Becoming God

The first time the Finos noticed that all was not well with their tenant – they were, of course, unaware of the increasingly strange letters he had been writing for some time – was at the beginning of December, 1888. Nietzsche asked them to remove all the hangings from the walls of his room since he was expecting a visit from the king and queen of Italy, and the room needed to look like a temple to receive them. They also began to find torn-up banknotes in his wastepaper basket. Darkness did not, however, descend all at once; there were still moments of lucidity. Even though, at the beginning of December, he had begun to write letters that were unmistakably deranged – one to Bismarck, for instance, was signed, ‘The Antichrist/ Frederick Nietzsche/ Fromentin’ (the last a French romantic painter who died in 1876) – he was still capable of writing an entirely normal letter to Emily Fynn on December 6 and a reasonably normal one to Köselitz on December 16. Progressively, though, his loss of contact with reality became ever more marked.

With respect to his body, for instance, he himself notes a sporadic loss of control, a kind of emotional incontinence. Such idiotic, ‘private-tomfool-notions’, came to him as he walked the streets, he writes on November 25, that for a full half hour he would be unable to stop grinning.