Zarathustra. I always had the utmost difficulty with Nietzsche, and on this occasion I had been unable to say anything apposite about him. Look, Gambetti, I said, I’ve been wrestling with Nietzsche for decades, but I haven’t gotten any further with him. Nietzsche has always fascinated me, but I’ve never understood him properly. To be honest, it’s the same with all the other philosophers, I told Gambetti, with Schopenhauer and Pascal, to name just two. All my life I’ve found them difficult and done no more than begin to understand them. They’ve always been Greek to me, though I’ve always been attracted and excited by them. The more I study these men’s writings, I told Gambetti, the more helpless I become. It’s only in moments of megalomania that I can claim to have understood them, just as it’s only at such moments that I can claim to have understood myself, though to this day I’ve never been able to understand myself. The more I study myself, the farther I get from the truth about myself, the more obscure everything about me becomes, I told Gambetti, and it’s the same with these philosophers. When I think I’ve understood them I’ve actually understood nothing. This is probably true of everything I’ve studied. But now and then, in moments of megalomania, I venture to say that I’ve understood something about these philosophers and their writings. None of these men or their works can be understood, not Pascal, not Descartes, not Kant, not Schopenhauer, not Schleiermacher, to name only those who preoccupy me at present, those I’m working on at the moment. With the greatest ruthlessness toward them and toward myself, I added. With the greatest audacity and the greatest impudence. For when we work on one of these philosophers, Gambetti, it’s impudent and presumptuous to take hold of them and, as it were, tear the philosophical guts out of the living body. It’s always impudent to set about a work of philosophy, but without such impudence we can’t approach it and get anywhere philosophically. We actually have to attack these philosophical writings as roughly and toughly as possible — and the writers themselves, whom we must always think of as enemies, as our most formidable opponents, Gambetti. I have to pit myself against Schopenhauer if I want to understand him, against Kant, against Montaigne, against Descartes, against Schleiermacher — you understand. I have to be against Voltaire if I want to get to grips with him properly and have some prospect of success. But so far I’ve been pretty unsuccessful at getting to grips with the philosophers and their works. Life will soon be over; my existence will be extinguished, I told Gambetti, and I’ll have achieved nothing. Everything will have remained firmly closed to me. In the same way I’ve been pretty unsuccessful up to now at getting to grips with myself. I treat myself as an enemy and go into philosophical action against myself, I told Gambetti. I approach myself with every possible doubt, and I fail. I achieve absolutely nothing. I have to regard the mind as an enemy and go into philosophical action against it if I am actually to enjoy it. But I probably don’t have enough time, just as none of them had enough time. Man’s greatest misfortune is that he never has enough time, and that’s what’s always made knowledge impossible. So all we have ever achieved is an approximation, a near miss. Anything else is nonsense. When we are thinking and don’t stop thinking, which is what we call philosophizing, we come to realize that our thinking has been wrong. Up to now all their thinking was wrong, whoever they were and whatever they wrote, yet they didn’t give up of their own volition, I told Gambetti; they gave up because nature forced them to, through sickness, madness, and finally death. They didn’t want to stop, however great the privations, however grievous the suffering; they carried on against all reason and despite all warnings. Yet they all committed themselves to false conclusions, I told Gambetti — ultimately to nothing, whatever this nothing might be, which, though we know it is nothing and therefore cannot exist, still dooms everything to failure, halts all progress, and finally brings everything to an end. On the Piazza del Popolo that evening I withheld the description of Wolfsegg that I had promised Gambetti on the Flaminia and launched instead into one of my disquisitions, which no one dreads more than I and which I have taken to calling my philosophizing disquisitions, because they have become more frequent in recent years and are as fluent as philosophy proper, as philosophical discourse in general, though all they have in common with philosophy is the motive behind them. Instead of the promised description of Wolfsegg, I delivered myself of a few words about Nietzsche that would have been better left unsaid, something quite nonsensical about Kant, something about Schopenhauer that seemed at first uncommonly apposite but then rather silly, and something about Montaigne that even I did not understand the moment I had said it. For no sooner had I uttered my observation about Montaigne than Gambetti asked me to explain it. I could not do so, as I no longer knew what I had said. We say something that seems quite clear at the time, then a moment later we don’t know what it was, I told Gambetti. I’ve just said something about Montaigne, but now, two or three seconds later, I don’t know what it was. We ought to be able to say something and then record it in our minds, I said, but we can’t. I’ve no idea why I spoke about Montaigne just now, and of course I’ve even less of an idea what I said. We imagine we’ve reached a stage where we’ve become a thinking machine, but we can’t rely on its thinking. This machine works unremittingly against the brain, I said. It generates thoughts, but we don’t know where they come from, why they were conceived, or what they relate to. The fact is that this nonstop thinking machine overtaxes us. The brain is overburdened but has no escape, as it’s inevitably linked up to the machine for the rest of our lives. Until we die. You say Montaigne, Gambetti, but right now I don’t know what that means. Descartes? I don’t know what that means, any more than I know what Schopenhauer means. You might just as well say buttercup: I wouldn’t know what that meant either. I once thought that if I went to Sils Maria and stayed near the Maloja Pass I’d understand Nietzsche better, that if I approached it from below, from Sondrio, I’d have a better understanding of him, maybe even a perfect understanding. But I was wrong. Having visited Sils Maria and approached it from below, from Sondrio, I understand even less about Nietzsche than I did before. I no longer understand him at all. I understand nothing about him. My visit to Sils Maria finished off Nietzsche. And Goethe was ruined for me when I committed the monumental folly of going to Weimar. And so was Kant when I visited Königsberg. There was a time when I was fired with a desire to travel the whole of Europe, seeking out the places where all these philosophers, poets, writers, or whatever had lived, but having done so I understand them far less than before. Take good care, Gambetti, not to visit the places associated with writers, poets, and philosophers, because if you do you won’t understand them at all. After visiting the places where they were born, lived, and died, you won’t be able to think about them. You must at all costs steer clear of the places associated with our great minds, I said. Don’t allow yourself to visit the places associated with Dante, Virgil, and Petrarch, because if you do you’ll destroy everything about them that you now have in your head. Nietzsche, I say, then I tap my head and find that it’s empty, quite empty. Schopenhauer, I say to myself, and tap my head — and again it’s empty. I tap my head and say Kant, only to find a complete void. It’s unutterably depressing, Gambetti. You think about some everyday notion, only to find that your mind’s a blank, that there’s nothing there. You want to grasp some quite ordinary notion, and there’s nothing whatever in your head. For days you go around with a total void in your head. You tap it and find that it’s quite empty. It drives you out of your mind and makes you desperately unhappy, utterly sick of life, my dear Gambetti. Although I’m your teacher, my mind’s a complete blank most of the time. Probably because I’ve overtaxed it, I said. By demanding too much of it. By quite simply overrating it. We overrate our minds and expect too much of them, and then we’re surprised when we tap our heads and find them entirely void, I told Gambetti. They don’t contain even the bare minimum, I said. And from time to time the philosophers who mean something to us — who may even mean a great deal to us, perhaps everything — completely withdraw from our minds, probably because we’ve misused them. They simply decamp and leave our minds vacant, so that instead of having ideas in our minds and doing something with them — sensible or otherwise, philosophical or otherwise — we’re left with an unbearable pain, a pain so terrible that we almost want to cry out. But of course we’re careful not to cry out and so reveal that our minds are quite empty, for that would inevitably be the end of us in a world that’s just waiting to hear us cry out and reveal the emptiness of our minds. Over time we’ve become accustomed to concealing everything, or at least everything we think, everything we venture to think, lest we be done to death, for we know that whoever fails to conceal his thoughts — his real thoughts, which only he is aware of — is done to death, I told Gambetti. The vital thoughts are those we keep secret, I told Gambetti, not those we express or publish, which have very little in common — usually nothing at all — with those we conceal and are always inferior to them. Our concealed thoughts encompass everything, while our published thoughts amount to next to nothing. But if we were to publish our secret thoughts, if we were once to express them, we’d be done for.