taceat de muliere (mulheres devem silenciar sobre a mulher)!”
“quando a mulher tem tendências intelectuais, amiúde ela não é sexualmente saudável”
“alguém de gênio é insofrível quando lhe faltam ao menos duas coisas: gratidão e asseio”
“quem, para salvar sua reputação, jamais sacrificou, pelo menos uma vez, – a si mesmo?”
“Eterno masculino” (cunhado por Goethe): a característica de quem sabe, reconhece e exalta as mulheres mais nobres.
“Toda sua seção sobre as mulheres em Beyond está repleta de Louísmos virados contra Lou, muito além de seus desertos [Aqui não fica claro o que eu deveria traduzir por ‘well beyond her deserts’ – As puerilidades e futilidades da mulher em geral, de Lou Salomé? Dos aforismos sobre o feminino que Lou tinha elaborado e que N. corrigiu com paciência?] [ou carências?] (ecoando, entretanto, [O que é que ‘ecoava’? o deserto, ou os ‘louísmos’ de N.? ou os louísmos da própria Lou?] o discurso zombeteiro da mulher como ente muito mais talhado para gerar um filho que para competir com o homem): foi sem dúvida a pior conseqüência intelectual de seu encontro.” Se Binion diz!
“Convencer o homem a tê-la em alta consideração; para em seguida, implicitamente, acreditar na estima que o homem nutre por ela: quem sabe melhor que a mulher realizar essa mágica?”
alternativa:
“Convencer o homem a tê-la em alta consideração; inconscientemente, acreditar na própria nobreza como coisa dada: quem melhor que a mulher para fazê-lo?”
ou ainda:
“Convencer o homem de que ela vale muito; acreditar no homem: não é este o truque supremo da feminilidade?”
…depois conferimos o aforismo 148 nas traduções já existentes em Português para uma pós-avaliação!
“Mais abstrata é a verdade que se quer ensinar, melhor se deve cativar os sentidos com ela.” Algo de que Heidegger certamente é incapaz…
“As colossais expectativas depositadas pela mulher no ato sexual e seu pudor concomitante frustram desde sempre toda a sua vida sexual.”
“one should talk only about what one knows firsthand”, assim resenhou N. o livro de Rée sobre a consciência, hahaha!
“Rée then separated after all from his soeur inseparable: ‘86 found them living, as Lou then put it, ‘at opposite ends’ of Berlin ‘like children mad at each other’. (…) Besides, Rée had had enough of chaperoning Lou, and Lou enough of his chaperoning.”
“The previous fall Rée had again failed his examination for a university lectureship, this time in Strasbourg, whereupon he had commenced studying the natural sciences with a view to grounding his moral philosophy in them” O nível do cidadão…
Mais meia dúzia de velhos babões pediram a mão da russinha em casamento, blá, blá, blá…
“Finally, after returning from a few weeks in Bavaria spent principally with Jenia, Lou received a proposal from Fred Charles Andreas, a prodigious philologist [define it!]; the engagement followed secretly on November 1, 1886.”
“Afterwards he studied medicine, zoology, and mineralogy at Halle and Göttingen, and at 22 he took a doctorate in oriental philology at Erlangen.” Morou muitos anos na Pérsia: “Only when he injured his eyes deciphering inscriptions in bright sunlight did he return to Europe – as courier to his royal patron, himself en route to Wiesbaden for eye treatment.”
“By ‘87 he had mastered Greek, Latin, Pahlavi, Sanskrit, Old Norse, Aramaic, and Hebrew, in addition to Javanese, Dutch, German, French, the Scandinavian tongues, English, Hindi, Arabic, Turkish, Armenian, and just about every dialect of Persian, from Afghan to Baluchi (including Dravidian Brahvi) to Ossetic to Kurdish. Furthermore, in each case he had an expert’s knowledge of the corresponding literature, religion, and folklore, as also of the history, geography, and archaeology. He deciphered inscriptions with surpassing ease, memorizing even as he deciphered. (…) His special concern was how dead languages sounded, particularly how sounds relates to writing and how dialects emerge, then vary; he intended to do a great book on all this once he was settled professionally.” Mas vacilou e o pai da Lingüística foi Saussure e não ele!
POR ISSO NÃO GOSTO DE PSICANALISTAS BIOGRAFANDO: “Whereas he called himself Charles, Lou called him Fred (in writing, mostly ‘F.’), and soon after their engagement he Germanized his given names to Friedrich Carl. This hints at Nie.. So do his age and profession, his interest in Zarathustra, even his eye trouble – and a friendship with Erwin Rohde.”
“Done with Lou as far as he knew, N. turned against R. in July 87 with The Genealogy of Morals, subtitled ‘a polemical piece’. In the preface he declared his arguments of 1876-86 against Rée’s moral theory to have been just that, pretending, however, to have drawn them from an age-old theory of his own about to be expounded in full for the 1st time – whereupon he presented them newly consolidated, sharpened, rectified, amplified, supplemented, and cleansed of Darwin’s and Bagehot’s traces. By predating this theory before his acquaintance with Rée, he was extirpating Rée from his past. He was also repudiating Rée the positivist par excellence when now he represented the scientific ideal as a derivative of Christian asceticism, Europe’s mortal malady, and repudiating Rée the rationalist par excellence when now he treated thinking as instinctual like everything else in life, only surreptitiously so. Thus confuted, R. became for him ‘congenial Dr. Rée’ again. And then, while in Ecce Homo he claimed to have meant himself by his Human, All Too Human tribute to ‘one of my friends, excellent Dr. Rée – fortunately too fine an animal to . . .’, (!) he also supposed that a subsidy remitted to him by Deussen from ‘unknown Berlin admirers’ came out of Deussen’s own pocket and, he told his mother, Rée’s.”
“Genealogy does retain Bagehot’s distinctive frame of reference – nature’s huge enterprise of making the human animal law-abiding – but no hint at a natural selection of those primitive tribes having the hardest cakes of custom. As for Darwinism, the old ‘herd instinct’ gave way to the slavish principle of strength in numbers.”
Carta a Rée de 1877: “I ever more admire how solid your exposition is on the logical side. Yes, I can do nothing like that, at most sing or sigh a little – but prove! for the good of the head! That you can do, and that is of 100x more consequence.”
“Rome viewed the Jew as something against nature, an antipodal monstrosity so to say” Genealogy of Morals
“the big news in The Genealogy of Morals, crucial to its whole argument, is the world-historical role of the Jews, a sly priestly folk with a genius for rancor, who, subjugated by Rome, incite the slaves of the Empire to moral revolt against their masters, thereby determining a unique historic reversal of values with modern nihilism as its final consequence – pending a transvaluation of values.”
“O mestre deveria aprender ao inverso: compaixão pelos escravos e suportar o ressentimento dos escravos.” Sempre achei que a forma mais cristalina desse axioma está contida não na Genealogia, mas no Crepúsculo dos Ídolos…
“Mulheres… todas gostam de mim – esse fato é de há muito conhecido: exceto as abortivas, as ‘emancipadas’, que não têm o que é preciso para gerar descendência.” Ecce Homo
Nem se eu enlouquecer eu mando cartas pra vocês!
“Rée took his medical degree in 1890, then set up in Tütz as a medical saint. Living alone in a hut on the family estate, he tended the community free of charge for 10 years without a break. He would carry bread and wine to poor patients beneath his priestly mantle and readily finance trips to the distant clinics. He came to hate Lou, and he dismissed N. as all ‘morbid vanity’ and ‘raving’ in ‘clever’ and ‘beautiful’ phraseology. He was preparing a supreme opus, Philosophie”
“He was still deriving transcendental concepts such as ‘justice’ from selfishness progressively rationalized – still writing history a priori, only now without wasting labor on corroborative research. His philosophy, once daring, was now dated: like his counterpart the Count, he had outlived himself – and not only philosophically.” Acabou com o jumento!
“He died on October 28, 1901”
Tönnies também possui um artigo devastador, chamado simplesmente ‘Rée’.
“As for Malwida, Hütter recollected that, when he asked her about Lou in 92, she ‘replied – gruff, embittered, deprecatory (not at all like herself) – <I was deceived by her. She let me down>, something like <unworthy>. I said no more…’”
V. THE WAYWARD DISCIPLE
“With Fred she proved frigid: the marriage could not be consummated.”
“She ruled out divorce because of ‘the bond, the word… – they retain their sting: he is still alive, he is, exists, and you have abandoned your freely chosen task!’”
“[1890] Throughout most of Europe, Realism had already yielded to Naturalism on stage and in letters a decade or two earlier. That is, the inescapable banalities of social life had yielded to its inextricable problems, the pointless norm to the pointed extreme, occurrences and recurrences to situations, data to theses. Flaubert having shown that adultery was as dull as marriage, Ibsen and Strindberg were now showing that marriage was anything but dull given its inherent perils, including adultery – and dullness. In Germany, though, where Realism had been best known in translation, Naturalism was naturalized belatedly – on the stage for the most part, and with a strong admixture of dialect, reverie, and rhyme. Just so it created a scandal: on October 20, 1889, the Freie Bühne’s first domestic offering, Vor Sonnenaufgang by the unknown Silesian dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, drew riotous cheers and jeers for blending didactics, lyricism, and crudity.”
“As mulheres foram até hoje tratadas como pássaros pelo homem” Beyond Good and Evil
“She advocated the emancipation of women, but with the proviso that new, self-given obligations and interdictions should replace the old, man-given ones.”
“Though Lou’s Ibsen book was extravagantly acclaimed in its time, its big talk about ideals – about self-liberation versus self-alienation through ideals, and about self-sacrifice for ideals or for want of them – rings false in ours.” “she discussed neither Ibsen’s plays nor even his characterizations, but his characters themselves, quite as if they were real people” “Lou could develop no farther as authoress, feminist or female except as Nietzsche’s ex-disciple.”
“Following Nietzsche’s breakdown, Lou filled in her old sketch of him and brought it up-to-date as she pored over his life’s work. The result was the first significant treatment of him in print: 10 precursory articles of 1891-93, elaborated into Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken¹ of 1894.” “Other Nietzscheana prior to Lou’s were crackpot adulation or defamation.” “N.’s writings emerged as symptomatic expressions of self-induced nervous derangement at distinct stages of its development toward insanity. This thesis, startling for its time, was damning for N. in effect and in after-effect, confused as were Lou’s intent and argument respectively.”
“If one has character, one has an ever-recurrent typical experience.” BGE
“In point of fact N.’s insanity was due to a brain ailment of physical origin, hence was not mentally self-induced, and there is no correlation whatever between the onsets of his malady, his intellectual self-renewals, and his alternations between felt instinctual harmony and felt instinctual chaos. He does seem to have induced and relished many a crisis, only not knowingly. Lou, however, lacked a conception of unconscious purpose”
“When speaking summarily, Lou let nothing philosophical survive N.’s self-renewals beyond his philosophical personality itself.”
“Evidently she took his Zarathustra IV (1st published in 1891) for his ‘last work’, written ‘on the threshold of madness’ (1890a), only to learn belatedly that it was actually completed in 1885” HAHAHAAHAHA!
Para a loira burra russa:
suprahomem – misticismo
vontade de potência – ( ) (não escreveu sobre)
eterno retorno – idéia fixa
transvaloração de todos os valores – blá, blá, blá (é tão idiota que seria humilhante proceder a este résumé
“Her first large-scale autobiographic hoax was, then, an approximation to that great coveted but forbidden spiritual and carnal union between them, rendered celestial and eternal by being depicted only dimly and solemnly and without temporal beginning or end.”
“Within N.’s old circle Erwin Rohde, after deeming L.’s first articles on N. incomparably fine and deep, now told Overbeck that she was ‘above all a literary parasite who would just like to live off N. a while as off a suitable substratum while also putting her own person to advantage, and this not so tactfully or nicely.’”
“her reflexions and constructions about N.’s illness are sufficient in themselves to rule out any really intimate association or communication.”
“In July 1893 Peter Gast, in his introduction to a reedition of N.’s Human, All Too Human, upbraided L. for her latest articles: he threw back her charge against N. of mystical madness, refuted her on point after point beginning with N.’s having come to positivism through Rée, and denounced her trickery about how long she knew N. – all this too late, however, to affect her book.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Förster had founded their colony – ‘New Germania’ – in Paraguay early in 1886. In 89, facing financial ruin, Bernhard took his life; Lisbeth carried on alone, slowly retrieving the deficit. She returned to Germany in the fall of 90 for 18 months to boost subscriptions, then definitively in September 93 to cash in on her brother’s growing fame. She wrested his literary estate from Gast’s hands, then from her mother’s proprietorship. In February 94 she founded the Nietzsche Archiv in Naumburg with Gast’s help – only to turn Gast out that very spring. For she intended using the Archiv to represent N.’s life and thought in the way of her neo-Germanic propaganda, anti-Semitism and all. Her very own first project was known in Archiv parlance as ‘the biography’.”
“In 1900 the Archiv began publishing N.’s letters: forged ones to Lisbeth reviling Lou and Jews plugged untoward gaps. A year later The Will to Power appeared, a concatenation of N. scraps presented as N.’s supreme work – as if to render Lou’s study obsolete. Lisbeth meanwhile more than once called Lou a liar in print – notably in 99 concerning Lou’s pretended conversations and correspondence with N. about the eternal recurrence. In 1904 the volume of the Archiv biography covering 82 appeared. By this account, Lou approached N. as a would-be disciple, but fast showed herself to be intellectually unfit and only out for an amour, so N., who really just wanted a secretary anyhow, sent her packing. L.’s book, ‘utterly false and untrue’, contained ‘conversations never held, excerpts from imaginary letters, and events that never took place.’ It was ‘an act of revenge upon sick N. due to wounded feminine vanity’ – and was ‘perhaps meant to win back Paul Rée’s alienated affections’ to boot.”
“Unfortunately for Lou, the mud slung at her was made up of pure grains of truth – or rather, fortunately for her, the pure grains of truth were all mudded over. So, speciously wondering that anyone could regard her book as directed against N., she dismissed the Archival as beneath her dignity to read, let alone refute”
“Her ethereal, ageless romance with N. having been refuted, she made him over into a nasty suitor – indeed a vengeful spurned man.”
“In this contest between fabler and forger, the one sure loser was N. himself.”
P A R T T H R E E . W O M A N H O O D
I. RITES OF LOVE
“IN 92 Lou Andreas, 31-year-old virginal wife, and Georg Ledebour, a Marxist journalist and lecturer 11 years her senior, fell in love.” “She insisted on working things out her own way. For months thereafter she lied to the 2 overwrought rivals by turns until she no longer heard what they growled or hissed back at her. She grew numb and skeletal.” “Ledebour married one of his pupils in 95—one of approximately Lou’s own age and social standing whom he had known, like Lou, since 92. She made him a tender companion through a stormy career and—following Hitler’s advent—a long exile.” “Lou’s Ledebour affair paralleled her Nietzsche hoax as her sorriest off-paper attempt since girlhood to impress fantasy upon reality. Even so, it was her farthest advance toward womanhood to date—a roundabout advance as if to a 2nd adolescence, this one compelling. Her first documented amour since her marriage, it was also her last with an older man: thereafter, while remaining a child-wife at home, she resumed her maidenly coquetterie abroad with new earnestness.”
“Lou also made acquaintances fleetingly with August Strindberg, tenuously with the lesser playwright Otto Hartleben, and abidingly with the Danish translator Therese Krüger. And early in 92 she met Frieda von Bülow, soon her closest friend.” “A most possessive friend, she nonetheless had mixed, unstable feelings toward Lou, who was unfailingly devoted to her.”
“Her next votive offering, Von der Bestie bis zum Gott (From Beast to God), was a delectable scholarly study of how deities, on losing their following, turn satanic and how, conversely, frightful beasts work their way up through totemism to fusion with tribal fathers, then withdraw to the wilderness as divinity sets in.”
“Having found Vienna enchanting at first sight, Lou now found it doubly so. Schnitzler was then, on turning 33, a physician who dabbled in letters; only later that year did his drama Liebelei invert the formula overnight.”
II. SUPER-LOU AND RAINER
“At Wassermann’s for tea on May 12, Lou was confronted with a veteran poet of 21 who, with huge soulful eyes, ‘narrow shoulders, thin neck’, ‘receding chin and almost no back to his head’, looked to her like a ‘sickly aristocrat’.”
“She was far from suspecting his genius. And no wonder, for he was then in his artistic incunabula, which were all sensibility, sentiment, and fancy, in rich effusion.”
(…)
P A R T F O U R . M A T U R I T Y
(…)
II. A PERSONALIZED FREUDIANISM
Puro lixo e devaneio.
III. THEORIZING FOR FREUD
(…)
IV. LIVING FOR FREUD
(…)
V. ASIDE FROM FREUD
“At Alvastra in ‘11 Lou seduced Poul (sic) Bjerre after having befriended his wife, an invalid, and laughed down his marital scruples (…) he too had once written on Nietzsche as a mad genius, but expressly to eschew reductive exegetics.” “About then Ellen Key ran into Bjerre, who inquired whether Lou still took Freud so seriously—and Ellen, reporting to Lou, added that Bjerre had just brought out a fine book exposing Freud’s exaggeration of sex.” “Lou’s next was Viktor Tausk, her classmate in Vienna, a Croation (sic) ex-jurist come lately to medicine and psychoanalysis.”
P A R T F I V E . O L D A G E [ O F A H A R L O T ]
I. REVAMPING THE PAST
“Reaffirming her individuality by this same token, she treated Freud’s work as a contribution to her existence rather than the reverse.”
“By and large, Lou treated other celebrities just like Tolstoi in not letting on how well or ill she knew them and as if her knowing them were a matter of course—though in fact she ransacked her ‘Celebrities’ file to compile 2 chapters teeming with them.”
II. “HOMECOMING”
“As the pain eased over the months, she went back from 100 to 125 pounds even on a limited calorie diet—one permitting her chocolate at night in lieu of bread by day.” “Later that year she was laid up in plaster with a broken foot. Her proud calligraphy was reduced to a pencil scrawl—as during her prostration of 2 years before, only this time definitively, for her eyesight was failing.” “Another year or so and her chronic heart ailment had set in for the duration, followed by cancer in a breast that was successfully amputated in mid-35 after she had put her papers in final order and taken leave of the world.”
III. A RETROSPECT
“Inclusive as were her cultural concerns, her concerns were that exclusively cultural: nowhere do her own ample annals disclose that, for instance, her life in Germany began under Bismarck and ended under Hitler.” Uma imbecil fora do tempo, mas não atemporal.
“a moral monstrosity”
“distraught fabler”
“post-elaborated beyond recognition”
BEYOND FRAU LOU
“Lou changed off fictionalizing techniques continually, but I could not grasp the sense of the changes.”
“The stock subjects of intellectual history were extraneous to Lou, who went the Zeitgeist’s way with no guidance from the Zeitgeist. Commonly ideas and their ilk are chronicled as if they developed somehow one from the other or else in response to conditions and events of public life; they developed neither way, however”
* * *
APPENDIX B
“How I would deal with a man who spoke that way about me to my sister there is no doubt. For I am a soldier and always will be, I can handle weapons. But a girl! And Lou! I did not at all doubt but that she would at some time cleanse herself of those ignominious deeds in a heavenly way. Dirt! Any other man would have turned away from such a girl with disgust: I too felt disgust, but overcame it again and again. It moved me to pity to see a nobly endowed nature in its momentary degeneration; and, to tell the truth, I spilled countless tears in Tautenburg—not on my own account, but on Lou’s. This trick pity played on me. I lost the little I still possessed: my good name, the confidence of a few people—perhaps I shall yet lose a friend: you (…) Dear friend, I call Lou my sirocco incarnate: not one minute have I had with her that clear sky that I need above me, with or without people. She combines all the human qualities repulsive and hateful to me, and since Tautenburg I have for that very reason put myself to the torture of loving her! (…) I thought you had persuaded her to come to my help: now I see that she is out for amusement and good mental entertainment. And when I think that questions of morality come in there too I am, to put it mildly, revolted.”
“Listen, friend, to how I see things today! She is an utter misfortune—and I am its victim. In the spring I thought I had found someone able to help me: for which not only a good intellect but a first-rate morality is needed. I discovered instead a being who wants to have fun and is shameless enough to believe that the most distinguished minds on Earth are just good enough for her fun. As a result of this mistake I more than ever lack the means of finding such a person. I am writing this in clearest weather: do not confuse my sense with the nonsense of my recent opium letter. I am certainly not crazy, nor do I suffer from delusions of grandeur. But I should have friends who warn me in good time about such desperate things as those of last summer. Who could suspect that her talk of ‘heroism’, of ‘fighting for a principle’, her poem ‘To Pain’, her tales of struggles for knowledge, are simply fraud?”
“It was a completely futile waste of love and heart—though in truth I can afford it. . . . Lou debases the whole dignity of our striving: she should have nothing further to do with your name and mine. I no longer understand you, dear friend. How can you stand being near such a creature? For heaven’s sake, pure air and highest mutual esteem!”
Seclusão Anagógica 