Thus scribbled Nietzsche in the twilight of his sanity, just months before his storied collapse in Turin. Lest we dismiss this extraordinary claim as an epistolary exaggeration (designed, perhaps, as a private bit of braggadocio between close friends), let us take note of the following passage, which was written at approximately the same time as the letter just cited. Intending to demonstrate publicly the extent of his formidable “authority,” Nietzsche rhetorically asks, “Need I say after all this that in questions of décadence I am experienced?” (EH:wise 1).

Although Nietzsche had thoroughly researched the problem of decadence, his “authority” was not merely academic in nature. Nor was his “experience” in “questions of décadence” culled exclusively from the pseudoscientific literature that proliferated in Europe and Great Britain in the 1880s. The problem of decadence was not only the intellectual fiefdom he had recently staked out for himself, but his “physiological” destiny as well. Nietzsche, it seems, knew whereof he spoke: “I am, no less than Wagner, a child of this time; that is, a décadent. But I comprehended this, I resisted it. The philosopher in me resisted” (CW P).