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San Francisco Angels Wood Bat Baseball Team
Friedrich Nietzsche Page
(wherein the "cosmopolitan" philologist,
still handcuffed by Pre-Socratic philosophy & Graeco-
"Philosophize with a hammer and you end up with a big bump on your head!" - Jerome Sanders Dickey
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"All the News in Fits" |
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Nietzsche's Tailor Excerpts from a letter from 24-year old Friedrich Nietzsche to a close friend, reporting on the preliminaries of Nietzsche's first meeting with German composer and icon Richard Wagner. To Erwin Rohde, [Leipzig, November 9, 1868]
My dear friend: Today I am going to tell you a succession of lively things; I am going to look happily into the future and conduct myself in such an idyllically snug way that your wicked visitor, that feline fever, will arch its back and trot away in a dudgeon… The acts in my comedy are headed: 1. An evening meeting of the society, or The subprofessor; 2. The ejected tailor; 3. A rendezvous with X. The cast includes a few old women. … When I arrived home, I found a note addressed to me, with the few words: “If you want to meet [composer] Richard Wagner, come at 3:45 p.m. to the Café Theatre. Windisch.” This surprise put my mind in somewhat of a whirl, so that I quite forgot- forgive me- the scene itself and was in a state of turmoil. Naturally I ran out, found our honorable friend Windisch, who gave me more information. Wagner was strictly incognito in Leipzig, staying with his relatives; the press knew nothing, and all Brockhaus’ servants had been told was to keep as quiet as liveried graves. Now Wagner’s sister, Frau Professor Brockhaus, that intelligent woman whom we know, had introduced her good friend Frau Professor Ritschl to her brother: which gave her a chance, the lucky thing, to show her brother off to her friend and her friend off to her brother. In Frau Ritschl’s presence, Wagner plays the Meisterlied, which you know too; and the good woman tells him that song is well now to her, mea opera [my doing]. Joy and amazement on Wagner’s part; announces his supreme will, to meet me incognito; I am to be invited for Friday evening. But Windisch explains that I shall be prevented by functions, duties, obligations; so Saturday is proposed. Thereupon, Windisch and I went along, found the professor’s family but not Richard, who had gone out with an immense hat on his large head. Here then I met the aforementioned excellent family and was kindly invited for Sunday evening. During these days my mood was like something in a novel; believe me, the preliminaries to this acquaintance, considering how unapproachable this eccentric man is, verged on the realm of fairy tale. Thinking that many people were invited, I decided to dress very smartly, and was glad that my tailor had promised for this same Sunday an evening suit. It was a terrible day of rain and snow; I shuddered at the thought of going out… It was getting dark, the tailor had not come, and Roscher left. I went with him, visited the tailor in person, and found his slaves hectically occupied with my suit; they promised to send it in three-quarters of an hour. I left contentedly, dropping in at Kintschy’s [café-restaurant], read Kladderadatsch [humor magazine], and found to my pleasure the notice that Wagner was in Switzerland but that a beautiful house was being built for him in Munich; all the time I knew that I would see him that same evening and that he had yesterday received a letter from the little king [Ludwig II of Bavaria, Wagner’s patron] bearing the address: To the great German composer Richard Wagner. At home I found no tailor, read in a leisurely way …, and was disturbed now and then by a loud but distant ringing. Finally I grew certain that someone was waiting at the patriarchal wrought-iron gate; it was locked, and so was the front door of the house. I shouted across the garden to the man and told him to come into the Naundörfchen: it was impossible to make oneself understood through the rain. The whole house was astir; finally the gate was opened, and a little old man with a package came up to my room. It was six-thirty, time to put on my things and get myself ready, for I live very far out. Right, the man has my things, I try them on, they fit. An ominous moment; he presents the bill. I take it politely; he wants to be paid on receipt of the goods. I am amazed, and explain that I will not deal with him, an employee of my tailor, but only with the tailor himself, to whom I gave the order. The man becomes more pressing, the time becomes more pressing; I seize the things and begin to put them on; the man seizes the things, and stops me from putting them on- force on my side, force on his side. Scene: I am fighting in my shirttails, for I am trying to put on my new trousers. Finally, a show of dignity, solemn threat, cursing my tailor and his assistant, swearing revenge; meanwhile the little man is moving off with my things. End of second act: I brood on the sofa in my shirttails and consider a black jacket, whether it is good enough for Richard. Outside the rain is pouring down. A quarter to eight; at seven-thirty, I have told Windisch, we are to meet in the Café Theatre. I rush out into the windy, wet night, also a little man in black, without dinner jacket, but feeling intensely that it is all like a fiction; fortune is propitious, even the scene with the tailor has about it something monstrously extraordinary. … Friedrich Nietzsche [from Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche; edited and translated by Christopher Middleton; Hackett Publishing Company; 1996] |
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Famous Authors Discuss Web Site Tips!
Illusions of Web Site Design by Fred Nietzsche (originally entitled On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense)
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German
romanticism, makes a mockery of himself)