"THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA: A BOOK FOR ALL AND NONE"

1
I now wish to relate the history of Zarathustra. The fundamental idea of the work,
the Eternal Recurrence, the highest formula of a Yea-saying to life that can ever be
attained, was first conceived in the month of August 1881. I made a note of the idea
on a sheet of paper, with the postscript: "Six thousand feet beyond man and time."
That day I happened to be wandering through the woods alongside of the Lake of
Silvaplana, and I halted not far from Surlei, beside a huge rock that towered aloft
like a pyramid. It was then that[Pg 97] the thought struck me. Looking back now, I
find that exactly two months before this inspiration I had an omen of its coming in
the form of a sudden and decisive change in my tastes—more particularly in music.
The whole of Zarathustra might perhaps be classified under the rubric music. At all
events, the essential condition of its production was a second birth within me of the
art of hearing. In Recoaro, a small mountain resort near Vicenza, where I spent the
spring of 1881, I and my friend and maestro, Peter Gast—who was also one who had
been born again, discovered that the phœnix music hovered over us, in lighter and
brighter plumage than it had ever worn before. If, therefore, I now calculate from
that day forward the sudden production of the book, under the most unlikely
circumstances, in February 1883,—the last part, out of which I quoted a few lines in
my preface, was written precisely in the hallowed hour when Richard Wagner gave
up the ghost in Venice,—I come to the conclusion that the period of gestation
covered eighteen months. This period of exactly eighteen months, might suggest, at
least to Buddhists, that I am in reality a female elephant The interval was devoted to
the Gaya Scienza, which contains hundreds of indications of the proximity of
something unparalleled; for, after all, it shows the beginning of Zarathustra, since it
presents Zarathustra's fundamental thought in the last aphorism but one of the fourth
book. To this interval also belongs that Hymn to Life (for a mixed choir and
orchestra), the score of which was published in[Pg 98] Leipzig two years ago by E.
W. Fritsch, and which gave perhaps no slight indication of my spiritual state during
this year, in which the essentially yea-saying pathos, which I call the tragic pathos,
completely filled me heart and limb. One day people will sing it to my memory. The
text, let it be well understood, as there is some misunderstanding abroad on this
point, is not by me; it was the astounding inspiration of a young Russian lady, Miss
Lou von Salome, with whom I was then on friendly terms. He who is in any way
able to make some sense of the last words of the poem, will divine why I preferred
and admired it: there is greatness in them. Pain is not regarded as an objection to
existence: "And if thou hast no bliss now left to crown me—Lead on! Thou hast thy
Sorrow still."
Maybe that my music is also great in this passage. (The last note of the oboe, by the
bye, is C sharp, not C. The latter is a misprint.) During the following winter, I was
living on that charmingly peaceful Gulf of Rapallo, not far from Genoa, which cuts
inland between Chiavari and Cape Porto Fino. My health was not very good; the
winter was cold and exceptionally rainy; and the small albergo in which I lived was
so close to the water that at night my sleep was disturbed if the sea was rough. These
circumstances were surely the very reverse of favourable; and yet, in spite of it all,
and as if in proof of my belief that everything decisive comes to life in defiance of
every obstacle, it was precisely during this winter and in the midst of these
unfavourable[Pg 99] circumstances that my Zarathustra originated. In the morning I
used to start out in a southerly direction up the glorious road to Zoagli, which rises
up through a forest of pines and gives one a view far out to sea. In the afternoon, or
as often as my health allowed, I walked round the whole bay from Santa Margherita
to beyond Porto Fino. This spot affected me all the more deeply because it was so
dearly loved by the Emperor Frederick III. In the autumn of 1886 I chanced to be
there again when he was revisiting this small forgotten world of happiness for the
last time. It was on these two roads that all Zarathustra came to me, above all,
Zarathustra himself as a type—I ought rather to say that it was on these walks that he
waylaid me.