letters

Friedrich Nietzsche

Selected letters

To

Rohde.

Genoa, March 24, 1881.

Thus the sands of life run out and the best of friends hear and see nothing of each other! Aye, the trick is no easy one-to live and .Yet not to be discontented. How often do I not feel as if I should like to beg a loan from my robust, flourishing and brave old friend Rohde, when I am in sore need of a “transfusion” of strength, not of lamb’s but of lion’s blood. But there he dwells away in Tubingen, immersed in books and married life, and in every respect i accessible to me. Ah, dear friend, to live for ever on my own fat seems to be my lot, or, as every one knows who has tried it, to drink my own blood! Life then becomes a matter of not losing one’s thirst for oneself and also of not drinking oneself dry.

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I love reading letters written by people I admire like this example written by Friedrich Nietzsche to his good friend Peter Gast; it humanizes these people from who you normally only read the best they can produce and not about their daily lives. This comes out of a book written in 1921 by Oscar Levy, who translated a lot of Nietzsche’s work when it first got known outside Germany. You can read the book on archive.org, this letters starts on on page 139.

NIETZSCHE TO PETER GAST.

Sils-MaIaria, end of August, 1881.

But this is splendid news, my dear friend! Above all that you should have finished! At the thought of· this first great achievement of your life, I feel indescribably happy and solemn ; I shall not fail to remember August 24, 1881 ! How things are progressing ! But as soon as I think of your work I am overcome by a

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