I found it easy to give up drinking. I simply replaced one addiction, to alcohol, with another, to caffeine. At the time, I didn’t realise I was performing such a substitution. I would simply tell myself, over and over, that I had stopped drinking, and then knock back my eleventh espresso of the afternoon. Eventually, it did dawn on me that I was addicted — not to caffeine, or even to alcohol; I was addicted to addiction. Without an addiction, my life was arid and pointless. Having an addiction was like having a pet: it was something to worry over and care for, whose essential function was to shield me from the glare of my disengagement and boredom.
During this period, while I was lost in a miasma of caffeine, Natasha needed suddenly to return to Russia because her mother had fallen ill. Though I had never met Natasha’s family, I knew they regarded me as a half-mad and wholly malign influence on their beautiful and intelligent daughter, who surely deserved better, deserved the hand of an oligarch or a media sorcerer, not the squalid Hampstead flat of an alcoholic, bookish weirdo. Despite Russia’s luminous literary past, the modern Russian hates and abhors books. There is only one thing that the modern Russian hates and abhors more than he hates and abhors books, and that is the people who read them. Russia’s luminous literary past, as far as the modern Russian is concerned, belongs in the past.
For several days before and after Natasha left for Russia, I was beset by fears that she would not return to London, or else that she would be unfaithful to me during her time away. Natasha had never done anything to warrant this latter suspicion: my insecurities, in truth, stemmed from an infidelity of my own, committed during the vaguely defined beginning of our relationship, when the parameters had not yet been clearly established, or so I had told myself. Even now, four years on, I worried about the slow, secret evolution of this betrayal in Natasha’s innermost heart and thoughts, despite her claim to have forgiven me, and the consequences it might yet hatch, specifically revenge or abandonment.
When Natasha left I looked around our flat, trying to tell myself that she would surely return to London because so many of her possessions were still here. These included her cherished red shoes, the ones her father had bought her as a gift when they had spent Christmas on the French Riviera two years previously, and which she had grown attached to in a manner I privately considered darkly Freudian. Those shoes were a guarantee that Natasha would indeed return.
Now, though, with Natasha away in Moscow and a great deal of time on my hands, I could do little but sit in the living room of our Hampstead flat up on the fifth floor, gazing at the wall or the window, immobilised by dread at the scale of the task I had set for myself, and my feelings of utter inadequacy before it. Not only did the authors on my list of background reading remain unread, but every day the list expanded as I thought of more and more authors who, if I were not to read them, would be unforgivable omissions from anything that called itself a serious book about Nietzsche. Soon, it began to seem as if, in order to write as much as a single credible page about Nietzsche, I would have to read (or reread) the whole of the nineteenth century — and much of the eighteenth, twentieth and even seventeenth centuries as well.
One midweek afternoon I took myself out to Hampstead Heath for a long walk that I hoped would revive my spirits and infuse me with the vitality of the approaching summer. And, out on the Heath, I did feel better — for about seven minutes. Then, without discernible reason, gloom and anxiety overcame me yet again. Roaming on the Heath like King Lear, I felt like blowing my own head off, or fleeing to Bangkok or Vientiane, where I would book myself into a cheap room and slowly drink myself to death, pausing only to fuck whores and write bitter, sarcastic letters to the great public figures of our age, blaming them for everything. Attempting to shake off these oppressive feelings and shady thoughts, I walked for hours on the Heath, pacing from one end to the other, again and again across its vast and undulating surface, by varying and convoluted routes. Had my pacing been witnessed from the air and then graphed on to a map, it seems to me now, the result would have resembled the last work of a depraved Viennese painter before he shot himself in the face.
I thought hard on the course of that long, not to say interminable walk. I decided it was foolish to put myself under the impossible obligation of reading the entire nineteenth century before writing about Nietzsche — better to launch headlong into the writing itself, hurl myself at the project with a warlike and fearless mentality. (The image in my mind, for better or worse, was of kamikaze pilots slamming into an iceberg.) In the grip of these thoughts, while traversing the Heath for perhaps the eighth or ninth time as the sunny afternoon gave way to an overcast and chilly evening, I found myself reflecting on my first encounter with Nietzsche, more than a decade earlier. I had discovered Nietzsche’s work in a cubicle in the men’s toilets in the Dublin Mail Centre, a colossal, grey building in a business park in Clondalkin, where I worked for three awful years starting when I was nineteen, a period when I was dangerously depressed, impervious to all but the most experimental of medications. I hated the place, hated the people, hated myself for being there. The DMC felt to me like a concentration camp or a prison colony out of dystopian science fiction. The incessant noise of the mail-sorting machines made conversation impossible, which was just as well, considering that the workers who’d manned the machines for years and decades were such mindless, half-demented cretins. Bitter and resentful of everything, I calculated that, for at least an hour during each of my four-hour shifts, I could remove myself unnoticed from the workstations and hide in the toilets, where I was able to read. Reading, I felt, would partly justify my having to be in that horrible building, giving my time to those wretched machines and their wretched human overseers. With the machines screaming outside the toilet doors, I settled in and began reading Nietzsche, getting through The Antichrist, Human, All Too Human, Twilight of the Idols, On the Genealogy of Morals, and half of Thus Spoke Zarathustra over a period of several months. I should have quit the place, but the psychoanalyst I was seeing advised against making any major changes in my outward life, especially ones which would feed into what he saw as my dominant, dangerous tendency: withdrawing from human society into solitude, into silence, into stinking toilet cubicles.
As I paced across the Heath, I grew more certain that the only hope I had of writing something honest, vital and true about Nietzsche lay in attacking the project in a more personal, urgent, even autobiographical manner — to write in blood, in Nietzsche’s own words. Perhaps, I thought, I should even write about that vile and stinking toilet in the Dublin Mail Centre, in order to discover what that said about Nietzsche, or about the post-Christian epoch more generally, if it said anything at all. It might even be possible, I thought, growing increasingly excited by the idea as I tramped over the Heath, to frame my study of Nietzsche around the image of that stinking toilet, which would speak eloquently to any discerning reader of the death of God, the putrefying carcass of God, not to mention the cauldron of depravity and hate underlying Christian slave morality. The filthy toilet was Christian morality itself, it seemed to me then, tramping across the Heath. I returned to the flat late that evening greatly relieved, with the sense I had finally discovered a way in to my project. I resolved that, as soon as I left London and began my travels in Europe, I would begin writing in blood. I slept soundly that night for what felt like the first time in months.