#20 – The Underground Spirit

Hey, everybody, this is Darryl Cooper and you're listening to the Mordermade podcast. We're about to hear the Underground Spirit. This is an episode about the interplay between the lives and ideas of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Went outside my comfort zone a bit on this one, but I think the result was pretty good. A lot of people tell me that this is their favorite episode and it might be the one that I'm most proud of. If you've been listening to Mordermade for the massacres and terrorists and suicide cults, you're not going to get action like that in this one, but I do think you will really like it. If you enjoy this episode, please consider subscribing to my substack page. It's how I am able to do this. You can find it at mardomade.substack.com and that's where I post supplemental writings and exclusive podcast episodes available only to subscribers for just five bucks a month or fifty bucks a year. To all of you who are already contributing, you guys are what allow me to even do this. So again, the website is mardomade.substack.com. I hope you guys enjoy the show. Here we go. I can content to die for my beliefs. So cut off my head and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it. No. They must get. God is a thought. I'm not a real man. So there's this movie trope that I wonder if you guys have seen. There's lots of examples of it. I've seen it many times over the years, but for some reason right now, I can't think of a specific one, but I'll just describe it. It's usually a thriller. Maybe it's a horror movie where the character is either being targeted by some vast conspiracy or maybe it's a psychological thriller and he's starting to lose his mind, something like that. And the trope is the character will be alone in a room and the television zone. And usually it's showing the news that always works well for this particular scene. And then suddenly the anchor, the news anchor, will start talking to the character through the television. You know what I mean? Like I'll be in a room sitting down reading a book and the TV's on in the background. And that sports back to you, John. Thanks, Jim. In other news, no one's going to like this podcast episode, Darryl. People come here for straight history and you're in way over your head in this one. Here's Jill with the weather. And so I look up from my book like what? But you know, it's just Jill with tomorrow's forecast. That's how it always goes in the scene. And so I think I must have misheard it or it was just some coincidence and I go back to my book. And then a few minutes later, it happens again. Actually this time when I look up, the news anchor is staring right down the barrel of the camera at me. And he says, yes, Darryl, I'm talking to you. And I kind of look around the room, right? Because I'm still an idiot. Like, who, who me? Is there any other Darryl here? And then he starts talking to me, right? You know the scenes I'm talking about now? Starts talking to me about maybe things that he shouldn't know. I mean, I don't know why a news anchor would know anything about me, but I'm processing all this on the fly. He starts speaking like he knows a lot about me. And maybe I start looking around the room for hidden cameras and start shouting at the TV, but at that point I'm starting to feel like maybe I am crazy. But then he starts talking about my past, secret things, things that I thought were secret, almost as if he can read my thoughts, things that I don't talk to my friends about, doubts and insecurities maybe that I try to avoid letting into my own thought process. And so imagine that this happens at a point of major stress or transition, at a low point in my life. After I've been very isolated and lonely for many years, and that may be for other reasons which we will discuss as we go on, my grip on reality is already beginning to fray a little bit and that the distinction between dreaming and waking life was already becoming a little bit blurry. Well I think, this is a thought I had a long time ago and it's always stuck with me that in a movie about the life of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, there could be a scene like this. No television in the 1880s obviously. He would be perusing a bookstore and a certain book gets his attention and he picks up and opens a book by the great Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky. And Dostoevsky had never heard of Nietzsche, never read him, almost no one had heard of or read Nietzsche at this point. And so he didn't mention him by name like my imaginary news anchor, it's not quite that dramatic. But I think it was maybe as close as you could get with books instead of television and also this version has the advantage of having actually happened in real life. Many of us have had experiences reading novels, great novels where we think, you know, wow, this author just gets me or some aspect of me at least. It may even be something that we didn't see or understand about ourselves before or something that we vaguely felt, maybe that had been floating around for a while but we just hadn't quite been able to articulate. Nietzsche had no problem articulating himself obviously but then even the most clear thinking and articulate among us are often very unclear and inarticulate when we're thinking or talking about ourselves, at least when we're being honest or trying to. A good novel can give us insight, deep insight into ourselves precisely because we're often not honest with ourselves about ourselves. In this first book by Dusty Ebski that Nietzsche ever found, the narrator says, "Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends but only to himself and that only in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. Sometimes the things we keep from ourselves are merely uncomfortable or inconvenient, something you just don't want to think about. But other times a lot more is writing on it. Sometimes we build a whole personality and a whole outer life that depends on keeping it locked up. Where things go for so long and so much gets built on top of it that admitting the truth of ourselves, even to ourselves, would have such devastating and unpredictable psychological consequences and consequences for our lives that we just do our best to forget about it. But of course we can't forget about it because there's a funny thing about how the human mind works where things that we refuse to acknowledge tend to grow in power over time until they become a raging beast beating on the door or the cellar we keep it in and keeping it locked up becomes a full-time occupation requiring more and more energy and the whole personality becomes a kind of fortress built for the singular purpose of keeping it down in its hole. Nietzsche would spend the next two years, the last two years before he went insane, seeking out translations of any dusty Eveski books he could find. He said he'd found a lost brother. Someone who knew everything he knew but whose conclusions were the opposite of everything he had ever believed or written. I think Dusty Eveski's books might have been like a Trojan horse that Nietzsche led into his fortress. And Nietzsche was a man who very much believed in fate and by this point in his life especially that was true. And so the string of coincidences that led to his discovery of Dusty Eveski might have been the thing that got him to let that Russian author inside of his gates to give him the time of day. And then as he starts reading and finding out more about Dusty Eveski himself the uncanny and myriad ways in which Dusty Eveski's work found correspondence not only in Nietzsche's work but in his own life, his personal life kept him going on along with it. And then one day, and he's walking along, and he looks over at that Trojan horse, and maybe he notices it in a different light. Maybe I shouldn't carry this metaphor too far, but it was if he maybe he suddenly saw something that he recognized, but the recognition came too late. And by the time he realized what was happening, he realized that his gates had been opened and the walls that he had carefully constructed to protect his sanity, all at once came tumbling down. Dustyewski was 23 years older than Nietzsche, and Nietzsche didn't discover Dustyewski until years after Dustyewski's death, but the shape of their two lives bore a remarkable similarity with each other until they reached a fork right around their mid-30s and from there chose to head in very different directions. They were both very sensitive children who were introduced early to reading and took refuge in books. They were both sickly kind of frail children who would have health problems that would plague both of them throughout their entire lives. Both of their families were conservative, conventional, and they piled great expectations and pressure upon the two boys Nietzsche and Dustyewski as they were growing up and into their adulthood that weighed very heavily upon them, not just expectations and pressure to achieve or to make great success in their life, but to be a certain way. They both lost their fathers at a very early age and then labored under the judgment of their father's ghost for the rest of their lives. In the early 20s they both had a brief very negative experience in the military. At about the same age just as they were getting out on their own they both even had a traumatic experience involving a horse that would remain with them for the rest of their lives. At exactly the age of 24 they were both recognized for their talent and elevated up into elite company only to be disillusioned within a year or two and then to slide into a decade of unproductive obscurity. So the whole first half of their lives kind of follows almost year by year in certain ways the same trajectory. But then when they emerged from their decade of wandering that decade of exile after their initial success they would be headed in opposite directions that would lead them to divergent fates. At first book of Dostoevsky's that Nietzsche found was called the Underground Spirit. The Underground Spirit was actually two short Dostoevsky stories packaged as one book. One was called the Land Lady and the other was notes from the Underground. Probably the title, the Underground Spirit was what caught Nietzsche's eye in the bookstore most likely. The most recent piece of writing that he had completed was a preface for his book Dawn or Daybreak at some what sometimes called in which the very first sentence began in this book you will find an underground man at work. Well the narrator and protagonist of notes from the Underground is never given a name in the book and he has come down to us even today simply as the Underground Man. By way of introduction to notes from the Underground Nietzsche would have read these very first lines. The author of the diary and the diary itself are of course imaginary. Nevertheless it is clear that such persons as the writer of these notes not only may but positively must exist in our society when we consider the circumstances in which our society is formed. I have tried to expose to the view of the public more distinctly than this commonly done one of the characters of the recent past. He is one of the representatives of the generation still living. In this fragment entitled Underground this person introduces himself in his views and as it were tries to explain the causes owing to which he has made his appearance and was bound to make his appearance in our midst. Nietzsche's first lines to his recently completed preface continued in this book you will find an underground man at work. You will see him provided that you have eyes for such work in the depths. How he goes forward calmly slowly with gentle inexorability without revealing too much of the hardship that is the product of every long deprivation of light and air. You might even call him content with his work in the dark. I like to imagine moments like this as if I had been sweeping the bookstore floor and watching Nietzsche out of the corner of my eye as he let out a chuckle when he saw that his big old mustache kind of flaps a bit. Many people over the years even critics and writers have mistakenly assumed that Nietzsche must have written the preface to dawn after having been influenced by his discovery of Dostoevsky but in fact we know that he had already written it. Nietzsche had stopped into that bookstore while he was taking a break from being out searching for a new apartment. When he opened the underground spirit and turned to the very first page the very first sentence read Ordenov the protagonist of the story had finally decided to change his apartment. That's not exactly the news anchor calling you out but isn't I don't know it's not too far off from him opening up the book in the first thing he sees is well hello Mr. Underground man how goes the apartment search especially as the coincidences continue to pile up at first maybe he just raises an eyebrow but it just starts rolling from there and Nietzsche was not a big believer in coincidences especially at this point in his life. So I like to imagine that he never got around to finding an apartment that day but instead plop down to find out what happened to Ordenov and the land lady and the underground man. He would find that Dostoevsky was very much engaged with the same questions that he had been wrestling with for years although from quite a different direction and with a different intent than Nietzsche although Nietzsche may not have been able to tell that just yet from only the land lady in notes from the underground but then again he might have gotten some idea. Nietzsche's most important book as far as he was concerned a book he considered a text of almost sacred knowledge. Something he thought would one day have entire universities dedicated to plumbing the depths of his teachings that was so far advanced that nobody in his own time could even understand it and it would take decades, decades and decades before men came along who could even grasp what he was saying. His book was called Thus Big Zarathustra and in it Nietzsche has his heroes Zarathustra come down from the mountains to the world of men in his 40th year to share the wisdom he's accumulated meditating up in the mountains. When he's made the decision to descend Zarathustra addresses the sun and says, "Thou great star! What would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those for who thou shinest?" He says he's like a bee who's gathered so much honey and now he has to go down the mountain to give it out into the outstretched hands of mankind and most of the book consists of his speeches, Nietzsche's words basically to the people that he meets. The underground man from Dostoevsky's book is also coming out to speak to humanity in his 40th year although he's coming up out of his whole rather than descending from the mountain top and much of that book consists of his speeches. Early in the book he says, "We underground folk, though we may sit 40 years underground without speaking, when we do come out into the light of day and break out, we talk and talk and talk." And he says, "You must excuse me for being overly philosophical. It's just the result of 40 years underground." Nietzsche's Zarathustra has come down to humanity to preach the ubermench, the overman or Superman, the radically free individual who is cast off the fetters of social convention and in his total freedom and outlook is as different from men as men are from apes." That's how Nietzsche describes it. Dostoevsky's underground man has come to humanity in a way to talk about the same thing but to expose the true nature of this radically free individual who's cut free from all ties and conventions and who it turns out is in many ways more of a slave than the herd of people for whom he has so much contempt. And that's how Dostoevsky's work proceeds as Nietzsche goes through a practically chapter by chapter and line by line. Dostoevsky responds to the major ideas with which Nietzsche had been dealing in books he'd written over the past several years. Although again, you know, Dostoevsky was dead and he written notes from the underground when Nietzsche was a teenager. Nietzsche was a man suffering from chronic illnesses since childhood and rapidly collapsing health by the time he found this book and when he opened up notes from the underground the very first line that he read after that introduction was "I am a sick man." Nietzsche By now, had more or less given up trying to track or improve his health through medicine, he was disregarding the advice of doctors when they gave it to him, and that line in notes continues. I think my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it though, I have a respect for medicine in doctors. Besides, I'm extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine anyway. I am well educated enough to not be superstitious, but I am superstitious. No, I refuse to consult a doctor out of spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I'm mortifying by my spite. I'm perfectly well aware that I cannot harm the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that by all this, I'm only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor, it is out of spite. My liver is bad, well, let it get worse. In that same first chapter, Nietzsche reads that the underground man, like himself, quit his job early and now survives on a fixed income sufficient for an extremely modest living. He learns that the underground man, like himself, spends virtually all of his time alone, has almost no friends and has a lot of trouble getting along too well with people for very long. And of course, the underground man is sick like he is. Nietzsche boasted in his writings of his ability to drive through his illnesses and his chronic pain, which was certainly a superpower of his. No question about that, that whole idea of that, which does not kill me, only makes me stronger, that comes from Nietzsche. Again and again in his writings, he describes his fortitude through all his suffering as a mark of his warrior spirit and he attributes much of his insight to this. Immediately in the second chapter of notes from the underground, the underground man is imagining that we the readers are kind of gently mocking him for taking pride in his own afflictions and so the underground man asks the readers, but gentlemen, whoever can take pride in his diseases and even swagger over them. Though after all, everyone does do that. People do pride themselves on their diseases and I suppose I do maybe more than anyone. These little correspondence just go on chapter after chapter. The whole book is like a dark mirror held up to Nietzsche's life and ideas. It's a very fruitful experience to read Nietzsche's autobiography, "Echey Homo," alongside a immediately alongside notes from the underground. And just imagine that you're reading a book by the same person but from two sides of their personality. You read it with a knowledge of Nietzsche's biography and what his life was like when he wrote that autobiography in the final months before he lost his mind. The former presents him as this confident, conquering hero and the latter sort of exposes the inner life of someone who believes that about himself but is confronted with the consistent series of failures and defeats that make up his real life. Notes from the underground was the second story in the underground spirit, the first one, the Land Lady, which begins with the main character setting out to find a new apartment as Nietzsche had been when he found the book, was from an earlier period of Dostoevsky's career and is not a masterpiece like notes from the underground, but it's definitely in keeping with the series of coincidences and content uncannily relevant that Nietzsche found throughout the rest of the book. In fact, the plot of the Land Lady has many parallels with a very significant and very formative event in Nietzsche's own life, and that was his relationship to and his eventual falling out with the famous composer Richard Wagner and his wife Kossima. Nietzsche met Wagner when Nietzsche was still a student in Leapsig in the late 1860s, and by this time Wagner was already very famous, something of a god figure in Germany at the time almost, and he had a circle of admirers and hangers on who treated him that way. Their famous men like Franz Lis, the Hungarian composer and pianist and the conductor Hans Van Buello were in Wagner's circle and gatherings at his mansion were sort of famous for their intolerance of small talk. You had to carry yourself in a certain way. Germany at this point hadn't even been unified into a single country, but many powerful people were working on that, and this was a circle that was self-consciously involved in trying to forge a common Germanic culture for this new nation at the envision. Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, was the Foreign Minister of Prussia, and after Prussia incorporated Austria in 1866 he was the Chancellor of the North German Federation, so this is coming together. The song "Deutschland Uberale", "Germany Above All", people often just sort of assume that that has something to do with the Nazis and German imperialism, but it came out of this period. It wasn't about German imperialism, but German unity. You know, don't just be Bavarian, don't just be Prussian, be German. Germany Above All, "Deutschland Uberale". Nietzsche was a non-conformist to the core and was uncomfortable with many elements of German nationalism and the cultural chauvinism that he saw emerging from that, but even he felt the pull. In 1867, the year after the incorporation of Austria, he volunteered for Prussian artillery division. Which when you go through a lot of Nietzsche's writings, especially his later stuff, when you start to get into his biography and you hear that, it seems that of character in a way. It didn't last long, he was injured the next year in a writing accident, but still, he didn't join from a lack of better things to do at this time. This was the age of nationalism. Nationalism is a mass movement. German unification was only four years away, and so the spirit of all this, it's in the air and it's on the streets. This is around the same time, a little bit before, that the brothers' grand were going around Germany, collecting and publishing folk tales for similar reasons, to provide the people of this emerging German nation that was coming into view, a shared cultural heritage to form basis of their communion. And Wagner was very much interested in doing this in his own realm of musical drama, and this is how other people understood him as well. Not only as a composer, but as a cultural figure of great importance. And so when you were invited to a gathering at Wagner's, you were expected to bring your A.M. to this great cultural task. Even if it was a party, you were expected to bring it. While Nietzsche came well-recommended, he was obviously brilliant enough to stand out among other brilliant people, and so he made a good impression. And also he'd recently accepted an offer to become the youngest full professor in the history of the Swiss university system, despite the fact that he hadn't even completed his doctorate yet. When this gives you an idea of how brilliant the man was, and how precocious, when the University of Basel offered Nietzsche the position as chair of classical philology, he hadn't even taken his doctoral examination or submitted a thesis, but apparently the University of Leapzig thought that this guy had proven himself plenty because they waived both of those requirements, awarded him his doctorate, and sent him on his way. And so it was clear that this was an emerging German intellectual, and therefore he was brought in to Wagner's inner circle. Wagner had a tremendous pull on people. Almost, you don't want to say mystical pull, but it's to the extent that after a scandal involving an affair between Wagner and the wife of Hans Wambulow, the king Ludwig II was pressured to make Wagner leave Bavaria, but not before Wagner had to personally talk King Ludwig out of abdicating his throne so that he could move away with him. There were other reasons he was asked to leave. The king was young, and many of the people at court didn't like the influence that Wagner had over him, but you get the point. This is a very significant figure in Germany's cultural life at the time. And his circle included others who were also recognized as such, and the atmosphere of their gatherings was charged with the feeling that they were at the center of significant historical developments. And Nietzsche was very independently minded, but he's a young man too, and so he was also dazzled at first by being swept up into such rarefied air at a young age. At the center of the circle, in a way, was a woman named Kossima. Kossima was Wagner's mistress when Nietzsche was brought in, and she was also the wife of Hans Wambulow, a member of Wagner's inner circle. Hans Wambulow had been the most prominent student of Kossima's father, the famous pianist and composer, Franz Liszt, who was also a key member of the Wagnerian inner circle. And so when Nietzsche was brought into this club, the three most important figures, arguably, probably, Liszt, Buello, and Wagner himself, all have this sort of solicitous love relationship to this woman. Liszt obviously only has her father, but still she's the center of everyone's affectionate attention in one way or another. And desire is mimetic and so very soon, Nietzsche also falls in love with Cosm of Wagner. And so coming back to that bookstore, this is years after Nietzsche's relationship with the Wagner's ended catastrophically, but which was still very much an open wound to the point that most of his books that he put out at the time still reference Wagner either directly or indirectly. And two years after this moment in the bookstore, after Nietzsche loses his mind, one of the first things he does, and in the days immediately after he's put in bed, one of the very first things he did was write a love letter to Cosm of Wagner, to whom he hadn't spoken many years. This is almost 20 years after they met, a decade since their split, so this whole experience was never far from the surface of Nietzsche's mind. And so he's there in the bookstore. He sees a book called the Underground Spirit, picks it up because he's recently written in essay in which he says, "This is the work of an underground man." One of the stories, notes from the underground, is also described as the work of an underground man, and seems to be in dialogue with much of his own work over the last many years. The other story, the landlady begins with the line Ordinov has finally decided to find a new apartment, just as Nietzsche had been out searching for an apartment when he stopped into the bookstore. And so he finds a corner, settles in, and reads a story about a young, reclusive scholar named Ordinov, who has been invited into the home of a couple. A young, lovely woman named Katarina and a mysterious older man named Muren, who seems to hold Katarina under some kind of a spell. And so of course the hero Ordinov soon falls in love with Katarina, and the two of them who are much closer in age than she is to Muren, just as Nietzsche and Cosm of were much closer in age than she was to Wagner, who was the same age as Nietzsche's father. The two of them soon become very close, just as Nietzsche and Cosm of would become very close. But it soon becomes clear that the older man has too much power over her for him to really make any inroads, much less pry her away. I wasn't kidding when I said Wagner's circle treated him like a deity, even Hans von Bülo, when his wife, who was Cosm of at the time, when his wife's affair with Wagner became a public scandal and she asked for a divorce, even he took it in stride. He supposed to have invoked the story of Theesius Dionysus and Ariadne, in which Theesius, who's a human, is married to Ariadne, but gives her up to Dionysus, a god after Dionysus takes his claim to her. There are various versions of the story, but this is the one he was referring to. According to Nietzsche's sister, Bülo said that when a woman is torn between a man and a god, it is excusable for her to choose the god. And he's talking about Wagner, obviously. He basically was treating it like, I don't know, if you're working as a rote for Elvis Presley and your wife ends up leaving you for the King of Rock and Roll, it's like, how could you, you evil woman, you, how could you do this to me, why I ought to, yeah, what are you going to do? Remember that episode, because it will come up near the end. Well, Kausama was every bit as enraptured by her husband as everyone else. She wasn't as I should stop saying that. So she was as mistress until 1970. We'll get to that in a second. She still as mistress, still with Bülo and Nietzsche first comes in. She's every bit as enraptured by her husband, Wagner is anyone else. She holds the man in awe. She's utterly devoted to him. Years earlier, when they had practically first met, this is before Nietzsche came into the picture. She had just met Wagner. She was still married to Bülo and she and Wagner apparently got alone in a room one time and she literally fell at his feet, weeping, just practically worshiping the man. She spent the remainder of her life after her husband's death, completely devoted to increasing his fame and spreading his work. So Nietzsche has fallen for a married woman who is intensely devoted to her husband. There's a part in the land lady where Ordinov tries to stand up to Muren, the old man, but he wilts at the critical moment and Katarina falls at Muren's feet weeping. It's also hinted that Muren may have originally been the lover of Katarina's mother and that he and Katarina ran off together after he killed her father. It's all a little bit vague. Well Nietzsche had wandered into Wagner's circle where Cosimo was still married to Bülo at the time, even though she'd already had children with Wagner, whose work was being promoted by Cosimo's father, Franz Lis, to as the teacher of her cuckold husband Bülo. Two of Wagner's children actually carried Bülo's last name because they were born when Cosimo was still married to Hans and they pretended the children were his to avoid scandal. Obviously the details between the book and this real life example are different, but my point is both Ordinov and Nietzsche had walked into a strange pseudo-insesituous situation and fallen in love with a young woman who was held in thrall to a powerful older man who seemed to hold all the people around him under some kind of spell. There's also a possible political reading of the book that provides another interesting angle and relates to Nietzsche's experience. It's hinted that Muren is a Russian old believer sectarian and so he represents in this reading the pre-modern beliefs and traditions of Russia. Ordinov, the Moody scholar, is the Russian intelligentsia who identifies with modernity and the broader European world and the woman, Katarina, is the Russian folk. And so in this reading the modern intellectual is trying to pry the Russian folk away from the old superstitions and customs which still exercise so much control over them. Although Katarina is still too devoted to the old man to leave him, she tells Ordinov that she loves him, loves him like a sister, more than a sister and she tries to draw him into their relationship, into her and the old man's relationship. The exact nature of it's a bit murky and it's been a while since I've read it. Russia in the 19th century was very politically and socially turbulent, at least as much as anywhere in Europe and Dostoevsky was always very much in touch with these currents. So if you read it as a political allegory then you have this modern intelligentsia struggling against the old ways and institutions for the hearts and minds of the people and the people of course being very attached to the traditional ways and instead sort of trying to tempt the younger intellectuals to join them. Forget about socialism, modernism, whatever the fashionable intellectual ideas of the day are and put your powers to work in the service of old Russia, the Tsarist regime, orthodoxy and so forth. Well there was maybe an element of this in the Nietzsche Wagner triangle as well, in the sense that Nietzsche despite his brief stint in the Prussian military really considered himself even at this time a European more than a German. In fact he gave up his Prussian citizenship when he accepted the professorship at Basel and never even got around to completing the process to gain Swiss citizenship. So for the rest of his life he was literally a European man without a country. He was uncomfortable with the direction that Germany was headed as the nationalist idea was catching fire and he would become increasingly uncomfortable with Wagner as he embraced and championed that idea. Nkasima was only one quarter German, her father was Hungarian and her mother was French German but she was enthralled to Wagner's imperial German vision and just taking it in wholeheartedly and was sharing his nationalist showvonism and his increasingly hostile attitude toward foreigners. And so just to summarize in the land lady you've got a young modern intellectual in a rivalry with an older man who represents the more provincial backward looking values and the woman who was the object of their rivalry being too much under the power of the old man and instead trying to pull the intellectual into their circle to be a part of this other thing that they're doing but which the intellectual finds increasingly off-putting. That's pretty much what happens with Nietzsche and the Wagner's. He falls in love with Kusima which puts him in rivalry with Wagner, the older man representing the more provincial backward looking ways as Nietzsche saw it and Kusima being too much under the power of the older man and instead using her influence with Nietzsche to try to pull him into their circle in the service of a cause that he found increasingly offensive. Nietzsche never did make an open play for Kusima while Richard Wagner was alive as far as I know and so the rivalry didn't break into the open and in a way the story of the land lady plays out somewhat somewhat similar to this in the sense that he didn't have the courage to really go through with it and make a direct challenge. Ordinov does confess his feelings for Katarina but at the climax of the story when Ordinov decides to kill Muren in order to free Katarina. At the last moment he's holding the knife and he's got the advantage and he breaks down under the gaze of the old man and drops the knife and that's when Katarina falls at Muren's feet weeping in a scene reminiscent of Kusima's worship of Wagner and so when the police arrive the old man Muren tells them that a woman like Katarina requires a strong master like himself and that this guy Ordinov you know Ordinov is so weak in spirit that he couldn't kill a stronger man even when he fully had the means to do so, so don't worry about him. It's interesting, and important, I think, that all three of the women Nietzsche ever fell in love with. There were only three, and all three of them were part of a love triangle where Nietzsche ended up the odd man out. He never made a move on any woman until 1876, after he began to publicly criticize Richard Wagner's work and broke with the couple. In that instance, in 1876, he fell in love with a woman and asked a friend to propose to her on his behalf, but she rejected him and ended up going with his friend instead. So that hurt, and he would go another six years before trying again, and experienced maybe even worse humiliation with a very close friend and a woman that he was mad for. And that one would leave a scar, but we'll talk about that in just a little bit. After Nietzsche read the underground spirit, he starts writing to acquaintances and asking for more information about this Dostoevsky guy. Just finding anything he can in translation, find out what he can about the man, and what he would find are many more stories centered around love triangles. It's obviously a common device to generate literary conflict, but few authors mastered the motif as well as Dostoevsky, and what would have really resonated with Nietzsche based on his own life experiences, was that in Dostoevsky's stories, the protagonist is pretty much always the loser in the love triangle, which is not too surprising, because like Nietzsche, Dostoevsky had some painful experiences of his own to draw on. Dostoevsky had published the Land Lady 40 years before Nietzsche found it at one of the lowest points in his own life. His first book, the first 20'd ever really written, the first time he ever really sat down to seriously write something as far as we know, is called Poor Folk, and it had made him immediately the next big thing when he was just 24 years old. Same age as Nietzsche when he became the youngest ever classics professor in Switzerland. The most prominent Russian literary critic of the day, one of two or three at least, Visarian Balinsky, took a look at Poor Folk and thought it spoke well to some of the fashionable political and social critiques of the day, and so very quickly and quite easily, Dostoevsky suddenly found himself yanked out of obscurity into the faunting but fickle world of Russia's literary salons. And to see the least, he was not psychologically or emotionally prepared to handle the change gracefully. Let's just put it that way. Balinsky's blessing had brought Dostoevsky into the spotlight, but that also meant that he had the power to cast him out. This made the young Dostoevsky dependent on a man for whom his opinion was, let's say, mixed it best. The best way I can put it is imagine that a young artist from a farm in Alabama gets noticed by a major art dealer, and all at once is swept up into the New York City art scene. Now he's an artist. He doesn't care about Alabama, Auburn, football, he hated farm work, never really felt at home down south. He couldn't wait to get out of that place and go to the big city where there were people like him where it was all happening. Just before he left for the big city, he and his dad even had a big fight because he hates Trump and his dad voted for Trump. So you got the idea in your head. And he gets to New York, he's new, he's the next big thing. Everybody loves him, everybody wants a piece of him. So he just jumps in with both feet, but he soon learns that his new friends have some very choice words about the places and the values and the people that he grew up with. Now he never really fit in down there, and he's at his own choice words on occasion as he was growing up. But you know, these are his friends and his family they're talking about. And it's not only the people back home. He starts to realize that he needs to maybe watch what he says if he doesn't want to start a fight because he thought he was a liberal back home, but his new friends are talking about people who hold views that he finds pretty reasonable and some pretty nasty ways. And it's not just sometimes these scenes are always extremely politicized, it's always a huge part of people's identity and scenes like this. So he's hearing it all the time, all the time, everywhere he goes. And he can tell himself, I'm not here for the politics, I'm here for the art, but he also realizes that his new friends would turn on him like hyenas if he ever did voice some disagreement. And it doesn't matter who you are, there's an innate sense of honor that makes it very difficult to sit there quiet day after day as people insult and mock your parents and your friends in your hometown. That's not a perfect analogy for what Dostoevsky encountered in the Petersburg literary scene, but it will give you some idea. Dostoevsky had lost his mother when he was a teenager and his father who took over there raising himself was a stern conservative man. He's a Russian man of the 19th century. He wasn't wealthy, but he wasn't a state owner and he was a military doctor. He's described sometimes as a tyrant, but he provided well for his children, he saw their education and really was probably no more tyrannical than what you would expect from an orthodox Christian 19th century Russian father who is also a military doctor. To a boy like Dostoevsky, a sensitive, somewhat frail child who spent his teenage years dreaming of being a writer, a father like that probably did seem like a tyrant. When the boy was 15, his father pulled him and his brother from their regular academic studies and sent them to a military academy to study engineering, something Dostoevsky was unhappy about to say the least. That whole experience left such a negative impression on him that an incident he witnessed on his journey to the military academy was burned into his memory forever as a sort of symbol or like an initiation into this miserable period of his life. As he was walking, he saw a courier beating the driver of a horse drawn cart in such a way that each time he struck the driver with his fist, the driver would strike the horse with his whip almost like it was all one mechanical motion, strike strike strike strike. He strikes the driver, the driver strikes the horse all in perfect time. Dostoevsky's biographer wrote that it was like a primal experience for him, one that Dostoevsky himself even in his late years assigned a formative role in his own self development. It was also an experience on which he would base one of the most powerful and harrowing scenes in all of literature, one that would have itself a devastating effect on Friedrich Nietzsche when he read it. As the experience struck Dostoevsky who then passed that blow onto Nietzsche just as the blow had passed from the courier to the driver to the horse. Almost 40 years later, Dostoevsky wrote about this incident and sort of a mysterious merger of fates of the horse and the man. He wrote, "This disgusting sight has remained in my memory all my life. Never was I able to forget it. This little scene appeared to me so to speak as an emblem, as something which very graphically demonstrated the link between cause and effect. Here every blow dealt at the animal leaped out of each blow dealt at the man." Well, at the military academy, Dostoevsky was both the horse and the man. He was a victim of blows as a young cadet, but also one expected to deliver them as an officer in training, and he hated it. And he only looked forward to escape. He absolutely hated it. A friend from those days remembered, "There was no student in the entire institution with less of a military bearing than FM Dostoevsky. He moved clumsily and jirkely, his uniform hung awkwardly on him, and his knapsack, shiko, and rifle all looked like some sort of fetter he had been forced to wear for a time in which lay heavily upon him. He had very few friends, and was constantly complaining in letters to his father about not having enough money for anything. One time his father had a stroke after reading a letter from his son informing them that he had failed to be promoted. Then when Dostoevsky learned about his father's stroke, he suffered some kind of a collapse and spent some time in the hospital. So it seems like there's a very intense relationship between father and son here, people having strokes and fainting when they hear about them and going to the hospital for weeks at a time based on these things happening at a distance. Some very intense relationship involving heavy expectations from the father, guilt, and feelings of inadequacy from the son, as well as lots of resentments over having been pushed into this place that he hated so much to begin with. When Dostoevsky was 18, his father was found dead. It was long thought that Dostoevsky's father was murdered by his own serfs. That story has come into doubt over the years as far as I understand, but the important point is that Dostoevsky himself believed it to be true. And more than that, he very well may have felt that he was at least partly responsible, believing that his constant depression would be gone. man's for money were what had caused his father to increase the burden on his serfs which led to their discontent and his murder. Again, we're not really concerned here with whether or not the story itself is true. What matters for where we're going is that Dostoevsky likely believed it to be true and would carry that with him for the rest of his life. He told his brother, "I would regret nothing if the tears of our poor father did not burn my soul." This had happened maybe three, maybe four years prior to Dostoevsky writing "Poorfolk" and arriving into the Peter's Brew literary scene. He gets out of the Academy after all these intense experiences having to do with his father and everything and you know he's supposed to go out and become a military engineer. That's what he's been in the military Academy for but he gets out and he says that to hell with that and he goes out and charges on path in a couple years later he writes "Poorfolk" and here he is. So add that ingredient into the mix, into the ambivalent mix he's got going here. The man who raised his status, the critic Balinsky, is a very committed and outspoken atheist. I mean really vocal about it. Dostoevsky is an Orthodox Christian, you know one who wrestled with his faith especially back then but his father, his home, the people he came from, the people that in a way part of him felt like he had betrayed by not following through with this military career. These are the kind of deeply committed Christians that Balinsky held in deep and open contempt. Balinsky was also involved in radical and revolutionary politics which suffused the whole Petersburg literary scene for which Dostoevsky had abandoned his military career and which his late father, the conservative orthodox military doctor, would have liked about as much as I don't know the head of the Chicago fraternal order of police would like seeing his son hang out with Antifa, something like that. Why do you deal with that? If you've got these feelings pulling you in various directions, one of the ways you can deal with it and the way Dostoevsky did it first was to just dive in. He's glad to be away from home, glad to be out of that Godforsaken military academy and here he was. You know the next big thing, the fact that he had arrived like this didn't it prove that he'd been right all along in the doubters and naysayers and other people had been wrong? Here he is, finally among his people, people like him. This is where he belonged. But old ties are strong and enthusiasm can only carry you so far before the ambivalence bubbles up and inside he's roiled with conflicting feelings of grief and guilt and resentment for his father and for the whole world that a powerful father still represents to a son who's still immature. He even admitted experiencing some feelings of relief when his father died and dramatized those feelings through some of his characters later on. In his final masterpiece, the brother's Karamazov, one of the brothers Yvonne, says at one point, "Who doesn't wish for their father's death?" Another one of the brother's demetry Karamazov actually goes to kill their father only to find him already dead, which is a pretty direct dramatization of a son wishing for his father's death and then having it happen. It's pretty common for children to experience feelings of relief when their parents die. It's inevitable that our feelings for our parents are always mixed, especially when we're younger. You know because even the best parents place burdens on us that sometimes feel heavy, control us in ways that we would rather not be controlled at the time and so they die and now you're free and that feeling can just pop up simultaneously. I'm assuming your parents weren't monsters and that you're not a complete psychopath. That feeling of relief is quickly repressed and followed by feelings of guilt for having indulged it. That's what happens in a normal person. Freud in an essay speculating about the causes of Dostoevsky's epilepsy mentions this episode with his father. He says, "It is a dangerous thing when reality fulfills such repressed wishes." Bit of an understatement, which is not usually Freud's forte, but Freud was probably wrong that Dostoevsky's epilepsy resulted from repressed ambivalence toward his father, but he was not wrong about Dostoevsky's feelings. And now part of him, not the part that felt relief, but the part that flogged him with guilt for it, has one more reason to feel like he's betrayed his father's memory by making himself dependent on the patronage of this man, Balinsky, and a crowd who are not only the opposite of his father, but aggressively opposite. If all these mixed feelings weren't enough, Dostoevsky is a man as a person who he was at the time was just not mature enough to handle all the success and the praise coming his way without it going straight to his head. In a letter to his brother, he wrote, "Never, my brother, will my glory surpass the summit which it has now attained, everywhere I excite, incredible respect, an amazing curiosity. Everyone now considers me a wonder." He tells his brother that word is spreading, "that a new star has just appeared and will push everyone else into the mud." Renas Gerard writes about this period in Dostoevsky's career, says quote, "The young writer takes all the flattery quite seriously. He does not understand that this is a short term loan and that he must pay back everything right away under penalty of losing credit." Dostoevsky does not practice any of the little compromises that make the literary underground tolerable. His pride is no doubt greater than that of the people around him, but he is too naive, too crude, less able to spare the pride of others. This young, provincial, boiling with unsated desires, yet already mistreated by life to the point of feeling forever deformed, could not avoid at once amusing and irritating the literary dandies he encountered. Here he is now, entering as an acclaimed figure into the most brilliant literary salons of St. Petersburg. It is thus no surprise that he takes himself for a god. Contemporary sources all describe his astonishing transformation. At first, extremely quiet and self-contained, he subsequently demonstrated extraordinary exuberance and arrogance. The others initially smiled at this, but soon they were annoyed. All the underground mechanisms then began to function. Their pride injured, the others attempted to injure Dostoevsky in turn. Dostoevsky tries to defend himself, but the match is not equal. He accuses the circles leader, whom he had until then venerated, of being jealous of his work. He lets it be known that his giants' wings prevent him from merely walking. The mockers break loose and satirical verses start to circulate. In a satirical poem called "The Night of the Rufl Countenance," Dostoevsky is labeled a pimple on the face of Russian literature. His mocked for his inflated opinions of his literary creativity and ridiculed for fainting when he was introduced to a beautiful bell of the aristocracy who wanted to meet him. End quote. That last thing really did happen, by the way. Dostoevsky was infamously awkward around women and he did once faint in front of many people when he was introduced to a pretty girl. And it became as if he was two different people. The one acting in the world and the one inside experiencing it all. And the two were getting further and further apart as the one inside seemed to be losing control of what the one outside on the outside was doing. The most stark illustration of that is when you meet somebody and do this external experience, you lose complete control over yourself and faint. Yet everything he'd ever dreamed of, but with reservations and to overcome the ambivalence, he gave over his whole identity to these fickle people, tried to impress them and took all the praise that they laid on him, not only at face value, but as the literal truth, and yet his ambivalence in his awkwardness and insecurity couldn't help but come out. Now he felt himself to be more sensitive and talented than the people around him. And it's Dostoevsky, so it turned out he was, in many ways. But at the same time, he felt relatively uncouth and unsophisticated and vulgar in the presence of these practice cosmopolitons, whom he always expected were looking down their noses at him and whispering behind his back, even before his conflict with them came out into the open. Not long after poor folk raised him up and everyone's attention, Dostoevsky published another book called The Double that sort of sealed his fate in the Russian literary world and left him out in the cold, often literally for more than a decade. Now at first glance, The Double is a very different book from poor folk, Dostoevsky's first one. The psychoanalyst Otto Ronk wrote an essay on the phenomenon of The Double, The Double Ganger, the uncanny or evil twin in literature. And in it, he points out that Dostoevsky's second novel provides an almost complete illustration of what a mind is like in a paranoid state. The narcissistic and paranoid complexes are close cousins. I think we talked about this somewhat in the Jones Town series. You know, thinking that you are the center of everyone's attention is another way of saying that you feel like you are constantly under surveillance. If you're always being watched or feel like you are, you become hyper aware, pathologically hyper aware of what you're doing, how you're coming across, how it's being perceived. how to manage people's perceptions while being aware that all of this is causing you to act kind of unnaturally and being self-conscious about that as well. It's this obsessive recursive loop that you get caught in. Both paranoia and narcissism describe a subject who is self-obsessed and who refers everything in the world back to himself. You're not only in his speech the way he talks about things but in the basic way, the fundamental way that his mind arranges his relationship to the world. And he imagines that others must be focusing on him equally as much. He goes through tremendous mental convolutions to maintain the illusion that that is true because their own sense of significance and their own identity is derived from other people. And so both narcissists and paranoid often suffer hard hard breakdowns if their psychological offenses fail and they're forced to confront the fact that that is not true. Which is, you know, in extreme cases, it's strange. You would think that a paranoid person would be relieved to learn that, oh, actually, there's no conspiracy threatening you, but that's not how it plays out in real life. In reality, they fight to hold on to their paranoia tooth and nail. And if through therapy or some other intervention, you're able to break through and convince them that that's not true, they do not celebrate. They fall apart usually into a very deep depression. It's so common that doctors who treat paranoid patients plan for it. Narcissists who aren't suffering from acute paranoia are a little bit different in that their delusions of centrality break down more frequently, you know, before they can build up into an all-encompassing conspiracy. The paranoid has a hostile response. The difference is that the paranoid has a hostile response to anybody who doesn't confirm his paranoia. So there's kind of a built-in malfunction in that he can just assume that the person who is disconfirming his paranoia is part of the conspiracy. And so it's like, it's just like this built-in, you know, sort of means of incorporating any disconfirming data, right? So rather than creating cracks, disconfirming evidence just adds to his certainty because it's just one more person that I thought I could trust, but it turns out is in on it until the whole thing builds up into a, you know, a giant system. And when it collapses, the whole personality collapses with it. It's somewhat like, you know, how we've managed like forest fires, forest and wilderness areas in the United States, right? Doing everything we can to prevent fires from happening, which eventually allows so much undergrowth and dead wood to accumulate that when the firefighting comes, it's way worse than it would have otherwise been. The basic Narcissist arranges his relationships similar to the paranoid, but he has those smaller forest fires more frequently. He has to actually confront evidence that other people maybe aren't so concerned about him or that he's not the center of things the way that he imagines on a more regular basis. And rather than going through a whole personality collapse, he just tends to fall into depressive periods until he can get himself together and rebuild his self image and then head back out into the world to do it all over again. And so you might say that, you know, the paranoia is a sort of very extreme, very pathological narcissistic defense. When someone's confronted with evidence that threatens their view of themselves rather than becoming depressed or falling, falling apart, they interpret it as hostility and integrate it into a broader conspiracy that although it's threatening and uncomfortable, it maintains their place at the center. I know we talked a bit about narcissism in the Jones Town series, but it's worth rehashing just a few basics to make sure that it's fresh in the back of our minds here. The basic narcissist dilemma to put it in a very non-technical sort of relatable term terms is to feel utterly unique and superior to the people around you while at the same time desperately needing their approval, thus placing them above you, putting them in a position to look down on you, and of course resenting their condescension and hating yourself for caring what these nobody's think about you in the first place, which then circles back around and challenges your view of yourself as unique and superior to the people around you, which creates an even greater need for their approval and validation and so on in a vicious cycle. People say narcissists are incapable of empathy or understanding the feelings of others, but it's not the same as psychopathy. Many of the greatest most sensitive novelists and artists have been narcissists and these are people who clearly not only understand but who deeply feel and can put themselves in the emotional position of other people, but that's just dead. That's what they're doing, imagining themselves in that position. The narcissist deficiency is really his inability to relate to others as separate people with their own center, their own trajectory that has nothing to do with you, and to just interact with them as an equal independent person. I don't mean equal in terms of social status, but ontological status almost. Rather than as just one character, one NPC in this obsessive psychodrama that you've got going on, they're not a character in your life, they're their own thing. Narcissists cannot just can't do that. It's not how their mind arranges things. As you can imagine, narcissistic personalities proliferate in the literary and art world as well as among, you know, you could think of other fields like politicians and actors, not only because those fields attract the type and they do, but because the fields themselves draw out and amplify narcissistic tendencies that are latent in all of us to some degree. These are fields without objective measures of achievement. You can get an 84% on your art history exam, but you can't get an 84% on a painting or a sculpture because, you know, 84% of what? Like what are you measuring? What matters is what other people think of it and very much what other people think of you. And so to be in one of these fields is to be under surveillance, to be watched and judged, which leads to an acute division between what's going on inside your head, your inner life, and how you present to the world. That's how people who are always being watched learn how to be. A good politician can have a devastating fight with his wife and then walk on stage and give a great historic uplifting speech. So the literary and intellectual worlds that both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche moved in attracted men like them with overdeveloped narcissistic attributes and then they find themselves surrounded by other similar people, all of whom see the others as extras in a movie that they're starring in. It's a world defined by reading the room and comparing yourself to others, appearing to be interested in certain things, but not too interested because that would betray you as a Philistine. Unless everyone else is extremely interested, but even then you got to worry about staking out your own position. You don't want to seem like a conformist, but not a position that's too far out because then your eccentricity will seem affected. And you also might risk alienating some of the really significant people, though you don't want to be seen as sucking up to them either. It's very important to be able to watch for the signs. They should treat you as an equal, but not see you as arrival, but at least not yet. You can see how this personality very easily veers off into a kind of paranoia. A person can become obsessive, even delusional. There are people we all probably know or have known in everyday life, who are always sure that people are talking behind their backs or plotting against them in the office, trying to subvert their success. It's almost like you sit down and try to have a conversation with the person and always seems to end up there, right? You would have no evidence for these things. And we might say, "There's no evidence for these things. This person is delusional." We don't mean it the same way we do about a person who thinks that the government is plotting against him, but in important ways the psychological dynamics are the same. The guy walking down the street muttering to himself about that evil Susan who sits in the cubicle across from him and Brad and accounting, you know, I know they didn't just forget to invite me to the office lunch on Friday. They thought it was funny. The whole group probably had a big laugh over it. Yeah, well, we'll see how funny it is when that guy is only slightly less crazy than the one walking down the street muttering about the CIA monitoring him. And sometimes more crazy. Sometimes the first guy creates enough conflict as these people tend to do that he gets fired some Friday afternoon confirming for sure that there was a conspiracy against him by his coworkers. And then he shows up uninvited on Monday morning with a duffle bag full of gear that is inappropriate to bring into the workplace. That's morbid, but obviously it happens. And this is how it starts. So coming back to Dostoevsky his fall from grace was almost as rapid as his rise. He had repeatedly made a fool of himself and was abrasive and arrogant and would never like Gerard said would just never refrain from scoring a point never spared the pride of someone else when he had the opportunity. And so he made a lot of enemies in the literary scene who were looking for a reason to take him down a notch or two or 10 and he gave them that reason when he published the double, which his sponsor, Visari Ambulinsky did not like. Now, I've been reading Dusty Eveski for a long time. I'm no literary critic, but I don't care what Polinsky says. I think the doubles are better booked than poor folk, the one that brought him to prominence. But the doubles are an overtly psychological drama that does not lend itself to the kind of political readings that impress Polinsky. Although the two books have more in common than it appears in first glance, I think. They play on themes that Dusty Eveski will progressively develop over the course of his career. Poor folk, like the landlady, centers around a love triangle in which the protagonist comes out the loser. Again, a common Dusty Eveski motif. The protagonist is a low-ranking bureaucrat, another very common Dusty Eveski motif. His name is Makar Devushkin and his life's not great. He's poor. His room is just a sectioned-off part of someone's kitchen, people at work, treat him badly. He's very passive. His only light, the only light in his life comes from his correspondence with this woman who lives down the street and whose existence is equally miserable. Of course, he's in love with her, but he never actually goes to see her in person because he doesn't want to start rumors. But through their letters, they become very close. They're writing back and forth and the novel sort of proceeds and away through their letters. They become very close. In these letters, he's giving her advice. Sometimes he's buying her gifts if he ever has any extra money. Any extra money he gets goes to go to gifts for her. He becomes an important part of her everyday life through these letters. But their correspondence is not the center of her life in quite the way that it is for him. In the end, she agrees to marry this other man, an older man, and a brute, but a rich old brute. As the novel ends, she's starting to become accustomed to her new status. They've been sharing their miseries together and kind of him talking her through them. It's really kind of a one-sided relationship in that sense. But as it's ending now, she's marrying this rich guy and kind of like adjusting to that. In her letters, she's already starting to speak casually and naturally to Makar about all these new luxuries that are in her life. Her responses to his letters are becoming shorter and rarer. He writes to her, begging her to respond, and she finally writes him back, just saying, "All is over." But even then, leaves a little drop of poison asking him not to forget about her. He writes back, finally, after all this time to confess his love for her, but she never writes back, and that's the end of the story. So, yay! Anyone out there who's always heard about Dusty Eveski, but never gotten around to reading him, I'm sure you're rushing out to buy his books as we speak after that. So you can see, you got this guy in poverty beaten down by the world in love with a woman in similar circumstances, only to have a mean rich guy barge in and claim her for himself. So you've got the socioeconomic critique if you want it, and people like that at the time. Although personally, I wonder how much Dusty Eveski himself really intended that? I've wondered if maybe part of his self-sabotage wasn't driven by a sort of imposter syndrome if he was being praised and hailed for an interpretation of his book that he never really intended. That's just my speculation. And so you see a motif similar to the Land Lady, right from the beginning, with a protagonist in love, you know, in a love triangle, with a rival who is older, stronger, more assertive, and who in the end overpowers him and gets the girl that he wants. In her letters, she tells McCarr that the man who has proposed to her is a tyrant and a brute, but what does he do? He doesn't tell her cancel the wedding immediately, or try to make a gallant play to steal her away in a lobe, or anything like that. You'd like to say he didn't do anything, but it's actually worse than that. Instead, he tries to make himself useful to the couple, you know, helping to prepare the wedding between the woman he loves and this other man who he doesn't like, screying around, looking for new humiliation, as an excuse to stay in her orbit, and signaling his non-threateningness to her fiancee, so as not to be ordered out of the picture by him, or even by her. The double, his second book continues with the theme of a one-sided rivalry at the expense of the protagonist, although in place of the rival fiancee is a doppelganger. Someone similar in appearance to the protagonist, almost identical the way it's described, who holds the same position in the same office, and who has all of the positive personality traits and social graces that the protagonist lacks. The protagonist, his name's Goljagkin. He has trouble getting along with anybody, he has no friends, he hates the people in his office, and they seem to hate him, at least he believes that. Near the beginning, he sees a doctor and ends up rambling on about all the enemies plotting against him at work. His double, on the other hand, shows up, and everybody loves his double. He gets along with everyone. He's a huge hit. And so at first, his double befriends him. They become tight friends, but soon the double starts trying to kind of take over his life and basically replace him. It's kind of a fight club, Tyler Durden thing going on. And there are actually scenes where Dusta asks, "He kind of teases you a little bit with which one Goljagkin or his double is actually real." So it's kind of like that. And just like Tyler Durden doesn't fight club, the double eventually gets tired of Goljagkin's negative attitude and joins his colleagues at work to ridicule and humiliate him. And so you see the double is pretty explicitly a split-off or repressed part of the protagonist personality, right? Like in fight club or in that Aranowski movie, Black Swan, if you've seen that, the one with the ballerinas. It was this explicit psychological rendering that put off Balinsky. There's also a lot of interplay with various literary trends and traditions at the time, but I don't know enough about to comment on. You know, people recognize the double, the double as Dustaevsky's foray into German romanticism and people debate over whether the book was a knockoff or a rebuttal to Goljagkin's work. And I think some of his rivals at the time even accused him of plagiarizing Goljagkin. I can't speak to any of that. That's all way over my head. But there is this theme in Dustaevsky that runs through from beginning to end to the very, very end and from the very beginning, this theme of the divided self. It sometimes portrayed in a psychological way as it is in the double, but other times with the parts portrayed as separate characters in the story. It's a theme he returns to over and over and over time learns to develop with incredible subtlety by the time he gets to the second half of his career. And crime and punishment probably his most famous book, which he wrote about 20 years after this time we're talking about now. The protagonist's name, Roskalnakov, is a play on the Russian "Raskal", which means "divided" or split or ruptured. The mid-17th century schism in the Russian Orthodox Church is known as the "Raskal". It's somewhat related to the way we use the prefix "Pera", as in "Para Noia". It's an old word and we use it different ways, but one of the meanings of "Para" is "beside" or "next to". As in, someone is having a hysterical fit and you say the person is beside himself. Which is kind of a strange way to put it when you first think about it, to say he's beside himself, like he's next to himself. Like there are two of him and one of him is standing on the outside and watching the other one act and do this thing. It's similar to our words "skits" as well, and like "skits of Frania" or "skitsoid". Skits is obviously related to schism and it means "split" or "divided". The literal meaning of "skits of Frania" is a split or divided mind. Which is interesting, right? It's interesting that we chose that particular terminology to describe some of the most fundamental forms of madness. If you were observing someone suffering from "skits of Frania" and I asked you to put a name on that. You've never heard of it before or whatever. You said this person, watch him for a little while and give me a name for whatever you're seeing. You'd probably come up with a lot of ideas before "divided mind", but it's based on a sound insight that even the most pathological complexes begin with a simple split, namely between the self that you present to the world and your inner self as you know and experience it when you're there alone with your thoughts. We all know that split. That split is the compromise that we make to live in a society together, but sometimes the different parts can become so divergent that they're practically different people. That they can develop different desires and needs that might even come into conflict with one another, which means they can even become enemies. Being your own worst enemies, not just a cute phrase. And many of Dostoevsky's books are explorations of how that really works, how it plays out. Dostoevsky uses the device of the double to explore a theme that he had begun to develop in his first novel, but here he hammers it home with more force and fewer distractions, namely the pathological way in which someone who is too timid or weak to confront a rival directly tends to end up because obsessed with that rival. To sort of orbit around them, their existence kind of warps around them. To the point that by the end of the double, the protagonist, Goliad, can has become so obsessed with his nemesis that he lands in an asylum. So after Dostoevsky falls out with Balinsky, he finds himself out in the cold, as if poor folk had never been written. Nobody cares about him anymore. He's become disillute in his lifestyle, running around with some of the political radicals who were hangers on to the literary scene. He has no money because he's developed a terrible gambling addiction. Terrible. His addiction got to be overwhelming, completely out of control. And people who were dominated by forces outside their control, and that could mean an addiction, but it means compulsions of any kind, whether neurotic compulsions, or even people who live in totalitarian societies or in families with overwhelming pressure to be a certain way. These are conditions that might as well be specifically designed to help develop and widen that skitzoid division of the self. You're compelled to behave a certain way, to do certain things, that inwardly you resent or resist, but you do them anyway, and you lose enough of those battles, and you start to get used to losing them until you reach a point where your body seems to be going through motions while inside you feel like you're just watching it all happen. In a really pathological situation, like an addiction, you can't overstate the damaging effects that this has on the personality. It's a terrible feeling to be a slave to compulsion of any kind. It's not far off from being possessed by a demon. The first lie that every addict tells himself is, "I can quit if I want to." It's the first lie he tells himself and other people. "I can quit anytime I want." They tell that lie because they're ashamed and they're ashamed because all compulsions, no matter how harmless or mundane they seem, the addict experiences that loss of autonomy as a moral failure. It doesn't matter how well they rationalize it. That's how it is, which is why any addiction to drugs or gambling or sex or whatever, things that seem far less serious or damaging eventually will rot the soul, even if outwardly the addiction seems to be rather mild, because even if you see no harm in the underlying activity, once it acquires elements of an addiction, then it's no longer about the underlying activity. It's about whether or not you are able to exercise agency and make decisions for yourself at all. There are other strategies, you know? I'm not doing this because I'm addicted. I'm deciding to do it. I'm doing it because I like it. That's another popular one. One time after he'd won some money at the tables, Dostoyevsky wrote in a letter, "Please do not think that in my joy over not having lost. I'm showing off by saying that I possessed the secret of how to win instead of losing. I really do know the secret. It is terribly silly and simple merely a matter of keeping oneself under constant control and never getting excited no matter how the game shifts. That's all there is to it. You just can't lose that way and are sure to win." Now mind you, at this point, this letter was later after his gambling addiction had done terrible damage to his life and to the lives of the people around him, just devastating to his life and to his loved ones when he's writing this letter. This is an addiction that has dominated his life for years at this point, has caused him to lie to and betray sacred promises to people and here he is explaining that the secret to success is being able to exercise absolute self-control. It's a very clean illustration of what happens for people who are under compulsion and again, not only addicts, but also people who are being coerced by other forces or people. Every question in their life eventually goes by the wayside and boils down to, "Can you or can you not gain control of yourself?" And they know on some level that if they can't, then there's just the abyss. A week after writing that letter, Dust Desk, he lost all of his money and he had to write to beg his family to bail him out of debt. He said, "And I believed in my system within a quarter of an hour, I won 600 francs, he was in France at the time. This wedded my appetite. Suddenly I started to lose. I couldn't control myself and lost everything. After that I took my last money and went to play. I was carried away by this unusual good fortune and I risked all 35 Napoleon's, French gold coins, and lost them all. I had six Napoleon's, "You're left to pay the land lady and for the journey. In Geneva, I pawn my watch." He would go through these psychological games, these permutations to justify heading into the casino. But then even after he'd lost his money, he would work himself into another lather, turning his failure into some gigantic cross he was bearing. You know, imagining himself as the worst most depraved sinner in the whole world and suffering all the more for being aware of how awful he was, anything other than doing the actual hard thing, the necessary thing, which was to admit that he wasn't the world's worst sinner. He wasn't living out some great tragic drama that he was just like all the other unhealthy yellow-eyed men who haunted the gambling den and lied to their wives about where they were, just another disappointing degenerate gambler. It's like Anakachyan, one of the hosts of the RedScare podcast said, "Don't flatter yourself thinking that you're a sociopath when you're just a garden variety narcissist." But of course, that's what narcissists do, a hero or an insect, nothing in between. Psychologists say that narcissists are very often almost impossible to treat through therapy, because it's very difficult to tell them, these are people that, again, are in their heads all the times, just evaluating everything, going through everything. It's very difficult to tell them anything about themselves that they don't already know. And they're quite satisfied with themselves for being so self-aware. The only thing they really have to learn from the therapist, the only thing they really need to accept and internalize is that guess what the therapist has actually seen 100 people just like you this week alone. And your problems are not that unique. And the reason you came to therapy was to not to see deeper insight into the human condition or for guidance up the final steps toward self-actualization. You came to therapy because you're unhappy and because your life is unsatisfying and because sometimes maybe you even feel a little desperate and lost just like every other NPCs that you passed on the street on the way here. But narcissists are invariably good storytellers. It's what they do. And most therapists will tell you that the ruthlessness that it takes to break down their list of reasons why their situation really is quite unique, despite all appearances, that it usually only elicits hostile defense mechanisms and drives them away. And that already on their way out of the therapy office, they've convinced themselves that the therapist's inability to understand their unique situation just proves that the therapist is really like an intellectual and emotionally insensitive person who just doesn't understand them. And then they go order the eighth psychology or self-help book that they've read half of and pass off the lessons that they learn from that half as their own wisdom and change nothing in their actual life. That's how it actually goes. It's very hard to crack that shell. It's one of the things it makes it almost impossible to sustain a relationship with a narcissist. And I mentioned that compulsion in whatever form tends to foster a divided self. Atix talk about feeling like they're on autopilot, like they're just a passenger, you know, with someone in the back of their head maybe saying, "Don't do it. Don't do it as they go to meet the dealer or go walk into the casino again." I remember years ago, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, must have been 15 years ago now, down here in San Diego where I live, there was a news story. Totally true, this was not some tabloid where a woman had been arrested after she'd been found in the backseat of a car, snorting cocaine off of her baby's head while her baby was breastfeeding from her. Now you can ask that woman, "What were you thinking?" But kind of answered, "Do you think you're going to get it?" She wasn't thinking anything. At a certain point, every decision you make is just to numb the panic and make the pain stop to clean up whatever mess you just made and to avoid the reckoning that is barreling down the tracks in your direction. before. Fyodor Dostoevsky, a reckoning came in 1849. The year before had seen widespread revolutions across Europe and the secret police and the Russian Empire were not in a very tolerant mood. And the group of radicals that Dostoevsky had been hanging around were denounced to the secret police. They were rounded up and thrown in jail, a jail reserved for dangerous criminals, while a commission of very high-level officials chaired by the Tsar himself convened to decide their fate. So they had been in jail for about seven months and on December 23rd, I'm not sure if that's Julian or Gregorian, but on December 23rd he and his comrades were informed that they would all be executed by firing squad. And so in groups of three, they were let out to the place of execution. Dostoevsky was the third man in the second row. He was blindfolded with the rest of them and they were tied to posts and he stood there, waiting for the soldiers to finish their rituals knowing, accepting that these were his very last moments in the world and that he was about to be executed as a traitor to the country his father served, making his betrayal of his father's memory complete. You can ride through your life on autopilot a long time telling yourself that it's not really you doing those things, not the real you anyway. And eventually, next time, next time you'll make better decisions, you'll make up for your betrayals. You'll listen to the voice in there, the real you that's inside your head saying, stop, don't do it. You'll be the one who finally takes control of your life from whoever it is that's been calling the shots and dragging you along. You can do that for a long time, but there's nothing like being brought up to the very moment of your own execution to bring the outer you that's been acting in the world and the inner you that's been watching it all happen back together again and to drive home the reality that you never were divided. There never were two people that it was all along just you doing these things because it's not just your double that's about to die, it's both of you. At the very last moment with rounds chambered, a cart pulls up with a letter from the czar himself announcing that he had decided to show mercy and stay their executions. The men were returned to their cells to await a decision on their prison sentences and dust abscues still a young man he had only just turned 28 at this point and this episode had a profound effect on him as it was intended to do I imagine. Many years later when he was quite a different man he authored a scene in one of his great books the idiot which drew on this experience. The idiot of the book title is Prince Mishkin the prince in the passage that I'm about to read and he is sitting with a group of people in conversation and a woman at a later has asked him to choose a subject for a picture that she's going to paint. Quote. Just now I confess began the prince with more animation when you asked me for a subject for a picture I confess I had serious thoughts of giving you one. I thought of asking you to draw the face of a criminal one minute before the fall of the guillotine while the wretched man is still standing on the scaffold preparatory to placing his neck on the block. What? His face only his face asked that a later that would be a strange subject indeed and what sort of picture would that make? Oh why not the prince insisted with some warmth. When I was in Basel I saw a picture very much in that style I should like to tell you about it it struck me most forcibly. This is another fun coincidence actually the prince the idiot had spent the four years before right before the novel commences in Basel Switzerland where he had been recuperating from poor health and where Nietzsche was of course a professor. Nietzsche did read the idiot and when he did he might have gotten a kick out of the fact that it had been published in 1869 the year he left for Basel to begin teaching there. Anyway continuing the prince is describing the scene quote "it was just a minute before the execution," said the prince readily carried away by the recollection and evidently forgetting everything else in a moment just at the instant when he stepped off the ladder onto the scaffold. He happened to look in my direction I saw his eyes and understood all at once but how am I to describe it? I do so wish you or somebody else could draw it you with possible. I thought at the time what a picture it would make. You must imagine all that went before of course all all. He had lived in the prison for some time and had not expected that the execution would take place for at least a week yet he had counted on all the formalities and someone taking time but it so happened that his papers had been got ready quickly. At five o'clock in the morning he was asleep it was October and at five in the morning it was cold and dark. The governor of the prison comes in on tiptoe and touches the sleeping man's shoulder gently. He starts up. What is it? He says the execution is fixed for ten o'clock. He was only just awake and would not believe it first began to argue that his papers would not be out for a week and so on when he was wide awake and realized the truth he became very silent and argued no more so they say but after a bit he said it comes very hard on one so suddenly and then he was silent again and said nothing. The three or four hours went by of course in necessary preparations the priest the breakfast coffee, meat and some wine they gave him. Doesn't it seem ridiculous? And yet I believe these people give them a good breakfast out of pure kindness of heart and believe that they are doing a good action. Then he is dressed and then begins the procession through the town to the scaffold. I think he too must feel that he has an age still to live while they cart him along. Probably he thought on the way oh I have a long long time yet three streets of life yet. When we pass this street there'll be that other one and then that one where the baker's shop is on the right and when shall we get there? It's ages ages around him are crowds shouting yelling 10,000 faces 20,000 eyes and all this has to be endured and especially the thought. Here are 10,000 men and not one of them is going to be executed and yet I am to die. Well all that is preparatory. At the scaffold there's a ladder and just there he bursts into tears and this was a strong man and a terribly wicked one they say. There was a priest with him the whole time talking. Even in the cart as they drove along he talked and talked. Probably the other heard nothing he would begin to listen now and then and at the third word or so he had forgotten all about it. At last he began to mount the steps. His legs were tied so that he had to take very small steps. The priest who seemed to be a wise man had stopped talking now and only held the cross with a wretched fellow to kiss. At the foot of the ladder he had been pale enough but when he set foot on the scaffold at the top his face suddenly became the color of paper, positively like white note paper. His legs must have become suddenly feeble and helpless and he felt a sudden choking in his throat. You know the sudden feeling one has in moments of terrible fear when one does not lose one's wits but is absolutely powerless to move. If some dreadful thing were suddenly to happen if a house were just about to fall on one. Don't you know how one would long to sit down and shut one's eyes and wait and wait? Well when this terrible feeling came over him the priest quickly pressed the cross to his lips without a word. The little silver cross it was and he kept on pressing it to the man's lips every second and whenever the cross touched his lips the eyes would open for a moment and the legs moved once and he kissed the cross greedily, hurriedly. Just as though he were anxious to catch hold of something in case of it's being useful to him afterwards though he could hardly have had any connected religious thoughts at the time and so up he took to the very block. How strange that criminals seldom swoon at such a moment. On the contrary the brain is especially active and works incessantly, probably hard, hard, hard like an engine at full pressure. Imagine I do that various thoughts must beat loud and fast through his head. All unfinished ones and strange funny thoughts very likely like this for instance that man is looking for me and he has a wart on his forehead and the executioner has burst one of his buttons and the lowest one is all rusty and meanwhile he notices and remembers everything. There's one point that cannot be forgotten around which everything else dances and turns about and because of this point he cannot faint and this lasts until the very final quarter of a second when the wretched neck is on the block and the victim listens and waits and knows that's the point. He knows that he is just now about to die, and listens for the rasp of the iron over his head. If I lay there, I should certainly listen for that grating sound, and hear it, too. There would probably be, but the tenth part of an instant left to hear it, but one would certainly hear it, and imagine some people declare that when the head flies off, it is conscious of having flown off. Just imagine what a thing to realize. Just imagine what a thing to see if consciousness would last for even five seconds. Draw the scaffold so that only the top step of the ladder comes in clearly. The criminal must be just stepping onto it. His face white as notepaper. The priest is holding the cross to his blue lips, and the criminal kisses it, and knows, and sees, and understands everything. The cross in the head, there is your picture. The priest and the executioner with his two assistants and a few heads and eyes below. Those might come in as subordinate accessories, a sort of mist. There is a picture for you. Dusty Eski was sentenced to four years of a hard labor in Siberia, and that was as miserable as it sounds. About his barracks he wrote, "In summer, intolerable closeness, in winter, unendurable cold, all the floors were rotten. Fill from the floors and instick. One could slip and fall. We were packed like herrings in a barrel. There was no room to turn about. From dust to dawn, it was impossible not to behave like pigs, fleas, lice, and black beetles by the bushel." And there would be no literature here. For four years, Dusty Eski had nothing to read but the New Testament. And he read it a lot, he read it and read it. Judgment was not finished with him after four years. When his sentence was complete, he was placed in the army and sent to an outpost in the empty middle of the Russian Empire in what's now Kazakhstan. He'd hated the military academy his father sent him to, and he'd presented his father for making him go. He fled from the life his father had prepared for him to make his own way, only to end up back here, back in the army with no choice to leave, and further than ever from everywhere. And there he would remain an unproductive exile for another six years. The famous line from Paradise Lost that the mind is its own place and can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven comes to mind when I think about this parallel period in the lives of Dusty Eskiy in Nietzsche. And by all appearances Nietzsche's exile was certainly more comfortable than Dusty Eskiy's and not nearly as traumatic. Nine years or so as an unknown professor at a university in Switzerland certainly beats a decade in Siberia. I know which one I would choose. And yet Nietzsche was miserable and increasingly so he wrote nothing of importance during what should have been the productive years of his life. He felt trapped in a place without ever really remembering making a firm decision to end up there. But then that describes a lot of Nietzsche's life. Like Dusty Eskiy he labored under tremendous family pressure and under the overbearing memory of a powerful judgmental father. I don't mean that his father was judgmental but that his memory was. He died when Nietzsche was not quite five years old. Nietzsche's father had been a Lutheran minister appointed to his ministry by the king himself. As had his father's father and his mother's father was a pastor as well. It was expected that Friedrich, little Friedrich Nietzsche would also take up the tradition when he grew up and as a boy he seemed to be on that path. His father wrote in a letter that little Friedrich Fritz he calls him, "is a wild boy who can sometimes be controlled only by his papa and as much as the rod is never far from him. But now someone else helps more powerfully and that is the dear Holy Christ who has already taken hold of even little Fritz by head and heart so that he wants to hear and speak of nothing but the Holy Spirit. It's something very sweet." When he's a little bit older than that the other children would call Nietzsche the little pastor because of his undiviating focus on the faith and on the Bible. This is a boy who had lost his minister father was facing a lot of family pressure to kind of become his father in a way and at first he really tried to embrace that. Dustyewski too incidentally was nicknamed "Monk Fodius" by his classmates for a similar reason after the Orthodox Saint Fodius the Great. Nietzsche's father was only 36 years old when he died very suddenly and unexpectedly. I suppose when you're 5 years old everything is sudden and unexpected to you. Nietzsche also had a younger sister who was almost 3 at the time and a baby brother who was about a year old and years later when Nietzsche was 13 he wrote that he still to that day couldn't quiet the sad sound of the bells from his father's funeral from ringing in his ears every day. About 6 months after the funeral little 5 year old Friedrich Nietzsche has a terrible dream which he told his mother about the next morning and wrote down later. He says "I heard this is in his dream now. I heard the church organ playing as it a funeral when I looked to see what was going on a grave suddenly opened and my father arose out of it in a shroud. He hurries into the church and soon comes back with a small child in his arms. The mound on the grave opens, he climbs back in and the grave stones sinks back over the opening. The swelling noise of the organ stops at once and I wake up. In the morning I tell the dream to my dear mother. Soon after that my little brother Joseph is suddenly taken ill. He goes into convulsions and dies within hours. So the very day after dreaming of his father coming out of the grave to retrieve a baby boy, his infant brother dies in a horrible fashion. You know convulsions and it was not pretty. And to make matters worse his father's body was then exhumed so that baby Joseph's body could be placed in his arms and the two of them buried together. Which is a touching gesture I suppose but I don't know how a 5 year old boy even begins to process that. After his father's death he and his mother and his sister, I'm sorry after his baby brother's death as well, he and his father and his sister moved in with his grandmother and his two unmarried aunts. And that's how little Friedrich Nietzsche would grow up in a house with five women. And putting aside the gender politics of a household like that, you know, it put a tremendous amount of pressure on the boy. Again, his father was a respected minister patronized by the king. There's a pillar of his community and of his family. Little Friedrich was his father's only son now that he'd taken little Joseph to the grave with him. And so he was expected by the women in the house to take his father's place. You know, and all the women, even the two aunts, these were his father's sisters, not his mother's sisters. And so you know they had lost a brother, his mother had lost her husband and so forth. So he there he is, his father's little avatar and you're kind of expected to take his place. It's a hard thing for a boy to grow up after his father has died in his prime. All anyone remembers is the man at full strength, you know, the mother and others who knew the father. They only remember the good things or they only want to talk about them anyway, which makes sense. You know, why would you talk to your son about the times his dead father was a jerk, but the consequence is that instead of a real person for a dad, the boy grows up with this idealized image. And part of becoming a man is as you grow, you're seeing your father start to slow down, you know, start to see some cracks in his armor, gradually coming to terms with the fact that he's not a God. He's just a man. And so his footsteps are something you can actually follow. And at a certain point, coming to a crossroads in your rise in his decline where maybe you're actually stronger, more capable than he is and then shouldering the responsibility that comes with that, you know, the fact that he may need to lean on you now, that you might be the one that the family is counting on. That's part of a healthy process of maturity. When your father dies before you're old enough to have much recollection, and all you grow up with are the stories you hear from people who miss him and only want to honor his memory, you don't really have a father, you have a God, or something that plays a role in your life very similar to one. And it's very hard to grow up in the shadow of a God, let alone meet everyone's heavy expectations to fill his shoes. I think one of the reasons Nietzsche's writings resonate so much with late adolescent boys and young men is that Nietzsche himself, in many ways, never really developed into a grown man himself. Even up into his late 30s, early 40s, his mother and his younger sister are still manipulating and terrorizing him in various ways, you know, emotionally, psychologically, they were still able to wield tremendous power over him. He blamed his sister for his final failed love triangle, which is coming up later. He accused her of meddling in the situation and manipulating things behind the scenes. And he wrote to other people that he hated her. And there are definite signs of some narcissistic emotional abuse of Nietzsche by both his mother and his sister. But the point is he's still very much a captive of these people, even at a late period in his life. You know, again, I'm not, I'm talking about in his mid late 30s. And it's like, okay, I get it. They're a pain. What do you mean your mother and your younger sister are oppressing you and causing you this much grief? You're a grown man. Your father is only son. You're a professor at a major university. Take control of the situation. There's no world in which you should not be the dominant presence in a relationship with your elderly widowed mother and your little sister. And a man of innately strong will of the type you write about in your books would not have to be told that. But he was just not that guy, not in real life. If all you read is Nietzsche's books, then you think you're reading the words of a warrior poet as if Sigmund or Baal Wolf decided to take a break from slaying monsters to share some thoughts about Hegel and Ancient Greece. In real life, this is a man who felt trapped, who felt trapped in his life, who felt that all of his choices from a young age had been defined by others. And he even writes in his autobiography that he just sort of fell into being a professor of philology by accident. At the time, he'd become bored by it and was about to change to a scientific field, but then he got the offer to teach it. So you know, now, look, none of this is obviously original to Nietzsche. This is the transition of late adolescence and a lot of our life is determined by how we manage that transition. You know, you've been a living according to rules put down by parents and teachers on the rest, but now you're starting to kick and push against the walls. And you want to get out there and find out what you're about. It's not just your parents rules and expectations. You rebel against it. It's everything and all the things that you've been required to conform to when you didn't have a choice. And ideally, you don't make mistakes with any, you know, too many lasting consequences. And the one you do, the ones you do make, let you know that, okay, you know, maybe my parents weren't right about everything. In fact, they're wrong about a lot, but okay, some rules are probably there for a reason and you start to figure things out. But it doesn't always go that way. We've all heard stories of kids who were sheltered and controlled too much. And then when they finally get loose, it's just, you know, just revel without a cause. And sometimes a kid grows up with so much weight crushing down on him that he really wants to rebel. But when he goes out into the world, he just can't quite do it. Either he's blocked in some way or his heart's just not really in it or else with other people making his decisions for him for so long, he just never really learned how to want anything on his own without input from other people. And I come back to the fact that all three women Nietzsche ever fell in love with over the course of his life were involved with somebody he knew. And the meat of his philosophy was all about the centrality of the will about the emerging man of the future having the courage and the strength to shut off the pull of the crowd and create his own values. Literally create his own values and not apologize for his desires or his demands. And yet it's as if Nietzsche couldn't even desire a woman on his own, not without his desire being validated by someone else. And again, in each case, he was the one who ended up alone and he never really put up much of a fight about it. There's a story from his time with the Wagner's that I think would have made a great scene in an early Dostoevsky novel. In 1870, when Nietzsche was just starting out, Richard and Cosma Wagner invited him to spend Christmas with them, just the three of them at Wagner's Mansion in Lucerne. Nietzsche had been drummed out of the Army medical corps during the Franco-oppression war due to his illness, but they didn't care about that. He had gone to serve, you know, and so they welcomed him back as a hero. But it's a little bit awkward, at least, you know, for Nietzsche maybe. Nietzsche loved Cosma Wagner and he must have been disappointed when she and Wagner had been married just a few months before this, not that it was a surprise or that anyone imagined any other outcome, but still. Like Ordinov in The Land Lady, Nietzsche had now gone to stay for a while with a woman he loved and the old man who held her in thrall. And like Ordinov, he became very close with that woman, especially over the course of this visit, but was never able to break into the circle reserve for her and her husband. Like Ordinov, by this point, he was already having ambivalent feelings for the old man and those feelings would grow darker over time. And yet just as the old man, Muren, in the story could dominate Ordinov with a look for all Nietzsche's warrior bravado in his books, Wagner was still Wagner. And so when Nietzsche arrived for Christmas that year, his first time seeing Cosma, since she had married his rival, Nietzsche brought gifts, Christmas gifts, that can only make me think of a male animal who comes up short in a mating competition and makes cringing signs of submission to the dominant alpha. To Wagner, he gave an engraving by Durer called The Night Death and the Devil. This had been for many years an important German nationalist rallying point, a symbol of German fierceness and warrior courage and adversity, you know, and so forth. It shows that German knight writing a horse through a corrupted land with skulls on the ground and monsters surrounding him. Wagner loved it, of course, and understood Nietzsche's gift as depicting himself, Wagner writing the horse to save German culture from the foreign, French and Jewish mainly influences that had corrupted it. Now if you take Nietzsche at his word, he was already filling with mounting disgust for exactly that kind of German chauvinism and becoming disillusioned with Wagner himself for indulging in it. And yet he got the gift that he got. His gift for Cosima is maybe even, I don't know, arguably worse. For her, he brought an early transcript of the book that he was working on, which would become his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. In the book, he describes Greek tragedy as developing out of a musical base and he says that the great age of Greek drama was the result of a synthesis between the non-rational, dionician musical impulse. And the rational, opalonian narrative structure imposed upon it and that the two came into balance in the plays of Sophocles and Eskilis before being thrown off kilter and eventually ruined by the overly critical influence of men like Socrates and Europides. Obviously Socrates wasn't a playwright, but that era when Athens was starting to question everything and just pick everything apart with logic. He concludes by suggesting that after many centuries of dormancy, a great age was now bringing up the curtain in the German fusion of music and drama most significantly in the work of Richard Wagner, who was even as he wrote, pushing toward a similar peak as Eskilis, as Sophocles, the great Greek tragedians, right? Now I don't know, maybe I'm reading too much into this, maybe I'm being too hard on Nietzsche here, but it seems to me like a guy with his ego and his ego was intergalactic, that if you're in love with another man's wife, a man who's kind of your patron, the alpha of your most significant social circle for sure, put it that way. You get invited to stay with them for Christmas, just months after they get married. What do you get them for Christmas? Hmm? Like maybe some flowers, maybe like a sequined angel for the top of their Christmas tree. Given Nietzsche's negative feelings about German imperialism and German nationalism, getting Wagner that Durr print would be like, you know, like if I don't know, if you're like a hardcore liberal Democrat, but for some reason you're in love with Ivanka Trump, and she and Jared Kushner invites you over for Christmas or Hanukkah, I guess it would be now, and you hate Jared's politics, you hate Donald Trump, you just can't stomach any of it. And for Jared's present, you bring him a painting of him writing a Humvee to go save the country from BLM and Antifa. And for Ivanka, you give her a book that you wrote about politics that ends by predicting her husband will be America's salvation. I don't know, I mean, what would have to be going through your mind? This is different than telling yourself, you know, she's just, she's married, so just forget about it, be cool, we're all friends here, we're just going to enjoy Christmas, no big deal, just get it over with, this is different than that. In that case, you get him the angel for the Christmas tree or some other nice neutral gift, right? Am I nuts? Especially since, as we'll see, he'd never got over Kossima, and his rivalry with Wagner would become one of the central obsessions of Nietzsche's life all the way up to the very end. after that Christmas. Miss Nietzsche went back to teach at Basel. Any state in touch with the Wagner's, he published that book, The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, but although the Wagner's did their best to defend him, he got a terrible reception. It didn't really fit into any established categories. And so other scholars didn't really know what to do with it. A few hated it so much that some of his students' parents tried to have him run out of the university, which is actually kind of ironic for a guy who hated Socrates so much and criticized him so much in the book, considering Socrates was put to death for corrupting the youth. Anyway, he was very bitter over this experience, and disenchanted with the whole field of philology, which again, he was actually on the brink of leaving for a scientific field when he'd got the offer to teach. And so he's just sort of in this place now. And after his rapid initial rise into the company of the great at 24, he just sort of settles in as a rather conventional professor of philology, publishing a handful of essays and other pieces that nobody really considers among his important work, and that nobody really read except his students, and just sort of stayed there as his health gradually and then more rapidly degraded. Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky followed a trajectory that wasn't just common to them. It's not a huge surprise that they have such a common life trajectory in at least the first half because it's perfectly familiar to many people. You feel controlled and stifled going up, and after some early attempts at rebellion, pretty soon the weight of things, the weight of your society, however it impresses itself upon you through parents or social pressure, financial pressure, or bumping up against the law, hopefully not. But the weight of it all eventually bears down and puts you back in a place that it has more or less decided for you. You can make peace with that, or you can just let the resentment build up until you have a midlife crisis and go through the whole divorce your wife and buy a red convertible thing. Nietzsche couldn't go through with the divorce 'cause he never had a woman. I actually wonder sometimes if that was part of the problem here, 'cause when it's just you, I mean, you can rationalize bad decisions for a long time. It's a little bit different when you bring other people into the picture, especially people who are depending on you. Dusty Ebsky found a woman shortly after being released from prison. It was a miserable relationship in many ways, but even a miserable relationship forces you to regard yourself from the position of another person at least occasionally. Dusty Ebsky had not been cured of his pathologies overnight. Don't get me wrong. That the experience with the near execution was transformative, but all that did was change his trajectory. It didn't fix him. That rarely happens. And so after his mock execution, he still had to go through purgatory. I know that being orthodox, he would object to my invoking purgatory, but as an author, he would have understood that sometimes we have to go a field for appropriate metaphors because purgatory, of course, is not just a place, at least in Dante's reading. It's not just a place of abstract suffering or random penance. It's a place where the sufferings are specifically intended and constructed to burn away the parts of ourselves that make it impossible for us to enter heaven. In Dusty Ebsky's case, he was doomed to live out the very pathologies that he was using his early novels to sentimentalize and justify. We've seen how in both poor folk and the landlady, the protagonist was a weaker man who came out the loser in a love triangle with the rival. In the landlady, Ordinov couldn't meet the gaze of the old man, Muren, in poor folk, the vushkin, not only neatly accepted the loss of his love, but continued to ingratiate himself and help prepare her wedding. It's a theme that Dusty Ebsky can't let go from his first book all the way up to the time of his arrest. Renas Girard describes two of his short stories from this period of disillusion just before his arrest. He says, quote, "In his story, a weak heart, we find ourselves once more in the world of minor officials. The story is that of the double, but viewed from the outside by an observer who does not share in the hallucinations of the hero. The latter has everything, so it seems, to be happy. His fiancee is charming, his friend is devoted, his superiors are benevolent. But for all that, he is no less paralyzed by the possibility of failure and, like Goyadkin, the protagonist of the double, he sinks little by little into madness. At an appointed moment, the weak heart, the hero, presents his fiancee to his friend, who immediately declares himself in love. This is not just his friend, it's like his best friend, the two live together and they're practically the same person, which is why Girard compares it to the double. Two faithful to compete with his friend, the weak heart merely asks the latter to make a small place for him in his household. I love her as much as I love you. She shall be my guardian angel, as for you also. Your happiness will reflect on me and warm me too. May she direct me as she will direct you. From now on, my friendship with you and my friendship with her will become one friendship. You will see how she will protect you and how devotedly I will take care of you both. The young woman accepts the idea of a life atua with enthusiasm and she exclaims joyfully, we three will be one. The main figure of the story, White Knights, as in the land lady, is a dreamer. He spends the twilight nights of St. Petersburg summers in long walks. In the course of one of his rambles, he makes the acquaintance of a young woman who is no less a romantic dreamer than he, a veritable Russian emabovering. He past her adolescence, she past her adolescence, attached by a pin to the skirt of her grandmother. He falls in love with her but does not express it because she expects at any moment the return of a young man whom she has promised to marry. But she is no longer completely certain that she loves this fiance. She wonders whether her grandmother's pin is not a bit responsible for this juvenile passion. In the course of an ambiguous exchange of confidences, she accuses her companion of indifference and offers her friendship to him on terms reminisce into the land lady or the fiance of the weak heart. When I get married, we will remain friends. We will be as brother and sister or something even more. I will love you almost as much as him. The protagonist finally declares his love but far from pressing his advantage with her, he does everything like Makar Davushkin in Porfult to ensure the success of his rival. He sends him the woman's letters. He arranges a rendezvous to which he accompanies her when the two young people meet and fall into each other's arms. He is the fascinated voyeur. And now here's the key point. The entire conduct of his character is described in terms of generosity, of devotion, of the spirit of sacrifice. The woman goes away forever but she sends to the unfortunate fellow a letter in which she expresses once more what could be called the dream of the life atua. We will see each other again, she writes, you will come to be with us and you will not leave us. You will always be our friend, my brother, end quote. Now obviously this is all just revolting behavior on the part of the protagonist but that last part is the key to understanding Dusty Ewski's development. The story is from before his exile, before his time of imprisonment and then six more years in the army out in Kazakhstan, Siberia. Those pre-exile stories, while they might show how this beta behavior of the protagonist causes them to suffer, it's the suffering of a martyr. Their motives are taken at face value. Oh, you're madly in love with a woman and now she's gonna marry someone who's rude and uncaring and who you don't like at all and now you're giving advice to them on how to prepare the nuptials and kind of helping set them up. Yeah, you know, that's the thing. I just love her so much that it's not about what I want, I just want her to be happy and this is what she needs to be happy and that, yeah, of course, I couldn't be happier for, okay, really, really. Well, in Dusty Ewski's early novels and short stories, yes, really. It's all presented as Gerard says in his spirit of self-sacrifice and generosity as if all that is not a cover for a roiling ocean, a resentment and humiliation and having been rejected in the most fundamental and primal way that you can be rejected in a mating competition. The moral posturing of the rejected protagonist is akin to the addict telling himself stories in order to pretend that he has some kind of control over his situation. The protagonists in these stories, they never make a direct play. They never stand up to the rival and say, "Why, I'm not going to stand by and watch you mistreat her anymore. She and I are leaving, mister." They don't go to the woman that they love and say, "This guy is horrible. You're going with him because you feel trapped. Well, you're not trapped. You're coming with me. We're getting out of here." Yeah, he might lose. He might not come out on top if he does that. She still might choose the other guy and that would sting, but there's nothing shameful or humiliating about that. At least his feelings are on his sleeve. He's actually doing the things that he imagined himself doing as he. lay awake at night gnashing his teeth over the situation. Instead, Dostoevsky's heroes are too timid and too weak for a direct confrontation that might open themselves up to a definitive no, and so instead they just orbit. In the early books, the pre-exiled books, they treat these people as victims, and in the post-exiled books, Dostoevsky's a lot more truthful about what's really going on. Too timid to confront, too weak to walk away, they just orbit telling themselves stories that it's all out of compassion for this wonderful woman, for his friend, in fact, more than a friend, they're practically siblings, brother and sister, more than brother and sister, and like the addict, all the stories have the singular purpose of avoiding the sorted, hidden underground emotions that are really driving their behavior. Again, in Dostoevsky's pre-exiled stories, that part of it is all left out, and instead we're just left with the smiling face. It's just because I care about her so much, and sometimes when you're so selfless, it can get you hurt, but then again, Jesus and the apostles were martyred, too, so Dostoevsky can't face the truth about his characters because he wasn't able to face the truth about himself at the time. The protagonist in his early novels, and again, this is key, are expressions of his own anguish, with all their suffering, the result of being put upon by a brutal or uncaring world, and his later novels, he knows better, he knows better than to blame the world. Before he was able to see the truth about his characters, though, he had to become one of them. In 1854, Dostoevsky's released from prison, he's collared into the army to write out six more years of exile in the middle of the empire and what's now Kazakhstan, and there he befriended a married couple. The husband was a drunken mess, and Dostoevsky soon falls in love with the wife, Maria. Before long, the husband dies, and Dostoevsky, although only able to visit occasionally due to his army duties, quickly proposes to Maria. And she seems not to have given him a firm answer, neither accepting nor closing the door on it, and the offer is just sort of sitting out there on the table. And so one day, Dostoevsky takes leave to come back and visit her, and after the visit, he writes a letter to his friend named Rangel. He wrote, "I saw her. What an angelic soul she cried. She squeezed my hands, but alas, she loves another." This other is a man named Vergonov. Vergonov is young and handsome, but basically poor, earning a small salary as a provincial teacher. And Maria, rather than apologizing for not warning Dostoevsky and their letters that, you know, I just so you know, before you visit, instead she kind of hedges her bets a little bit, and I feel bad. Maybe I'm not being fair to her, it's just how it seems to me, because she says that yes, she is smitten with Vergonov, but she shows some hesitation and maybe hints at an openness to having her mind changed. And again, I may be being unfair here, but she confides in Dostoevsky, even discusses some details of her relationship with Vergonov, which is, you know, a little bit sketch, seems to be basically keeping her options open. Again, maybe I'm being too cynical about her motives, but in any case, she encourages Dostoevsky to keep in touch and to come visit her again. Now, if Dostoevsky was a man of action of the type developed as a heroic ideal in the works of Nietzsche and that he would describe in various ways in his later work, Dostoevsky himself, and not the underground man that he in fact was, he would see two paths before him and only two paths. He would either announce his love for Maria and make a direct challenge for her affection, or he would wash his hands of this indecisive woman and walk away. Or maybe there's a thorough, maybe there's one where you kind of become a distant friend or something like that, but like, I don't know. I think that's a dangerous path personally. I think personally there's two paths. But Dostoevsky's not a man of action. He is a denizen of the underground where nothing is ever done directly, ever, or for, and never done for reasons that are openly stated. And so when he meets Vergonov, he makes nice with him. He becomes his friend. But in his letters to Maria, he subverts. He warns her that marrying Vergonov will only end with her stranded out on the step with a husband that's too young for her who will saddle her with a few children and then inevitably lever. But of course, he gives the impression, of course, like he's, you know, he's only really talking about this for her own sake. It's very difficult for him to even bring it up. He says, I don't want to give the impression that I'm working on my own behalf. Oh, no, of course not. He's only concerned for her happiness, you know, because his love for her is pure and selfless. When it becomes clear that Maria is not going to abandon Vergonov just like that, Dostoevsky imitates the protagonist from his own novels and shamelessly insinuates himself into their lives. And he promises to write to one of the aristocratic patrons of his to obtain financial support for Vergonov. He tells Maria in one of his letters, just listen to the language. He says, whatever you do, don't forget Vergonov for God's sake. He reminds her in his letters to remain devoted to Vergonov because he's such a good young man and he already has so much weighing on him being so poor and without a real future and all. It's just incredibly cringed, you know, just a snake in the grass. But you know, it's not all tactical. That's the thing. At least not consciously tactical. He's lying to himself as much as anyone because that's how it works in the underground. To another friend, he writes that his feelings for Vergonov are best described as disinterested sympathy. You know, that poor sympathetic Vergonov whom the woman Dostoevsky wants has chosen over him. I don't care who you are. There's nothing more fundamental, nothing more basic in primal than mating competition. And the idea that he feels disinterested sympathy for the rival he's being rejected for is obviously nothing but a cope. But the thing, here's a thing like if enough is writing on it, we'll take the cope and run with it. In rejections, one thing, but a man who is rejected by a woman and then finds himself befriending the man that he's being rejected for and doing things to try to help along the relationship between his rival and the woman, no man is feeling anything in that situation except an insane mix of rage and resentment and self hatred. And he's doing those things out of cowardice, trying in subversive ways to show the woman that he really is the better man after all, all while signaling his non-threateningness to his rival. It's just, he writes to his friend that his attitude toward Maria is not defined by passion, but by compassion. He says, "I had compassion for her and she inclined toward me. It was for me that she had compassion. You have never known her. At each instant something original, something wise, spiritual, but also paradoxical, infinitely good, truly chivalrous, a knight in woman's dress." This too, by the way, is another notorious mark of the narcissistic personality, namely being incapable of just liking someone or thinking of them as an equal, just being like, "Oh, yeah, she's great. She's smart. She's super interesting. She's beautiful." Like that, Maria, she's just a great girl. I really like her. They can never just leave it like that. Just as he swings between thinking of himself as either a hero or a worm, the narcissist builds up the objects of his desire into larger than life figures in order to justify how much he finds himself needing their attention and approval. In his book, The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lash writes of the narcissistic need for adulation, and then he says, "When it finally occurs to the new narcissist that he can, now quoting the writer Frederick X Lee, live not only without fame, but without self, live and die without ever having had one's fellow conscious of the microscopic space one occupies upon this planet. He experiences this discovery not merely as a disappointment, but as a shattering blow to his sense of selfhood. And so, his consolation, in his emptiness and insignificance, he tries to warm himself in the reflected glow of others endowed with more significance and to live vicariously through their brilliance." In his behavior toward Maria and Vergonov, Dusty Ebsky, it's hard to read. He just wallows in these displays of phony chivalry, that he's the same type of behavior as he tries to put across as morally legitimate in his early books. He's just living out his early books. Just wallows in it like a pig, playing up the virtues of Maria as well as Vergonov, and always congratulating himself for standing above the fray and raining down his uncorrupted compassion upon them both. He went out of his way to write letters requesting salary increases for Vergonov out of compassion, sure, but also ensuring that both he and Maria would know that it was him and not Vergonov. Virgenov who had improved their financial situation and at Virgenov would know that too. In other letters, Dostoevsky announces his conquest over the egoism of the passions. You know, and others, he waxes poetic about the sanctity of his love, rooted as it is in the spirit rather than the flesh and so on and so on. I'm not being cynical and doubting Dostoevsky's sincerity here, okay? I'm not. First, because any man who behaves like that is a snake and you can take that to the bank. If you have a girlfriend and before you were together, there was another guy angling for her, but she chose you instead. Congratulations. If he is still hanging around and they're still just friends, I'm not Dr. Phil or whatever you got to live your own life, but let's just say I would search him for weapons. Anytime he comes around because that dude hates you and he is not to be trusted. If you are one of those guys, you know better than anybody that I'm right, so stop being one of those guys. The second reason is because Dostoevsky himself understands the real nature of his behavior and holds it all up in the clear, burning light to create his great masterpieces in the second half of his career. And third, because his own subsequent real life behavior just makes it undeniable. Sometimes his light of themselves well, but they can't keep up the rules all the time. That's the problem. Somewhere inside they always know the truth. Occasionally in his letters to his friend, this charade of disinterested compassion would break down. And one, he writes, "I love her insanely. I know that in many respects I act absurdly in my relations with her that there's almost no hope for me. But whether there may be hope or not is all the same to me. I cannot think about anyone else to see her only, only to hear her. I am a poor madman. The love of this sword is an illness." The other thing about this, this kind of talk, here's the thing about it too, is that it never lasts. It can't. Because see, inevitably, the one that the narcissist is building up into a figure worthy of the cringing debasement that the narcissist inflicts on himself turns out to be like the rest of us, only a person, which means having to face the fact that he's been embarrassing himself if only in his own mind over someone who is merely human. And so what must that say about him? A disillusioned narcissist can be a dangerous animal. They often swing from worship to contempt or even hostility or hatred at the drop of a hat. They relate to themselves in a similar way. In relationships with others, male narcissists at least, I can't speak as much to the other side, but male narcissists, often carry what's known as the Madonna Horror Complex. The woman is the purest expression of sanctified feminine beauty. Like, you know, a night in woman's dress is Dusty Havsky wrote. But at the first indication that she's just a woman, you know, maybe a wonderful woman, but with impulses and insecurities and desires and fears vulnerable to manipulation and compulsion, trying to find love and stability and to get by in the world, then perfectly capable of developing feelings for people other than you, if they check one or more of those boxes under the right circumstances, then in an instant, your snow white virgin becomes in eyes of the narcissist a degraded whore. There's that 9 inch nail song from back in the 90s, one of his best songs called Reptile, that perfectly captures the feelings of a disappointed narcissist. She spreads herself wide open to let the insects in. She leaves a trail of honey to show me where she's been. She has the blood of Reptile just underneath the skin, seeds from a thousand others, drip down from within. Oh my beautiful liar, oh my precious whore. It's dark stuff, especially when you account for the fact that it's not just theory. You find this kind of thing all throughout the diaries of the Columbine killers, for example. I knew a guy, knew him on the internet, very, very smart guy, a brilliant guy actually, but lonely and had some emotional problems, I guess you could say, although I never really saw them manifest in an alarming way at least at first. He's a little older and at one point he fell in love with this much younger, very pretty girl that he met on the internet. She was into him as well and they sort of became a thing in a long distance. She was a cam girl. She did, I guess, like intimate shows over the internet to make money. I'm not sure if that's how he met her or if he found out after or whatever, but she had some issues of her own as you can imagine. She had started to behave kind of erratically by this point. I had cut ties with him, but I would hear from other people bits and pieces of the story sometimes. This was an odd couple and they had their ups and downs and eventually this girl commits suicide. This girl, among her other pursuits, was an artist, like a visual artist, a painter, I think. Here she died, this guy, her boyfriend, started writing essays and doing videos about her art. He was a writer and a speaker already and he did a lot of stuff about contemporary and post-modern art and he starts writing and making videos, just building her work up into just epic defining, paradigm shifting, world historical transcendental transformative pieces of art, civilization defining art. Now I'm not woke on contemporary art, I'm sure it was great, but I also think it was fairly easy to see what was going on there and also understandable and sympathetic, right? But at a certain point, I don't know how or what the story was. He found out that, well, you know, she was a cam girl. They lived in different states. She had some emotional issues and so it turned out that he was not the only guy in her life, apparently. So this guy loses it, starts posting these videos and putting things up on social media about her that, you know, just the most evil, vile stuff you can imagine. It's the attitude of that nine-inch nail song, just drawn out and long videos and posts, really, really ugly stuff. This is after this woman is long gone, long gone. You know, this happened, I don't know, two, three years ago maybe, and this is still going on. It's an obsession. It's very sad and very, very dark. Obviously, the guy was hurt is hurt, but it's very dark. Obviously, that's an extreme case, but that's how the complex looks when you blow it up on the big screen. Christopher Lash, as usual, is more restrained about it. He writes, quote, "The narcissist divides society into two groups. The rich, great, and famous on the one hand and the common herd on the other." Quick side note, if you're thinking, well, most people are just members of the herd, sheeple, NPCs. Congratulations, you might be a narcissist. And don't worry too much about it at least. Pretty much all of us are these days. Anyway, Lash continues. Quote. Narcissistic patients are, according to Kernberg, afraid of not belonging to the company of the great, and instead belonging to the company of the mediocre, by which they mean worthless and despicable rather than average in the ordinary sense of the term. They worship heroes only to turn against them when their heroes disappoint them. Unconsciously fixated on an idealized self-object for which they continue to yearn, such persons are forever searching for external omnipotent powers, from whose support and approval they attempt to derive strength. Narcissistic patients, according to Kernberg, often admire some hero or other admired individual and experience themselves as part of the admired person. They see the admired individual as merely an extension of themselves. The narcissist admires and identifies himself with the winners out of his fear of being labeled a loser. He seeks to warm himself in their reflected glow, but his feelings contain a strong ad mixture of envy and his admiration often turns to contempt if the object of his attachment does something to remind him of his own insignificance. End quote. And this is the trap. This is the narcissist trap because the surest way for the person built up into an idol to prove that they're merely human is to give the narcissist what he wants or what he thinks he wants. And Narcissistic is usually very adept at manipulating the feelings of others, especially the feelings of attachment and dependency. So Narcissists are seducers, and not always sexually it could just be emotional or intellectual seduction. He pours all his effort into gaining the affection of his object. But as soon as the person says yes, as soon as she surrenders, he loses all respect for the person. Sometimes the effect is immediate. If the guy pursues a woman fanatically and he loses interest the morning after they go to bed for the first time, the woman usually thinks that it means the guy was only after sex, but usually that's not true. A real alpha type who's just after sex usually is not such a jerk about it. the line of communications open, in case he's got nothing going on next weekend, you know? No, no, no. When there's an abrupt visceral change that you can feel, you know, where the air is different between you, like, immediately, the chances are you were not being deceived. You were just with a narcissist and up until the night you went to bed with them, he probably felt like he was in love. He was probably telling his friends that you were the greatest woman since the Virgin Mary because he wouldn't want them thinking he was acting this way over just some check and then he woke up that morning and it was gone and he didn't know why. He just knew that he felt disgusted with himself and didn't want to be around you anymore. This happens over and over in the life of a narcissist and it usually dictates the rhythm and flavor of his romantic interactions. Extremely passionate, followed by rapid, inexplicable disillusionment. And that's exactly what happened between Dust Aeveski and Maria. Eventually her infatuation with Virgenov began to wear off as infatuations do and she began to incline more toward Dust Aeveski. You know, you can't point. They communicated mostly in writing and this is Dust Aeveski we're talking about so the lady can be forgiven for falling for his tricks, right? But as soon as she became available to him, as soon as things tilted in his favor, his interest began to wane. And it waneed because she became available to him because he knew deep down he knew what a vacillating little slime ball he had been, how hesitating and how disingenuous and posing his attempts to steal her attention were. Part of what made her so great in his eyes was that she never gave into his ploys. As no great noble and virtuous woman worthy of his fascination would, right? You know, his words could charm any old girl and a bed and marriage, at least he imagined they could, but her, the pure and noble Maria. But now she had been charmed and if she could be charmed by a worm like him, well what did that say about her? It's a trap. When you read his letters to his friend, Wrangle, in one sense nothing's changed and yet everything is changed. He still employs the same lofty moral rhetoric to frame everything he's doing as a noble selfless sacrifice, but he does it in the exact opposite way, like puts it to the opposite purpose. At first he was claiming to be insane with love, yet a love so pure that he selflessly put aside his desires seeking only her happiness, even to the point of befriending her suitor Virgenov. But as soon as she wants him, his feelings evaporate and instead he's like, well, I guess I kinda have to marry her now, you know, and frames it as if he's selflessly shouldering this burden. In a letter to Wrangle he writes, "What a rotter I would be, think of it, if for no other reason, other than living a life of ease, lazy without a care. I renounce the happiness of having for a wife, the person who is dearer to me than anything in the world. If I passed by disregarding her sufferings, if I forgot her, abandoned her solely because of a few cares that may one day disturb my so very precious existence." Well, he went through with it because, you know, he's an underground man and you just get carried along in your life. That's what underground people do. So he goes through with it and they get married in a scene that could have been pulled straight from one of his stories. Him and Maria, he and Maria are married with Virgenov, her former suitor whom Dostoevsky had helped undermine as their witness. And it was a disaster immediately, literally on the carriage ride away from their wedding. Dostoevsky goes into an epileptic fit and their honeymoon is a disaster and it just is a disaster from then on. Now that she was all his, he could muster nothing but indifference toward Maria. Just overnight, they fell very quickly into a life of arguing and passive aggressive spite. And so Maria did end up stranded in the middle of nowhere in a better relationship for six years, but not with Virgenov as Dostoevsky had warned her that she would but with him. Now Maria didn't know what had changed, although women are wise in ways that men usually can't quite come to grips with. But whether she knew or not, she had to live with it. Stuck with a man who felt trapped in his life and as people do, focused all that resentment being trapped onto her, even though he was, you know, he put this poor win through hell, disappearing for periods of time on gambling, benches, returning without the money that they needed for food and shelter so that she was working to pay their bills. You intimate certain scenes from some of his later novels, you know, scenes of her sitting at home as the hour gets late and she realizes he's out again, hoping that maybe he's just been delayed, you know, telling herself that because after the last time he swore, he swore with tears in his eyes that he was done gambling, but then he'd sworn before and with the tears. And so as it gets later, she starts to cope. Okay, he's out gambling again, but maybe he'll win. It happens. Maybe he'll win this time and we can pay off our debts. And once the pressure is lifted, he won't need to gamble anymore. But it keeps getting later and she hears his footsteps and by now she knows just by how he's stepping that he's lost everything again. And she's going to have to ask for another advance on her wages to buy their food again. And he comes in crying and falls at her feet, groveling. And how do you turn away a husband in such a state of contrition, but she's seen it all before many times. And this was her life. And so obviously he did not come out of prison of st. Not by a long shot. Prison was just rock bottom for him, you know, a bucket of ice water over his head to make him wake up in the gutter. He was still in the gutter. He still was who he was. But he had been humbled. And in the years he spent with Maria, he would be further humbled by the daily confrontation with the misery that he was inflicting on someone that he claimed to love. And so this is life for six long years until Dostoevsky is finally granted release from the army. And so this is 10 years total, foreign prison and six in the army out there. And now he's released and he moves Maria back to St. Petersburg to resume writing. And he writes a book called The Insulted and Injured, which is more ambitious than any of his previous work by far. And it shows more insight into the true underground motives of characters whose actions are outwardly motivated by compassion and selflessness. There's certainly more insight. But in many ways it's even more of an underground novel than those previous ones. Because if he's no longer able to really lie to himself but is fighting even harder against admitting the truth. In this story, instead of one love triangle, you've got a bunch of overlapping love triangles. The narrator tells of a woman that he loved and still loves and kind of hangs around who respects him, but in the end rejects him for another man. This man in turn is involved with another woman who's being pushed on him by his family. Each of the women are jealous of the other and yet they push the man into the arms of the other. It's a pattern we've seen in Dusty Eskies personal life as well as in his previous novels, except here he begins to show how these acts of apparent magnanimity are really kind of a back and forth emotional sadomasochism. And the first woman doesn't really want him to go with the other woman, but she likes holding the upper hand against him morally. When he does go, she makes it clear that she's been hurt and so he eventually returns, confessing and apologizing and weeping and she takes kind of a sick pleasure in watching him grovel and deciding, deciding to forgive him, you know. The second woman for her part doesn't want to be in debt to the generosity of the first woman. So she pushes the man away as well. It's a long book and there's a lot going on, but Dusty Eskies starting to shine a light down into the nature of actions whose motivations are not only hidden, but are in fact the exact opposite of what they seem outwardly. And instead of just showing the pathology once, he shows it multiple times from multiple perspectives, you know, crossing paths and doubling back on each other until he's almost belaboring the point. Gerard writes, "The obsessions that reappear in this novel more pressing, more worrying, more intolerable than ever. With time, the structural lines of this obsession stand out, become more definite and simplify themselves like the features of a face in the hands of a caricaturist. In all the writings of this period, Dusty Eskies multiplies the obsessional situations and marks them out in such relief that it is nearly impossible to mistake their character. All the characters of the insulted and injured take a painful pleasure, quite intense, at the spectacle of an amorous disaster to which they all contributed their best collaboration." characters, hurt and betray one another, or encourage the others to hurt and betray them. And they bathe in a sense of martyrdom and magnanimous self-sacrifice while wielding their forgiveness as a moral cudgel. There are scenes which recall Dostoevsky crawling back to his wife after being broken on the roulette wheel, with the character in place of Maria taking a sadistic pleasure and granting his amnesty as he cries and grovels. These characters don't dominate each other, they manipulate and control each other through covert means. The identity of every character and the source of any power that they wield over each other is drawn from the insults and injuries that they suffer and hold on to in nurture and each holds the others in thrall by their victimhood. The author Richard Elliott Friedman wrote, "A theme of the book has to do with the egoism of suffering. Suggesting that there was a kind of person who positively needs to suffer, who finds a kind of psychological fulfillment in anguish. There is also a dark view of the egoism in virtue placed in the mouth of the book's villain who declares that, "At the root of all human virtues lies the completest egoism, and the more virtuous anything is, the more egoism there is in it." Usually the characters are manipulating and controlling each other by banal covert means. The little things that people do in their day to day lives, like trying to manipulate someone's emotions by pretending that you don't care what they do. When in fact that pretension, that affect is really just an attempt to control them and get some kind of a rise because you care very much about it. Claiming that they only want to do the right thing when they're really competing for the moral high ground. If you see in a lot of bad relationships where each of the two people were just outwardly doing nice things for each other, "I'll get the dishes, I'll take out the trash, I got you some flowers, but inside they're just racking up points." You find out that that's what's been happening when they get into a fight. I wash the dishes, I take out the trash, I got you flowers, and it's like, "Oh, okay, there was something else going on there." The other person has their list of things too, right? Every nice thing they do for each other is like moving a chest piece, making sure that they're in the better position, the next time that things break out into open conflict. The fights never happen when they should because neither person wants to be the one to start the fight. They want to be able to accuse the other person of making the one making a big deal. You see those couples where they're obviously fighting, but it's all under the surface. They're smiling like, "I'm not mad. Why are you mad?" "No, I'm fine. I just thought you seemed upset. Maybe you didn't sleep well. I slept fine. Thank you. Is there something you want to talk about?" "No. Okay, have a nice day. Love you." You want to grab them and just stick them in a shipping container together. How about you're both mad and you just fight and get it all out, right? But that's what people in the underground never do. They never get it all out. Nothing is done halfway on the slide by side channels and passive aggressive means that they can always deny later. Nothing is ever direct and nothing is ever finished. It just drags on and on because the whole point is to avoid open conflict as long as possible and wear the other party down through shame and moral grief. In his early novels, Dusty Eski just white watches all of this out of the picture. In his first post-exile novel, Insulted and Injured, he shows it and you almost think that maybe he's figured it out. Maybe he's got it, but then he fumbles at the goal line because he still shies away from the fact that this way of being inevitably leads to disaster. He takes it almost all the way up to the goal line and the way that he fumbles at just, you know, it, it, it, well. The man who is the subject of the two love triangles, Aaliyah Shah, is portrayed as this noble, but very passive and naive character who's being passed back and forth between these two women. It's as if Dusty Eski is still indulging this fantasy that Aaliyah Shah's essentially saintly moral character can, by itself, somehow redeem the situation. In the end, he can't, he can't choose between the two women and he tells them that he can't choose and says that the two of them must love each other and there's this sentimental scene where the two women come together and kiss and weep in each other's arms. It's pathetic. It's an unsatisfying way to end the book and it feels artificial like Dusty Eski doesn't really believe it himself, you know, and, and, and covers over his doubt with layers of gratuitous emotion. It's the work of a man whose lies to himself are wearing thin and whose fantasies for where this life is headed are no longer convincing. In 1862, this is two years later, two years after coming back to Petersburg and two years after publishing insulted and injured, he publishes the House of the Dead, which is a novel based on his experience as in prison and it's a huge hit and it brings him back to the attention of the literary world. And so he's got some success but his debts and his continued gambling addiction meant that the book's success didn't really help their financial situation that much. In 1863, he travels to Western Europe and starts up in a fair with a younger woman there and, again, all the underground mechanisms kicking to gear. But first, he was this older, wiser man, you know, a writer held in high esteem and she's smitten with him as, you know, even as he's refusing, oh no, I will not divorce my wife for you. He refuses to divorce Maria and kind of plays the part of the aloof older man. But then she falls for a young Spanish medical student and Dusty Eski just loses his mind, becomes jealous and obsessive and, you know, suddenly he's possessed by this cosmic passion now that she's moving away from him and she did move away and go with the Spanish student. Dusty Eski gambled and lost all the money that he had while he was in France and was forced to write relatives to beg money just to get home. That was when those letters were from. And while he's on that trip, Maria comes down sick and not long after he comes back, she dies. And very soon after that, Dusty Eski's brother, Mikhail, to whom he was very close, also died and he found himself the sole parent now of Maria's son, his stepson, as well as the single responsible provider for his brother's family. In this moment in Dusty Eski's biography, it feels like a make or break moment. Now, the way Gerard put it was, if Dusty Eski had simply gone mad in 1863, instead of starting to write notes from the underground, which is what he did, future critics to the extent that they paid any attention to him at all, would have found clear premonitions of the rupture in his work up to that point. Gerard writes that perhaps there was no other outcome for the Dusty Eski of 1863 other than madness or genius. To all of our benefit, he chose genius. His next book was Notes from the Underground. Maybe my favorite novel. It's at least the one that I've read the most times for sure. It's short, but it's just an incredible masterpiece. I must have read it. I don't know. 30 times. I just love it. I'll pick it up and read all sections of it just when I'm bored. If you're into audiobooks, actually, Audible has one narrated by a guy named Daniel Dors. If you haven't read Notes from the Underground, or even if you have and you want to enjoy it again, and if you're into audiobooks, go to Audible and get the one narrated by Daniel Dors. I don't think you could read that book better than he does. I just don't think it's possible. He captures every aspect of it. It's better than reading it yourself. The book notes from the Underground, divided into two parts, both told by the series same narrator, the same, the Underground Man. In the first part, he's talking to us, the readers, and giving us a sort of walking tour through Underground Psychology. It's very good, but then book two is more like a regular novel. It's still more conversational with the readers than a traditional novel, but it's narrative-driven. It's just brilliant. The Underground Man is telling us stories from his mid-twenties that are tragic and hilarious and just full of. they're just a tour-de-force illustration of how a narcissistic personality works. The concept of narcissism hadn't really even been thought of by psychologists yet, but Dusty Ebsky's book nails it so perfectly that I almost suspected the psychologist's read notes from the Underground and just said that right there, that thing, we're calling that narcissism. I mean, it's that good. Dusty Ebsky just sheds all of his armor and just walks out onto the battlefield naked in this book. It just lays it all out. It doesn't lie about anything. It doesn't hold back on account of his pride. It's just brilliant. I've read it probably 20 or 30 times. Even at this point, he doesn't have his life together yet, but his eyes are open. You can't be that honest in a book and still be lying to yourself. In the next year he wrote crime and punishment. And I can't say anything about that book that hasn't been said. It is one of the most magnificent pieces of literature ever written. And there's a character in the book. He's the drunken father of a teenage prostitute that meets Roskalnikov, the hero of the story. And novelist puts a bit of himself into every one of his characters, at least the good characters. Characters that the novelist can't identify with at all, usually aren't very good. And Dusty Ebsky, I don't really know how much of a drinker he was. He was Russian, I'm sure he liked vodka, but he wasn't addict who betrayed his wife for it countless times, made her suffer, gambled away their food and rent money, sold her jewelry and her clothes, sold his wedding ring, and then borrowed more money and had to flee when they couldn't pay. And this was a good woman, Maria was a good woman, a faithful and virtuous woman, probably of noble blood. Her grandfather had fled to Russia from France during the revolution. So, this is a woman who deserved better and endured tremendous suffering because of him and then got sick and died at 40 years old. And that was her life. And so there's this famous scene in crime and punishment where the protagonist, Roskalnikov, walks into a bar and finds this drunk, ranting to the other drinkers and then eventually to him. And he overhears the man saying, quote, "Well, so be it, I am a pig, but she is a lady. I have the semblance of a beast, but Katarina Ivanovna, my spouse, is a person of education and an officer's daughter. Granted, granted, I am a scoundrel, but she is a woman of noble heart, full of sentiments refined by education. And yet, oh, if only she felt for me, honored sir, honored sir, you know every man ought to have at least one place where people feel for him. But Katarina Ivanovna, though she is magnanimous, she is unjust. And yet, although I realize that when she pulls my hair, she only does it out of pity for I repeat, without being ashamed. She pulls my hair young man, but my God, she would but once, but no, no, it's all in vain, it's no use talking, no use talking. For more than once, my wish did come true, and more than once she has felt for me, but such is my fate and I am a beast by nature. Do you know, sir, do you know? I have sold her very stockings for drink. Not her shoes, that would be more or less in the order of things, but her stockings, her stockings I have sold for drink. Her mohair shawl I have sold for drink, a present to her long ago, her property, not mine, and we live in a cold room, and she has caught cold this winter and has been coughing and spitting blood too. We have three little children, and Katarina Ivanovna is at work from morning till night. She's scrubbing and cleaning and washing the children, for she's been used to cleanliness from a child. But her chest is weak, and she has a tendency to consumption, and I feel it. Do you suppose I don't feel it? And the more I drink, the more I feel it. That's why I drink, too, to find sympathy and feeling and drink. I drink so that I may suffer twice as much. Young man, my wife was educated in a high class school for the daughters of nobleman, and on leaving, she danced the shawl dance before the governor and other personages, for which she was presented with a gold medal in a certificate of merit. The medal, well, the medal, of course, was sold long ago. But the certificate of merit is in her trunk still, and not long ago, she showed it to our landlady, and although she is most continually on bad terms with the landlady, yet she wanted to tell someone or other of her past honors and of the happy days that are gone. I don't condemn her for it. I don't blame her. For the one thing left her is recollection of the past. All the rest is dust and ashes. Yes, yes, she is a lady of spirit, proud and determined. She scrubs the floors herself and has nothing but black bread to eat, but won't allow herself to be treated with disrespect. We have now a part of a room at Amalia Ivanovna, lip of esthels. And what we live upon and what we pay our rent with, I could not say. There are a lot of people living there besides ourselves, dirt and disorder, a perfect bedlam. Hmm, yes. And meanwhile, my daughter, by my first wife, has grown up. And what my daughter has had to put up with from her stepmother while she was growing up, I won't speak of. For though Katarina Ivanovna is full of generous feelings, she is a spirited lady, irritable and short tempered. Yes, but it's no use going over that. Sonya, as you may well fancy, has had no education. And do you suppose that a respectable poor girl can earn much by honest work? Not fifteen far things a day can she earn if she is respectable and has no social talent. And that without putting her work down for an instant. And there are the little ones hungry. And Katarina Ivanovna walking up and down, ringing her hands. Her cheeks flushed red as they always are in that disease. Here you live with us, say she. You eat and drink and are kept warm and you do nothing to help. And much as she gets to eat and drink when there's not a crust for the little ones for three days, although I was lying at the time. But what of it? I was lying drunk and I heard my Sonya speaking. She's a gentle creature with a soft little voice, fair hair and such a pale, thin little face. She said, "Ketarina Ivanovna, am I really to do a thing like that?" Daria Fransovna, you see a woman of evil character and very well known to the police, had two or three times tried to get at her. My daughter, Sonya, through the landlady. And why not? "Ketarina Ivanovna said with a jeer, you are something mighty precious to be so careful of. But don't blame her. Don't blame her on her answer. Don't blame her." She was not herself when she spoke, but driven to distraction by her illness and by the crying of the hungry children. At six o'clock I saw our little Sonya get up, put on her kerchief and her cape and go out of the room at about nine o'clock she came back. She walked straight up to Katarina Ivanovna and she laid thirty rubles on the table before her in silence. She did not utter a word, she did not even look at her. She simply picked up our big green shawl and put it over her head and laid down on the bed with her face to the wall, only her little shoulders and her small body kept shuttering. And I went online there just as before. And then I saw young man, then I saw Katarina Ivanovna in the same silence go up to Sonya's little bed. She was on her knees all the evening kissing Sonya's feet and would not get up and then they both fell asleep in each other's arms together, together, yes. And I laid drunk and "." Now there's nothing literary in this man suffering. He is a common degenerate and that's how he's portrayed and Dusty Evsky's portrayal often reads like a confession. He was still gambling, still didn't have his act together but he couldn't pretend that his problems were the fault of anyone but himself or that they were the result of grand tragic flaws in his character. His flaws are banal and common and ugly, embarrassing, not the flaws of Hamlet or Macbeth, but the flaws of the drunken stepover on the way to the casino. And that every parent tries to drum out of their children. And their flaws that his stern, tyrannical, conventional father had provided a pretty satisfactory example for how to avoid if only he hadn't been so stubborn about refusing the lesson. Over the next couple years he wrote The Gambler and The Eternal Husband to novellas that are pretty good. And then in 1869 he wrote The Idiot. The idiot is one of Dusty Evsky's great works, a beautiful novel. I know people who say it's their favorite of his books, it's not mine but it's great. By now he'd remarried. He married the woman who worked as his stenographer as he desperately dictated the gambler on a deadline to settle gambling debts. And the two had had children. And Dusty Evsky seems to be pulling himself together. And then in 1871 he lost gambling again and they had to sell most of their possessions. And who can really say why people do what they do? Who knows why this time was different but it was. He promised his wife he was done. That was it, he was done. The next year he wrote a masterpiece called Demons. Sometimes it's called Devils or the Possessed. That drew on his experience with the political radicals that got him thrown into prison. And then he started up a literary journal. Started making some money for the family and by now Russians were reading Dusty Evsky and starting to realize that something special was happening in their country. He went abroad for a while on doctors orders to recuperate from an illness. And when he returned the Tsar of Russia invited Fyodor Dusty Evsky to be honored at Kuala. court and asked him to educate the Zahzon sons. In the 1870s he accepted an invitation to serve as president of the Board for the All Slavic Benevolent Association, and he wrote lyrically about the Russian people and the Orthodox faith. As his health was failing in 1880, 1881, he pulled his strength together and wrote the brothers Karamazov, which is, you know, it is a world historical masterpiece of literature at the very top of many lists as the greatest novel ever written. And I don't think it's really out of anybody, anybody's top five, anybody serious anyway. When Fyodor Dostoevsky died in 1881, he was a recognized master of letters, but he had also become a man, you know, a husband and a beloved father, whose widow and children revered his memory, a proud Russian, and a man of whom Russians were proud. And an Orthodox Christian who had found his way back from the wilderness. When he passed, the whole people grieved. His funeral procession was said to have been the largest in Russian history up to that time. Well, the year Dostoevsky died was the worst year of Nietzsche's life by his account. And so we come back to this. Through most of that same year, 1881, Nietzsche was the same age as his father that his father had been when he suddenly died, and Nietzsche's long-held suspicion that he would follow his father into madness or early death was at the front of his mind. His health had collapsed to the point where he couldn't even maintain a light teaching schedule, and he was forced to retire from the university. His daily suffering was such that he wrote, "I had 200 days of torment in the year. My specialty was to endure extreme pain with perfect clarity for two or three consecutive days accompanied by constant vomiting. Over the years, Nietzsche had become progressively alienated from most of his friends and his academic peers, and increasingly from people and society in general." He had broken from the Wagner's in 1876, although it seems to have taken both sides a little bit of time to realize what was happening. His disillusionment with his hero had been growing for years as we talked about. In 1876, was the year he finally attacked Wagner in public. He attended the Beirut Festival, which was an annual cultural event to showcase Wagner's plays, and he was disgusted by what he saw. His praise of Wagner in his book, The Birth of Tragedy, where he predicted that Wagner might be inaugurating this new synthesis of European art on an order of greatness and significant similar to that of Greek tragedy, it wasn't just empty flattery. Nietzsche understood the tragic drama in Greece as an almost religious institution. He would come up with a better way to put it. He wouldn't like that. But in the sense that it allowed the Greeks to deal with the kind of primal and cosmic problems that humans use religion rather to deal with. Nietzsche describes the development of Greek tragedy, as I discussed a little bit before, beginning as a musical form with only the chorus, singing some well-known chorus or myth, and over time actors were brought onto the stage to dramatize certain elements, and then they began to interact with each other. That's the early development. The form reaches its apogee under Iskolis and Sophocles when the immersive, absorbing musical element comes into balance with the representational narrative element. But the peak didn't last, and what had been an almost religious institution devolved into social and political commentary, or else, representing common drama and day-to-day problems. The people weren't attending a ritual. They were now attending a show. Instead of the people leaving drain from the cathartic collective experience, they left arguing over the play's content. Well Nietzsche had hoped that Wagner was a new Iskolis, new Sophocles, bringing together the lyrical poetry foundational to the European canon, you know, Tristan and his older Parsifal, the song of the Nebelong, and Western orchestral music bringing them together. Nietzsche hoped that a new institution would arise out of this that might replace the Christian mass at a time when Christianity was losing its force in Europe. At the time that he wrote the birth of tragedy, Nietzsche's criticisms of Christianity were still relatively undeveloped, but later they would, you know, they would, they would, they would grow. He would mount a series of vicious attacks against the foundational values of the Christian faith. It became increasingly absorbing as he reached the end. He hoped that the new Wagnerian tragedy would call people together in celebration of courage and strength and heroism, rather than what he saw as the perverse Christian values of humility and renunciation. Well that year 1876, Nietzsche's health had worsened and forced him to take a long leave of absence from teaching. And he made a new friend, Paul Ray, and before he introduced Ray to Wagner, Nietzsche had to prepare Ray and ask him to ignore any comments that Wagner might make because Ray was Jewish and both Richard and Cosm of Wagner's anti-Semitism was becoming more central to their worldview, put it that way. Is that particular mind virus tends to do? And so Nietzsche's already kind of at his wit's end in a way, right, with the Wagner's, with Richard at least. At the Beirut Festival that year, Nietzsche was turned off before he even saw the performances of Wagner's plays. When he got there, he didn't see people attending a cultural ritual. He saw Germans going to have a good time and see a show, and not even a European show, but one in the service of German cultural shovonism. And obviously today we know that German nationalism is going to lead to some problems. And so for us it's all tinged with blood, but at the time Nietzsche's being kind of a humbug I think. Their attitudes understandable. Their nation was only five years old at the time, and they just come off a stunning victory over one of Europe's great military powers. What are they going to drink to if not the glory of their country? But you know, Nietzsche hated it. And he hated that Wagner seemed to be eating it up, using something that Nietzsche had cosine for as an effort making cultural achievement to create some little imperial German cult of personality for himself. That's how Nietzsche saw it. The final straw came when Nietzsche saw Wagner's rendition of the Grail legend, Parsephal. In the climactic scene, the hero Parsephal confronts his enemy, an evil sorcerer, who throws a spirit Parsephal. And now Nietzsche is expecting a European hero legend. You know, maybe Parsephal gets wounded, but then he bites down on his mouthpiece and charges forward to slay the wizard. Instead, the spear stops over Parsephal's head, and he reaches up and grabs hold of it and then makes the sign of the cross. And then that's it. He wins. The wizard's dead and the castle collapses, etc. Nietzsche did not respond well to that. He loved the music. He thought aesthetically, this was maybe the best work Wagner had ever done, but he wrote, Parsephal is a work of profidity, of vindictiveness, of a secret attempt to poison the presuppositions of life, a bad work. It is an incitement to anti-nature. I despise everyone who does not experience Parsephal as an attempted assassination of basic ethics. So yeah, the man took his theater very seriously. The break wasn't immediate. It wasn't like Nietzsche was chased out of the festival and banned from Wagner's presence, but it would soon come near to that. You got to the point that Wagner was so hurt and angry that he literally would not allow Nietzsche's name to be spoken in his presence for the rest of his life. A lot is made of Nietzsche's disillusionment over the 76 festival and Parsephal in particular, but I think this was a long time coming. Nietzsche was about to enter his explosive period and he had to get out from under the weight of Wagner before he could take off. Two years later, we're talking 1878-ish now, is when his health really took a nose dive and eventually leads him to quit teaching in 1879. His doctors ordered him to strictly limit his reading and writing to save whatever was left of his eyesight and because it really did a lot to contribute to his terrible daily migraines, but of course he ignored them. When it became too difficult, he started working with an early typewriter so that he could close his eyes and write without vision. He learned the keyboard and he would close his eyes and type as colorful swirls and sparkles flashed behind his eyelids as the migraines fired off his synapses. He told a friend that he saw a profusion of fantastic flowers twining around each other and constantly growing, changing and sh-- shape and color with exotic opulence, with disturbing urgency in his soft voice. He asked me, "Don't you think this is a symptom of incipient madness?" Nearly every day of the next ten years, Nietzsche was fighting through near blindness, but can't see three paces in front of him blindness, according to his own account. Near total exhaustion, extreme physical pain, overwhelming migraines, and taking frequent breaks for vomiting and diarrhea. But Nietzsche was entering his great period. Over the next decade, he would turn out a book a year, sometimes more, that are still taught and read today. The same year, he quit the university, he published "Human, All Too Human." The first book of his great period, and of the style that we've come to know Nietzsche for. The style itself was influenced by French writers, and he dedicated it to Voltaire, something that many critics interpret as a deliberate thumb in the eye of Wagner, whose anti-French chauvinism was well known. And this is a guy who wouldn't, he refused to be addressed or even to receive letters in the French language, even though he spoke it fluently. And he had specific, well-known contempt for Voltaire. So there's probably something going on there. A section of that book grapples with some implications of Darwin's theory, which was now about 20 years old, or so, maybe 15, 20 years old, and had swept the European intellectual world, obviously. Nietzsche was influenced by Darwin's discovery, a tremendous amount, a great deal, both directly and in reaction against certain aspects of them. In this passage, he objects to the strict reading of social Darwinism. He says, quote, "Wherever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of the greatest importance. Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones, help to advance it. Something similar also happens in the individual. There's rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice, or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike, restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone and may therefore become quieter and wiser. The one-eyed man will have one eye the stronger. The blind man may see deeper inwardly and certainly hear better. To this extent, the famous theory of the survival of the fittest does not seem to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening a man or a race." A fair point, perhaps, but maybe a little bit of personal defense there as well. Nietzsche would end up promoting social Darwinism of a certain type as the idea emerged and developed from the 1870s on. Social Darwinism theorists focus on the health of the whole society. That was their concern. The idea basically is that societies are subject to the same laws of natural selection as biological organisms and that we march ourselves willingly down the road to ruin when we interfere with that process. Society should be a competition and the losers of that competition should not be helped along but left behind. And they would say, "It might sound cruel, but science can't be cruel. What would be cruel would be allowing society to degenerate out of our sentimentality which would lead to suffering for everyone rather than just for the unfit." Nietzsche would put somewhat different spin on it. He was never concerned with the general welfare. He never made any pretensions about that. For Nietzsche, the purpose of society should be to produce great individuals and the greatness of a society is measured by the greatness of the individuals it produces. He doesn't mean the average individual in society A is better than the average individual in society B. Society B could consist of a population that is 98% to graded slaves. But if that other 2% is producing seizures and shakespeers and Napoleon, that is the one to be preferred. Nietzsche denounced pity as the morality of the slave. Of the slave resentful of his slavery but too weak to be anything else. He says pity is just a subversive idea that's used by the slave, by the weak to cripple the strong by making him ashamed of his strength. In a work a few years later, he began the first lines by addressing his readers of whom there were only a few dozen, mostly his own acquaintances who read out of politeness if they read it all. He starts off. Let us look each other in the face. We are hyperboreans. That's a mythical race in ancient Greece. We know well enough how remote our position is. Neither by land nor water will you find the road to the hyperboreans. Even Pindar in his day knew that much about us. After the introduction, he shares his thoughts and these are the first lines of the book. "What is good? Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is evil? Whatever springs from weakness? What is happiness? The feeling that power increases, that resistance has overcome. Not contentment, but more power. Not peace at any price, but war. Not virtue, but efficiency. Virtue in the Renaissance sense, v.2, virtue free of moral acid. The weak and the botched shall perish, first principle of our charity, and one should help them to it. What is more harmful than any vice? Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak. Christianity. Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is right for destruction. It fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life. By maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life a gloomy and dubious aspect. The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures. Man is an end. But what type of man must be bred? Must be willed as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life. The most secure guarantee of the future. This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past, but always as a happy accident as an exception, never as deliberately willed. Very often it has been precisely the most feared. Either too it has been almost the terror of terrors. And out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained. That is, the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick brute man, the Christian. End quote. In 1881 he published dawn or daybreak. And it he writes, "Medical kit for the soul. What is the best healing application? Victory." In his notes that made up the will to power later on, he writes, "What is it we combat in Christianity that it wants to break the strong, that it wants to discourage their courage, exploit their bad hours in their occasional weariness, convert their proud assurance into unease and distress of conscience, that it knows how to poison and sicken the noble instincts until their strength, their will to power turns backward against itself, until the strong parish through orgies of self-contempt and self-abuse, that gruesome way of perishing which Pascal provides the most famous example." Now, I don't want to be unfair, maybe is it unfair to point out that it was not Pascal but Nietzsche who goes insane just a few years later? Maybe sometimes it's appropriate to ignore the man when evaluating a man's ideas, but sometimes that's very difficult to do and probably not appropriate to do. I mean, sure, you can consider Isaac Newton's mathematical work without a glance at his personal peculiarities, but if a, I don't know, if a televangelist who makes his name fiercely opposing gay marriage is caught in a motel room on meth with a male prostitute, it's probably pretty reasonable to consider that maybe those two things might be related, right? We see variations on this theme often enough, this specific theme, to recognize some consistent psychological dynamics are probably at play. And one of the things that comes through pretty consistently is that there's more going on than just hypocrisy or a cynical outer show. If it was just a tactic, a normal person would understand that talking about it all the time in such an animated way is probably going to bring more scrutiny on you, not less. Now, it's more pathological than that. That pastor who, you know, that anti-gay pastor who gets caught in a motel room with a male prostitute, he does that because he can't help it. And he isn't just expressing disgust for homosexuality to throw people off of his scent. He really is disgusted by it. And he finds himself disgusting. But people can't just walk around being disgusted by themselves 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can't live like that very long. If that goes on too long and the mind can't devise some kind of a strategy to deal with it. Well, those people don't last very long. They find a way to exit the scene, either through some addiction to drown everything out or by just sabotaging themselves and blowing up their lives in a way that forces it all to come out into the open or sometimes, you know, just by committing suicide. But the mind is a very powerful thing and, you know, as long as you still got some road in front of you, it can really come up with some tricks. It's got a lot of tricks up its sleeve. And people are living enough of a double life in the sense that their outer presentation diverges wildly from their inner life. Often with people like this, the personality becomes little more than a collection of strategies and tricks that they have learned to employ to deal with trauma and to work around overwhelming negative feelings about themselves. When you meet the person, talk to them, interact with them. That's what you're interacting with is those strategies. That's the person. It's strange to talk about people in their minds as two different things, but you come back to that divided self again. And we say that someone is disgusted with themselves as if they're two separate people. And people do go through their lives telling themselves, you know, you're ugly, you're stupid, you're worthless, you're weak. But who's doing the talking and who are they talking to? The dynamic at play seems to work something like this. And I'm talking about someone like that pastor who gets caught in the motel room, right? What you hate about yourself, you tend to hate when you see it in other people. But your self hatred is all going on on the inside while you're hatred for these other people comes out where people can see it. And people do see it and they draw conclusions about you and what kind of person you are and what you think and so forth based on how they see you behaving. Once people start to form expectations for us, we tend to conform to them, at least in our outward behavior. You can surprise people and subvert their expectations occasionally, but you can't surprise people too often or they'll just think you're weird. If you've ever been around someone who's kind of skit so someone in the grip of psychosis, it's very unnerving because, you know, unconsciously your mind is trying to model their behavior so you can predict what they're going to do next. And if you can't, your mind starts sending out these alarm signals. And so it's in our nature to avoid that with people and the way we avoid it is by almost unconsciously without even willing it, tending to conform to whatever people expect of us. And this is where things can become dangerous because as you conform to expectations that people have derived from behavior that is actually an expression of your own self hatred, then the inner and the outer self get further and further apart and it becomes harder and harder to bring them back together in a way that's not going to blow up your entire life. The further apart they get, the more exhausting it gets to keep up appearances and you don't know how long you can keep it up only that you can't keep it up forever and your whole life becomes a long wait for the other shoot to drop, for the charade to collapse like Raskolnikov and crime and punishment like his divided life becomes in that story. A woman named Lou Salome who knew Nietzsche intimately for a while. She wrote a biography about him later and in it she wrote that suffering and loneliness then are the two great lines of fate in Nietzsche's biography which become more pronounced the newer one comes to the end. Nietzsche had met Lou Salome in 1882 through his friend Paul Ray and she was the third and final woman with whom Friedrich Nietzsche would fall in love. The first was Kossama Wagner, the second I believe I mentioned was in 1876 the year that he broke with the Wagner's. He had fallen for a woman and asked his friend to propose to her for him and she rejected his offer and ran off with his friend instead so not a good experience, not a good experience with Kossama Wagner. After that 1876 incident it was six more years before he would even try again enter this woman Lou Salome. On each it is in his late 30s I believe let's see 1882 he would be 38 years old maybe maybe 37 depending on if his birthday hit or not and Lou Salome is 21 years old and she is a young, brilliant and apparently captivating woman. In addition to Friedrich Nietzsche and his friend Paul Ray she is also supposed to have entranced Sigmund Freud just a few years later the young Sigmund Freud and the poet Rayna Maria Rilke sometime later after that so this is a captivating woman. She had met Nietzsche's friend Paul Ray at a literary salon in Rome when she was traveling with her mother earlier that year in 1882 and immediately Paul Ray falls in love with her and proposes marriage and she turns him down and instead suggests that the two of them live and study together as brother and sister she says and she suggests that they bring another man into the arrangement and that they start up a literary commune. And so Ray introduces her to Nietzsche and Nietzsche immediately falls in love with her. He asks his friend Ray to propose to her on his behalf and Ray does but she rejects Nietzsche as well. She says she's interested in Nietzsche as a friend but not as a husband and Nietzsche is very disappointed but he suppresses his disappointment and he agrees to be the third man in their commune. They go around calling themselves the holy trinity. They travel around Switzerland and Italy all summer making grand plans for their commune and they decide that they're going to set it up in an abandoned monastery once they find one. About a month after his initial proposal Nietzsche proposes marriage again to Salome. This time more earnestly and with some better planning but again she rejects him but Nietzsche stays with them anyway. And so one day when they're passing through Lucerne, Switzerland the town where he had spent Christmas with Richard and Cosma Wagner Nietzsche and the rest of the holy trinity stop into a photographer's shop to have their picture taken together. Lucerne tells the men to go wait in a lobby, you know, just stand by while she looks around at the props in the photographer's studio and stages the picture herself. She'll call them in when she's ready. And so when she is ready they're called into the studio and this is a famous picture. Lucerne, the young woman, is seated in the back of a two-wheeled cart holding a whip. Ray and Nietzsche are in front of the cart with ropes around their arms binding them to the wagon pretending to be horses that she was whipping to pull her along. This is as far as I know the only photograph of the three of them together and this is how this is how it was staged. The three of them suffered for a time near Nietzsche's mother and sister Ray traveled around a bit but Salamann Nietzsche were there in Germany for a period of time during the summer around his mother and sister and those two Nietzsche's, the other women in Nietzsche's life did not approve of Lucerne. The two of them spent a lot of time together walking and talking and discussing their plans. Nietzsche trying to change her feelings for him still but most of their time together was under the supervision of Nietzsche's sister who insisted on acting as Shaperone. Why did Nietzsche a 38-year-old man allow his little sister to act as his Shaperone? I don't know. Why did he allow himself to be photographed as a whipped horse by a woman who had twice rejected him along with his friend whom she'd also rejected. The answer to those questions might have something to do with why she rejected him. In the fall of that year Nietzsche is just kind of a wreck by this point. He's obsessed with this woman, she keeps turning him down, he's humiliating himself in pictures and so forth. He's just infuriated with his mother and sister for how he thinks they're interfering with the whole situation and in the fall of that year he proposes to Salamann again and again she rejects him and by this point things are just starting to become a little bit awkward and so Paul Ray Nietzsche's really only really close friend for the last several years and Lu Salamann ditched Nietzsche in Leapzig leaving for Poland with no plans to meet up again and Nietzsche sank into a deep depression. He wrote letters to Ray and immediate aftermath imploring we will see each other again won't we? And he was sad and he was bitter. He blamed Ray for subverting his chances with Salamann and then he blamed Salamann herself and had some choice words for her. He blamed his sister especially and he had fallen out with his mother as well. There's a dark time in his life. An author and philosophy professor at DePaul named David Ferrell Crull wrote a novel about Nietzsche's life that uses a lot of his real letters and notes as material in his text. He kind of uses a lot of his letters and notes to drive the story forward. Those writings are used in the book and they're unaltered formed to kind of carry you through the events in his life and in between is commentary in the form of Nietzsche's own thoughts to himself. And over the course of the novel, as Nietzsche suffers and experiences failure and frustration, the voice of those thoughts becomes increasingly separate from the one that they're directed towards. His thoughts to himself take on a life of their own and turn on him and begin to attack him, quote, "To take up with a woman half your age, assorted Russian without morals. Oh, I know you're the grand immoralist, but she was probably already engaged to your common Israelite friend. Didn't you think of infection, contamination, disease, invalidism? Canker, blindness, frustration? Didn't you think of the filth? The stench? Didn't you think of your mother, boy? You're a shame upon your family. You've desecrated your father's grave. God forgive you. I cannot. She stood you up in Berlin, served you right. Kept you cooling your heels all day long on the groon, walled four-learn, under the dappled sunlight on the walking paths by the lake. The next day, you crept home, crestfallen, just like a little boy who lost his way." And then this is followed by an actual letter that he wrote to Rey at the time. "To Paul Rey, Namburg, Sunday, sunny weather. In spite of everything, I am full of confidence in this year and its enigmatic toss of the dice for my fate. I won't travel to Berk, to Scotland, and in general, I'm no longer in any condition to undertake anything alone. In Berlin, I was like a lost penny, which I myself had dropped, but thanks to my eyes couldn't find, although it lay right at my feet, so that all the passers-by laughed at me. Heart-felt greetings, your friend, N." The year that all of this is happening, a year of emotional turmoil for Nietzsche, as you can imagine, is 1882. Nietzsche publishes his book, The Joy of Science. Sometimes the joyful science or the gay science, it's sometimes called. And in it, he raises a question that would become central to his outlook, to his philosophical outlook. He asks, "What if someday or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliness and say to you, this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more." Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke to us? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him? You were a God and never have I heard anything more divine." Nietzsche wrote these lines during a period again of intense frustration and humiliation and physical suffering. He finished it in a deep depression. In this state, he's posing the question, "How would you feel if you learned that life was an eternal recurrence that you would reincarnate, not as someone else, but as yourself, and not to make different choices, but to go through the exact same life again, so that every moment of your life, everything you do, is not an ephemeral thing that happens once and then fades away like a ripple on the ocean, but instead everything, everything you do is setting in stone for all eternity, the life that you will experience again and again forever." How does a man answer that question when the two main lines of fate in his life are as Lucellum he wrote about him loneliness and suffering? Nietzsche had his own answers, quote, "He who is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and others will be his victims, if only in having to always endure his ugly sight. For the sight of the ugly makes one bad and gloomy, it is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it. Every complaint already contains its revenge. Our self-respect depends on our ability to make requital for good or evil. A small revenge is more human than no revenge at all." And now I know all of the Nietzsche fans out there are shouting at me right now that he's not talking about himself there, he's talking about other people, and that's right he would never admit this about himself. He's talking about the botched in the week, the losers, the people who resent their position in life but are unable to do anything about it. And what you hate in yourself, you hate when you see it in other people. And one of the great insights into the narcissistic personality came from the psychologist Melanie Klein, at least it came to me that way, and she describes how the narcissist is capable of short-lived bursts of mania and depression, but has trouble sustaining the intensity of that, and then very quickly retreats into a feeling of numbness and kind of being dead inside. And the insight was that this is their way of defending against rage, against a raging desire for revenge on the world that is just refusing to give them what they need from it. The rage feels overwhelming and so they suppress it and it takes tremendous psychological energy to suppress real rage and that just leaves them numb and exhausted and unable to generate enthusiasm for normal things in life. The desire for revenge is at the bottom, that's primary, but they repress it out of fear. But on Nietzsche's case, there's a revenge on who, right? And revenge how? This is a man who participated in his own humiliation in that photography studio. This is a man who can't stand up to his own sister, his own younger sister. Instead, writes of his hatred for her and notes and letters to other people. Revenge was a major theme in Nietzsche's later work. He talked a lot about it. That day in the bookstore, he would have read in the third chapter of Dusty Ewski's notes from the Underground, something about revenge. Nietzsche is just a few years away from that bookstore now. We're getting close to that. The Underground man is discussing revenge, and in the previous passage, he had been saying that it's possible for a man to suffer from having too much consciousness. This is the way he puts it. He says that only a certain amount of consciousness is needed. Enough to address the world and make decisions and solve problems, and that'll get you through a happy life, and that anything more than that becomes counterproductive. It makes it impossible to do anything, because it just multiplies doubts and unanswered questions and just makes it impossible for the overly conscious man to actually commit and ever do anything. Think of the stereotype of the confident, but shallow, varsity quarterback and the introverted, sensitive nerd. It's wrong to call the Jacques Dumb because the Jacques knows many things that the nerd doesn't. Those things just happen to be about how to act in the world. The nerd's inability to act in the world has him, you know, it's driven him back into himself, driven him inward, and caused him to explore mental and emotional corners that the Jacques has never really had occasion to visit. And we say that, you know, he's deep and he's sensitive. The nerd explores whole worlds in his head. The Jacques explores the actual world. Well, Nietzsche was a man who lived in his head. His poor health had limited his activity from a very young age. He usually had very few friends or people close to him. He never had a wife. He never had a girlfriend. He never had a woman period, except for maybe a tripper two to a brothel. All three of the women he loved in his life chose arrival instead. He published books that nobody read. I mean, nobody. Those who did read them, mostly his acquaintances were not overly impressed. Even to the end of his life, he never got out from under a cloud of abuse from his mother and sister. So basically, this is a man who every time he ventured out into the world, he just got punched in the face and driven back. And every time he was driven back deeper and deeper into a place that does the Ewski call the underground and he lived there like a mouse in its hole. And so this is from the third chapter of notes from the underground. Quote. Now let us take a look at this mouse in action. Let us suppose, for instance, that it feels insulted and it almost always does feel insulted and wants to revenge itself. There may even be a greater accumulation of spite in it than in the simple man of action. The base and nasty desire to vent that spite on its assailant wrinkles, perhaps even more nastily in the mouse than in the simple man of action. For through his innate stupidity, the latter, the man of action, looks upon his revenge as justice, pure and simple. While in consequence of his acute consciousness, the mouse does not truly believe in the justice of it. To come at last to the deed itself, to the very act of revenge. Apart from the one fundamental nastiness, the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it, so many other nastinesses in the form of doubts and questions adds to the one question. So many unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it, a sort of fatal brew. A stinking mess made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand solemnly about as its judges and arbitrators laughing at it till their healthy sides ache. Of course, the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw and with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not really itself even believe. creep ignominiously back into its mouse hole. There, in its nasty, stinking, underground home, are insulted, crushed, and ridiculed little mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant, and above all, everlasting spite. For 40 years together, it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious details, and every time we'll add of itself, details still more ignominious. Spightfully teasing and tormenting itself with its own imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings, and yet it will recall it all. It will go over and over every detail of the offense against them. It will invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things might happen, and will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge itself too, but as it were, piecemeal, intrivial ways, from behind the stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to vengeance, or in the success of its revenge. Knowing that from all its effort at revenge, it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom it revanges itself. While he, dare I say, will not even scratch himself. On its deathbed, it will recall it all over again with interest accumulated over the years, and then he breaks off there. Now here's Nietzsche, writing in the bitter aftermath of his split with Ray and Salome. There was a real hatred of my sister, who has cheated me of my best acts of self-conquest for a whole year, so that I have finally become the victim of a relentless desire for vengeance. Precisely when my innmost thinking has renounced all schemes of vengeance and punishment. This conflict is bringing me step-by-step closer to madness. I feel this in the most frightening way. In that place that Dostoevsky called the underground, Nietzsche had another name for it, pulling from a French concept passing around at the time, Rassant de Mont. Only he never would have attributed that attitude to himself. Rassant de Mont is like resentment, kind of but more specific, and there's more layers to it. To keep it simple, it is the state of a person in an inferior position, who wishes revenge on those above him but lacks either the will or the ability to take that revenge. This state, resenting your inferiority, objecting to it in principle, but unable to disprove it in reality, not having any recourse, the soul rots in this condition and begins to seek other ways to revenge itself, and that is Rassant de Mont. Well, again, revenge on who? Right? One way to approach it is to just start close and work your way out. One of the most famous passages in the joy of science Nietzsche's 1882 book is the rant of a madman proclaiming that God is dead. If people know one thing about Nietzsche, sometimes this. What's a tremendous thing for the son of a pastor and the grandson of two pastors, and a person who grew up known as the little pastor himself to write? His Christian mother, who had been upset by Nietzsche's decision not to become a minister like his father, she read that passage and she told her son to his face that he was a disgrace to his father's grave. In a long time afterward, Nietzsche wrote that he had not for one instant been able to get the sound of his mother's voice, saying those words out of his mind, but then I think he must have known what her reaction would be. He begins mounting increasingly grandiose and vitriolic attacks on specifically those things that were valued and admired in his past. His work becomes increasingly hostile, even hateful toward Christianity, and this becomes more and more intense and more and more of an obsessional focus as he gets closer to the end. Any hammer's home is contempt for Wagner with screeds against Germany and the German people. He calls German stupid, culture-less, vulgar, tasteless, the spoilers of Europe, meanwhile extolling the virtues of the French and the Jews and everybody else with whom the Germans were currently in rivalry. For whom his appreciation was sincere enough, but it's the way he belabers the point that kind of betrays his motive. He goes after Arthur Schopenhauer, one of his early philosophical influences, as well as a heavy influence on Wagner. He attacks Kant and Hegel. He says that polluted blood makes it all but impossible for a German to create anything of value. He even invents a genealogy for himself that makes him a descendant of Polish nobility, which is totally made up, but he's just trying to convince himself that he's free of his German heritage. He's unmoored at this point. He drifts around Europe looking for a climate that might help ease his mounting illnesses. Alienated from his family with Paul Rey and Luc Alamegan, depressed in pain and increasingly taking very heavy doses of opium and other drugs just to get through the day. In 1883, he applies for a minor teaching post at the University of Leopzig where he had impressed his professors so much that they'd waived his doctoral requirements to give him an early start on his academic career, but they didn't want him. At same year, he managed to publish the first part of the book that he considered to be not only his most important, but one of the most important books ever written. Certainly the most important book of the age in his own eyes. That was the Spoke Zarathustra. I talked about this a little bit earlier. This is where he really starts to embrace this grandiose style that becomes more and more bombastic as time goes on. He begins the book with a sort of invocation, setting the scene with his character Zarathustra, who's basically speaking for Nietzsche himself, descending from the mountain top to share his accumulated wisdom with benighted man. When he encounters man, he takes his place and announces, "I teach you the ubermensch." And that's what he's there to do. Ubermensch means overman or superman. It doesn't mean a man with superpowers, but the being that will supersede man as man has superseded the ape. Zarathustra proceeds through many speeches to tell people how to follow him on the road to superhumanity. Nietzsche published the book in parts over the next few years, in 1885 he published part four and only printed 40 copies, most of which were distributed to acquaintances by Nietzsche himself and may have even been read by some of them. What's a man to do in a situation like this? What do you do when you are a half blind, hobbled, sickly man who believes that the weak and the botched should perish and in fact should be helped along their way? When you preach victory as the only good medicine for the soul and of the soul-routing effects of continual defeat and frustration and yet you have no victories. When you think the world is one way, but all the evidence of your senses tells you something else. Nietzsche's story reminds me a little bit, "I don't want to get too far off track here and I debated putting this in but it really does remind me of it so I will." It reminds me a bit of the evolutionary theorist George Price. Price was an American born in the 1920s and he didn't start out as an evolutionary theorist. I think he was a chemist who got his PhD at Chicago for work he did on the Manhattan Project. Just a man of extraordinary intelligence and after the war he ends up in America in the 50s and the kind of jobs waiting for people like him. Good job, but research and technical jobs and big organizations. Kind of like Nietzsche falling into his teaching gig at Basel. It's not satisfying. He's sort of a cog and a big machine. He started his career working on the Manhattan Project. He's got an ego the size of the atomic bomb so he wants to work on big problems and so he goes out and starts picking fights with economists on their own turf, writing letters to the US Senate with plans how to end the Cold War, you know, stuff like that. Price was a belligerent atheist to the point that it eventually helped end his marriage to a Catholic woman because he couldn't just not believe in God. He had to make a thing out of it. People found him arrogant and very abrasive and so in 1966 he's been divorced from his wife for a little while now. He gets thyroid surgery and it goes very badly and leaves him numb and one arm and on one side of his face. After the surgery he has to take hormone medication for the rest of his life and his body doesn't tolerate that well so he's got some health problems to go along with it. He gets a decent payout from the insurance company as a result of the botched operation and so he takes stock of where his life is. He's divorced. He's been divorced for a while now. His health isn't great and he's bored and frustrated and feels unappreciated with the work he's doing in America and so in 1967 he decides to move to London and work on a big scientific problem that will be his legacy and the problem he settles on is why do humans live in families? specifically what the purpose of fatherhood was from an evolutionary perspective. And so you got a guy who's been divorced and left his wife with their two daughters to move overseas by himself who has decided that his life's work is going to be to figure out why we live in families and what fatherhood is there for. Okay. In 1968, he discovers the work of Bill Hamilton, the great evolutionary biologist, who it turned out had been doing some related work. So what they were working on basically, I'll just try to tie this up. The problem was altruism essentially. How do we explain evolutionarily why someone would do something that apparently harms their own survival chances just to help somebody else out? Why would evolution have allowed that behavior to survive when it seems self-defeating from the standpoint of natural selection? Well, Bill Hamilton showed that the contradiction is resolved if instead of looking at the organisms you look at their genes instead, it might be evolutionarily counterproductive to sacrifice yourself for everyone you see, but it might actually propagate your genes more successfully if everyone who shares them makes sacrifices for others who share them. It's obviously more detailed and sophisticated than that, but that's basically it and it's called inclusive fitness or kin selection. Well, George Price sees this and immediately writes a letter to Bill Hamilton, who sends him kind of a polite reply, but then he leaves for a long research trip in Brazil. Price becomes obsessed with Hamilton's theory. He was looking at work that he couldn't refute that said that his genes should have commanded him to abandon his selfish ambitions and stay near and take care of his children, which he had not done. And so he had to disprove Hamilton's work somehow and he tried, but everything he tried only further cemented it in place. And as he's working on this problem, he comes up with an equation that he believes answers the riddle not only of limited altruism toward kin, but all human altruism, all human selfless kindness. It's called the Price Equation. And so one day, equation in hand, he wanders into Galton Laboratories, which is the genetic center at the University of London, and announces that he has discovered an equation that solves the problem of human altruism. And on nobody knows who this guy is, he has no credentials, he doesn't work for anybody, he's not from any university. He's just this random middle-aged American guy, who the people that day described as arrogant and condescending with an annoying, high-pitched voice, but 90 minutes later, when he leaves Galton Laboratories, he's got a job and the keys to his own office. And so Bill Hamilton comes back from his trip and Price reaches him again, saying that he had come up with a variation, maybe a little correction on Hamilton's theory and so Hamilton decides to give him the time of day and they meet and he realizes that Price's work is something much more than that, that this is something actually really original. And so they get to know each other and start working together pretty well. But something had changed in George Price. In his private writings, he describes having a religious experience in 1970. This is a very, very belligerent atheist up until this point, remember. He says he felt tremendous guilt for his part in discovering that all human kindness was nothing more than a mechanical genetic impulse commanded by the genes for selfish reasons. He starts to think about his daughters, his love for them, and the joy that he felt in the past when he helped them or watched them open a birthday present. And because he believed in his work, he had to admit to himself that according to the math, logically, which was the truth he believed in, he had to admit to himself that none of those feelings were real. If anything, they were an illusion created by his genes just to incentivize him to go acting a way that ensured their propagation. It was all just machine operations. Now of course it didn't feel that way. It felt like love and joy. It didn't feel like his genes were commanding anything. It felt like he had made these choices because he wanted to see his daughter smile. This was all the evidence of his senses and it was all telling him one thing. But then there was this theory and he couldn't talk himself out of it. It seemed to have an answer for every objection that his senses raised and every argument that his theory won drained a little more color out of life form. And so what do you do? One option is you say, well, okay, this is an elegant theory. It explains a lot, but maybe not everything. So I'll keep working on it and I'll go find my daughter a birthday present, you know, coming up after I get off work. Keep everything in a separate lane. Go live your life. But a guy who started studying the purpose of the family and fatherhood after he divorced his wife and moved across an ocean away from his kids is not going to keep those things in a separate lane. His life and his thought were all one thing. One informed and colored the other and the two were going to rise and fall together. And so he decides if he can't disprove this theory in the lab, he's going to disprove it himself. He's going to disprove it in the streets. And so in 1972, George Price starts giving away his belongings. Everything. He goes down to the homeless camps near the railroad stations and under bridges and just gives away whatever he has. He go down there after he got paid and just give away his paycheck. And he was still receiving a pout from the insurance company. I suppose that's how he paid his rent. He gave away his clothes. People talk about him giving away the shoes and socks and jackets he's wearing in the middle of winter. When it was cold and people had nowhere else to sleep, he just opened up his apartment as a kind of walk-in shelter. People could come and go as they as they pleased. Eat his food, take whatever they want. And so as you expect, his apartment went to pot pretty quickly, became just as ruined and filthy as you'd expect. And he lived like that. Right alongside these people, right alongside the homeless, sleeping next to them, sharing his food. He became entranced by an English poem from the 19th century called The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson. It's a long poem that describes the soul running away from God, hiding in sin and delusion. But the hound of heaven doesn't stop running and it's going to chase him down and find him wherever he hides. The soon George Price had given everything away and was just his destitute, as any of the people that he met. Eventually the lease ran out on his apartment and he left and started squatting wherever he could with the rest of the homeless. Confronted with an uncomfortable reality, a reality that he couldn't accept, George Price's choice was to fight back with his life, with his whole life. With everything he had, he refused to accept what everything he knew told him had to be true. But at a certain point, the enthusiasm that carries you at first begins to run low and you're going to have to find something other than enthusiasm. Because now he's on the street filthy, sick, cold, and everyone he knows, the people he loves in respects, all think he's lost his mind. And he knows that they cry when they think of him, when they think of what's become of him. And when the enthusiasm wanes, doubt starts to creep in and a voice starts to whisper that maybe you've been going about this the wrong way. That in fact, maybe, just maybe this act of total selflessness and total altruism and humility was really pride in disguise. Because what else but astronomical pride could make a man think that it was on him to serve as the ultimate example of human altruism by his own self-destruction. But what do you do when you've already come this far? And George Price is in his early 50s now. On the streets, destitute, mentally unstable just because of what he's been through. You turn back and you can't even see the place that you came from or how you got here. He tried. He listened to some people and got a job as a janitor at a bank. He didn't give away his paychecks anymore, but he'd come too far to turn back. And so he decided once and for all to prove that humans can act contrary to what some equation says are their evolutionary interests. And so one day he went into his bathroom and he held a pair of nail scissors and he looked himself in the mirror and he cut the artery in his neck. He died there and his grave in London was unmarked and his funeral was attended by Bill Hamilton and by several of the homeless men that he had served. Or what would turning back have looked like for a guy like George Price. It might have looked like cleaning the bank after hours until he. he kind of stabilized, then start to reconnect with your daughters, make a few friends among your neighbors. You know, it's a working class neighborhood is where your apartment is, so they're not going to be the fascinating scientific friends you had before. They're going to be regular people. Maybe after a while you go teach chemistry at the community college, you know, a normal life. But mostly it means sacrificing your pride, recognizing that the place it has led you is not a good place. Knowing that just because you think something is a good idea does not mean you have to do it, because really no matter how smart you are, at the end of the day you're just a guy and you don't know shit. Price had been a hardcore atheist and then he had this religious experience and went 180 degrees in the other direction, full speed, believing he was on a personal mission from God when maybe the better approach would have been to say, well, I've been an atheist all this time and I was real sure about that. But now I've had this religious experience and I'm real sure about this. Maybe being real sure about something doesn't mean I'm right. Maybe I should just slow it down a little bit. And Dusty Ebsky was dying and he knew the end was very close. He asked for his children to be brought in for a final time. He knew it was the final time and that was his decision. He knew that this experience would stick with his children and he had considered what it was that he wanted to leave them with. This was an educated eloquent, very widely read man who could have drawn from deep well to make his final message to his kids count. When his children were in the room with him, he asked that the parable of the prodigal son be read to them in his dying presence. Most of us know that. It's from the Bible. I'm going to be winging it here. But basically, there's a father who has two sons and older son and a younger son. And one day, the younger son says to him, "Father, I'm out of here. I'm tired of this place. Just give me my inheritance that I'm going to be due. Give it to me now so that I can go out and get my life started." The father says, "Well, okay, sure." He gives him his cut of his inheritance that he's got coming. And the son goes off and he just has a ball. He goes out with his friends and they're drinking and horing and just living it up in some foreign land, traveling around. And eventually, the money runs out and a famine strikes in the land where he's living. And since he has no more money, his friends don't really want to be around him anymore. He's no fun. And so they just leave him and he's all alone. And he has nothing to do now. No way to eat. No way to support himself in this foreign country. And so he goes and finds a citizen of this foreign land and just asks him, he can work for him as a servant or something. And so this guy puts him to work in his fields. He says, "Go out and take care of my pigs in the fields." And he's begging for food but nobody in that country will give him food. And so he ends up eating out of the troughs with the pigs, with the swine, eating husks and old food. And in this lowly state, he says to himself, "Back home, even my father's servants have bread to eat. They have more than enough to eat. But here I am starving. And so here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go back to my father and I'm going to say, "Father, I am not your son. I'm not worthy to be called your son. But maybe you will hire me as a servant. Just make me one of your servants." And so he does. He goes back and he is heading back to his father's state. And his father's servants or maybe his father himself see the boy coming. Like a long way off. And his father says to his servants, "Go prepare the fattened calf, the fattened lamb." The one we've been saving for a big feast, get it ready. We're having a feast. Tonight we celebrate. And his son comes and he falls at his father's feet. And he says, "Father, I'm not your son. But please in my humble state, I come to you in absolute humility. Please just take me back as one of your servants." I don't know what else to do. And his father picks him up and he tells some of his other workers. He says, "Go get my son, my finest robe. Go get a ring to put on his finger. Bring shoes for his feet. Bring them out here and prepare the feast for my son has come home." And they have a party. They have a celebration because his sons come back. And he says, "My son who is dead has returned to the living. My son who has lost has now been found." And so this party is going on. And the older son, the one who never left, the faithful one, comes back from working all day in his father's field. And he sees this party going on. He calls over to somebody and says, "What's all this about?" And they say, "Well, your little brother, he's come home." And so your dad's thrown this party and here's everything that's happened. And the older brother is upset about this. He says, "You know, they seem awfully overjoyed over this little shit that just came home after all this time. And so his father comes out to try to treat them and say, "Come on, come on in here and celebrate with us." And the older son, understandably, says, "Look, I've been here the whole time. I never left. I never abandoned my duties here." And you've never killed the fat and calf for me. You've never thrown a party for me and my friends. And the father says, "My son, you or my precious faithful son and everything I have is yours, but your brother has come home to us, safe and sound. Your brother was dead and now he's alive. And so come in here and we shall all celebrate together." And that's the story. And so it's that arc of degradation and forgiveness and redemption. And that's what he chose to leave his children with. Throughout this episode, Dostoevsky's biographer Joseph Frank wrote, "It was this parable of transgression, repentance and forgiveness that he wished to leave as a last heritage to his children and it may well be seen as his own ultimate understanding of the meaning of his life and the message of his word." Dostoevsky had left his father's house, you know, literally and figuratively. And then he realized that for saking his home did not make him free, it just made him homeless. He didn't want the responsibilities of a son and instead he ended up as a slave. When he hit rock bottom, he went back, humbled to all the things he'd left, you know, family, his country, his people, his faith. And instead of rejecting him, they celebrated that one of their sons had come home. And Nietzsche discovered Dostoevsky's books in 1887. He immediately recognized what he'd found, you know, give Nietzsche credit for that. As much as he resisted Dostoevsky in many ways, he recognized that he had found something important, you know, a lost brother he told his friend. He found a man at war with all the demons that he himself had been fighting. Years before Nietzsche had written that God is dead, Dostoevsky's characters uttered those words and recognized the same danger and reached the same conclusions that Nietzsche did about it. The brother is Karamazov. One of the brothers in that story, Ivan is an atheist and a humanist who page after page basically preaches Nietzsche's uberments to whoever's around, especially his younger brother, this priest, Aliyah Sheff, whom Ivan takes a great deal of delight in tormenting. Ivan says, "We only need to destroy the idea of God and man. As soon as man have all of them denied God, the man God will appear." And so he says, "Take up the task, embrace it, and let us become gods." In Dostoevsky's book Demons, which Nietzsche not only read, but meticulously copied dozens of passages from into his notebooks, the character Kierlov, one of the revolutionaries at the book's center's on, argues that after the annihilation of God, man will become God. He will himself be a God and that other God will not be. He says the new man will conquer pain and fear and will become a God himself. He says, "If God does not exist, then all will is mine and I am obliged to proclaim myself will." The responsibility of man to assume the mantle of Godhood now that the old one was dead, I mean this is one of Nietzsche's overriding ideas. He stated it forcefully in the famous passage in the joy of science that upset his mother so much. "Have you not heard of that madman who little lantern in the bright morning hours ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly? Where is God? Where is God?" As many of those who were present did not believe in God and they were just standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. [BLANK_AUDIO] lost, asked one, did he lose his way like a child asked another? Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Has he emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced him with his eyes. "Where is God?" he cried. "I will tell you. We have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How did we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchain the earth from its sun? Whether is it moving now? Whether are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually, black backward, sideward, forward in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not strained as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is night not continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the grave diggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? For God's too decompose, God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned as blood to death under our knives? Who will wipe this blood off of us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves with? What festivals of atonement? What sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed, and whoever is born after us for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto. And so to Nietzsche, the death of God was fraught with danger, leaving us unmoored without a point of reference, and his solution was that we must become our own points of reference, from our own gods. This is what the ubermensch is. When Zarathustra comes down to teach the ubermensch, the first thing that happens is he, there's a sort of prolog where he meets a saint in the forest. After their discussion, Zarathustra leaves amazed that the saint seems not to have gotten word that his god has died, and that's the very beginning of Nietzsche's most important book, before he preaches his first sermon. This is the impetus for Zarathustra's having come down to teach the ubermensch. That's how central this is to Nietzsche's approach. Zarathustra says that the ubermensch would be again as different from present day man as man is from the ape. And Dustyewski's Kierilov says that the history of man is divided into two halves, from the gorilla to the annihilation of god, and from the annihilation of god, quote, to the transformation of earth and man when man will be god. In the months after Nietzsche read demons, he wrote in letters that his work, his own work, now this is Nietzsche writing in his own letters right after reading Kierilov say those words, that his own work quote, "will split the history of humankind into two halves, and that I am powerful enough to break the history of mankind in two." One of the passages that Nietzsche copied into his notebook was Kierilov's account of an ecstatic vision where he says he experienced the presence of eternal harmony perfectly attained. One of these letters was written less than a month before Nietzsche went insane. Both Nietzsche and Dustyewski put these ideas, the death of god that is, into the mouths of madmen, which is very interesting. But the tension between them is kind of illustrated by the different way that they each related to madness. Lu Salome wrote of the central place of both dreams and madness in Nietzsche's thought, and yet she says, "the tranquil dream is insufficient for that quest. What is needed, she's describing Nietzsche's thought. What is needed is a much more real, effective, and even more terrible experiencing, namely through orgyastic, dyonician conditions and the chaos of frenzied passions. Yes, madness itself is a means of sinking back down into the crowd of entwined feelings and imaginings. This seemed for Nietzsche at the last road into the primal depths embedded within us." Nietzsche himself, in his book Dawn, written the year of Dustyewski's death, wrote, "An outburst of passion and in the fantasizing of dreams and insanity, there a man rediscoveres his own and mankind's prehistory." In Thussburg's Arthustra, there's the recurring line, "Thus he preached madness. Thus he preached madness." In Zarathustra's first speech, he says that, "Any man who wishes to be free must go voluntarily into a madhouse." In the joyous science, the same book where his madman announces the death of God, he says that all select spirits and explorers of truth above all must learn to take a veritable delight in madness. In another passage from Dawn, he writes, "All superior men, who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality into frame new laws had if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad." I don't know if you've ever spent long periods of time by yourself, you know, really by yourself. Maybe if you were sick at home by yourself for like a week or two or something, you know, things can get weird, it is my point. You spend some time by yourself and things can get weird. Even if you meet others, you know, the grocery check out, the waiter who takes your order, these kind of mechanical interactions don't ground you in the way that personal interactions do. Your real world interactions don't leave any lasting impression so that what happens is that whatever is happening in your head is much more immediate and visceral and can come to seem as real or more real in a way than the motions that you're going through when you leave your apartment or something. And especially if you don't discipline yourself with a strict routine, you can start to lose track of time because there's no real time up in your headspace. You know, day and night and days and weeks start to lose their distinction. And I think of Nietzsche in this late period in his last year, last months before his end to that isolation and he was very isolated, add the fact that he was daily and constant excruciating physical and psychological anguish. It'll warp your sense of reality a little bit, has the effect of detaching you even more from your surroundings. By now, he had been on heavy doses of opium and various sedatives for many years. Nietzsche's later writings, and the later you get the more it's like this take on, the grandiose tone of a man writing in a reverie, a man whose thoughts had become his life and therefore he could travel further into them than people who were forced to take breaks for other things. Falling this deeply into your thoughts is kind of another definition of madness, especially when you can't swim your way back out. Well, in Dostoevsky's novels, he puts Nietzsche's ideas, again without ever having read Nietzsche, he puts his ideas into the mouths of madmen as well, only he understands madness very differently. He doesn't see the insane as Nietzsche often writes, as conduits for the divine, by being able to separate and break themselves off from this corrupt society, they're able to speak more truly or more purely, which is kind of how Nietzsche describes it. Dostoevsky doesn't see it that way. He has a much more conventional view and one that is based more on personal experience. I have an idea that Dostoevsky's different understanding of madness was partly the result of his experience with gambling addiction. It's interesting to recall the letter that Dostoevsky wrote about his full proof method that he had discovered for successful gambling. I read it earlier, namely, to achieve a state of complete self-mastery. Well, it becomes clear in other writings of his that he's not only talking about being disciplined in the Betzumek or something, not getting excited at the table. He means it in a much more fundamental way, that if you are completely grounded and centered and are not subject to the corrupting influences from the outside, then your will becomes almost purified in such a way that reality tends to bend itself to satisfy it. This is very close to the self-mastery and self-possession Nietzsche is describing with the uberment. But Dostoevsky knew from hard experience that self-mastery of that kind was usually probably always just an illusion. In his final novel, the brother's Karamazov, Ivan, the atheist, just one of the most fascinating of all Dostoevsky's characters, the rationalist, atheist brother, he ends the novel or near the end of the novel in a room with the devil. refusing to believe that the devil's real, but having a conversation with him and also not wanting to accept that if the devil's not real here, then it means he's insane for sitting around and arguing with him and going through this scene. It's a fascinating scene. The devil's mocking Ivonne's pretensions at wisdom and Ivonne's just covering his ears and shouting at him that he's not real. In the end, Ivonne goes insane and commits suicide. The character Kira-Lav from demons who Nietzsche recognized as the closest to his ideal, in a sense, was a nihilist as well as an atheist and had determined to prove out his philosophy in the manner of George Price by committing suicide. Kira-Lav says, "God is the fear of the pain of death. Whoever conquers pain and fear will himself become God." And he intends to prove it. He's indifferent to the time or the method of suicide, however, so he decides to leave the decision up to the revolutionary group that he's a part of. He's going to kill himself in a manner and at a time when the group has an opportunity to put it to use in some way. Now, Kira-Lav believes that his suicide is the very act that will crack history in two and inaugurate the era of the man God. Just as Nietzsche believed his work was the act, the publication of his work was the act that would do that in real history. Now, Kira-Lav, of course, is simply suicidal. And his ideology is an elaborate justification for his desire to die. It's a very similar vibe in Mitchell Heisman's suicide note. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but the guy named Mitchell Heisman, this is in our modern day, considered Nietzsche's philosophical guide. And he spent five years working on a 2,000-page exposition of his nihilist philosophy. I've read most of it, extraordinary intelligence, extremely well read guy. And when he was finished, after five years of working on this document, he can read it online, look up Mitchell Heisman's suicide note. When he finished it on Yam Kapoor of 2010, Heisman, who is Jewish, put on an all-white suit and went to Memorial Church at Harvard University and shot himself in the head on the front steps in front of a bunch of people. And of course, there's something of a contradiction built into this act, right? If nothing matters, why take so much time to write about it? Why go through all the pageantry of a public suicide to bring attention to your note? This comes up in notes from the underground, actually. And Heisman has the same answer, basically, that the underground man does, which is that, yes, he does want attention for his death and for his note. And that granted certainly seems like he must believe that it matters. But his desire is just the result of biological drives and other impulses that are explainable in terms of genetics and biochemistry and so forth. And so really, it doesn't matter. Like the paranoid of the conspiracy theorist, the nihilist has an answer for everything and a good answer. Because it really is a complete outlook that can incorporate just about anything you feed into it. But for all the interesting content in his letter and it is interesting, he's a very smart guy. Most of it has nothing to do with his reasons for suicide and the parts at the end that deal with it directly tell you more than the other 1900 pages about what's going on. He says that he can't feel anything. He can't care about the things that other people care about and increasingly can't care about anything. He says that this is because of his discovery of the mechanical impulse driven nature of life. But those are just words. To me, it just sounds depressed. People can get trapped in these webs of words and work themselves into a very dark place. There's a counter argument made not by Nietzsche, but by Dostoevsky's underground man, who near the end of describing the catastrophe of his life tells the readers that if they're honest, they all recognize him in themselves, but that he simply dares to go all the way down a dark road that frightens them halfway and forces them to turn back. Maybe that would be an interesting variation on the parable of the prodigal son. If there were two of them traveling together, living it up and ending by eating together with the pigs. When one of the two has this awakening and says, "What are we doing? We've been foolish. We've been arrogant. Why did we think we knew better than our fathers and our big brother than everyone we grew up with? Enough of this. Let's go home." And the other one pulls his head out of the pig trough, and he's covered with slop and sores and he stinks. He has flies all over his face that he doesn't even notice anymore, but underneath all the filth is an unmistakable look of contempt for his friend, who's been broken by his conditions and now wants to go running home. And his humbled friend says, "Don't you understand what will happen if we continue on this way? And for what? Our families will welcome us home. They'll be overjoyed that we come back." And the other says, "I know perfectly well where my path leads, and I know they'll throw a feast on my return. Now go home to your daddy, coward." Let's see, the thing is, the thing is humans all break. You can call him a coward all you want, but humans all break. That's what it means to be human. The difference between humans and gods is that gods can break humans. The meaning of all our various hell myths, whether we mean, you know, actual hell or the misery of Job or the wasteland of the prodigal son, you know, the eagle plucking out the liver of Prometheus or Cisophus with his rock, is that if you go up against final things, you will lose. In his autobiography, Nietzsche wrote, "I attack only causes that are victorious. I attack only causes against which I cannot expect to find allies. I attack only causes against which I shall stand alone." Those are various waves of saying that he only chooses battles he can't win, which has a certain chivalrous mystique to it. You know, if you know you're fighting a lost cause from the beginning, but to take that attitude after a string of defeats in the last months of his sane life, to decide to stay in the fields with the pigs even after you've seen your future, now you're acting out of spite, which is the final human emotion, by the way. The one that remains after all the others, hope, love, sadness, and all the secondary emotions when it's all gone, when it's all numb, to the very, very end, humans still have the capacity for spite. A great deal of the worst harm we do to ourselves, the most unexplainable harm we do to ourselves and others comes from that fact. Well, more than any other of Dostoevsky's books, it was crime and punishment that affected Nietzsche. He called it Dostoevsky's main work, and Fahrenheit, maybe it is, but in any case, brothers K hadn't been translated yet, so Nietzsche didn't read that, which is a shame. In crime and punishment, Dostoevsky refers to madness more than in any of his other books. And by now, Nietzsche was pretty used to encountering himself in one form or another in Dostoevsky's books, so he probably wasn't surprised to learn that the main character, Raskolnikov, just like Nietzsche, had lost his father at a young age, and that his family, like Nietzsche's, consists of a mother and a younger sister, as well as a brother who died when he was a baby, again, like Nietzsche, down to the teeth. I think the best way to describe Raskolnikov, the protagonist of crime and punishment, would be that he is what you get when the underground man, the protagonist from notes of the underground, reads Nietzsche. Raskolnikov extolls the ubermanche almost point for point, with all the enthusiasm of a freshman in his first philosophy course. There are two kinds of people in the world, the great majority, the ordinary people who exist to reproduce their kind, populate the earth, and do the work of the world, and then the few extra-ordinary people who see deeper and see farther, and who don't reproduce what's come before but stand outside of history and create new ideas and create new values. The extraordinary ones, therefore, cannot be and are not subject to social conventions or the ordinary morality that governs the lives of the masses. They can't. They couldn't be creative if they were. Such people are the source of their own morality. Their will is the law to which they are subject. I mean, he even frequently refers to Napoleon as an example of his philosophy, which was one of Nietzsche's go-to examples for the ubermanche type. Napoleon famously saw himself as an agent of history and fate, which meant that in one sense he had no will of his own, but in another sense that his will had become synonymous with history and with fate, which operated above and themselves created the laws which govern the day-to-day normal lives of men. And so, Raskolnikov is spouting the ubermanch idea in a very specific way. And so, Raskolnikov determines to commit a murder. He's going to prove his intellectual and moral liberty from the conventions of society by breaking society's most serious prohibition. Why? Because an underground personality like Raskolnikov, who becomes possessed with this ubermanch idea, is going to have to prove it to himself. A true ubermanch wouldn't have to prove anything, presumably, but there you have it. His act is meant to show that society's laws don't matter. Not that he has no laws of his own, you know, that spring from his own will. And so, he doesn't want to just kill a random innocent person. He decides to kill an evil pawnbroker, this old woman, this evil woman. And he decides to rob her while he's at it, but the robber is really kind of an afterthought. You know, like, if you're going to be doing this, you might as well just make it worth your evening. And so, just take the money, but the money's not the point. They make that very clear. The most famous scene in crime and punishment is one of the most harrowing scenes in all literature. And we're nearing the end now. Raskolnikov is not yet committed his murder. He has fallen into a feverish daytime sleep and he's dreaming. As the dream begins, he and his father, who remember his dead, passed by the grave of his baby brother. They pause and Raskolnikov, who in this dream is like seven years old. This is him as a boy, crosses himself and kisses his baby brother's grave stone. And then he and his father is holding his father's hand. A little seven-year-old Raskolnikov and his father are walking into town. And the dream picks up there. Quote. And now he dreamt that he was walking with his father past the tavern on the way to the graveyard. He was holding his father's hand and looking with dread at the tavern. The peculiar circumstance attracted his attention. There seemed to be some kind of festivity going on. There were crowds of galeed dressed townspeople, peasant women, their husbands, and riffraff of all sorts, all singing and all more or less drunk. Near the entrance of the tavern stood a cart, but a strange cart. It was one of those big carts, usually drawn by heavy cart horses, and laden with casks of wine or other heavy goods. He always liked looking at the great cart horses, with their long mains, thick legs, and slow, even pace, drawing along a perfect mountain with no appearance of effort, as though it were easier going with a load than without it. But now, strange to say, in the shafts of such a cart, he saw a little thin, sorrow-beast, a little mare, one of those peasant's nags, which he had often seen straining under their utmost, under a heavy load of wood or hay, especially when the wheels were stuck in the mud or in a rut. And the peasants would beat them so cruelly, sometimes even about the nose and eyes, and he felt so sorry, so sorry for them, that he almost cried, and his mother always used to take him away from the window. All of a sudden there was a great uproar of shouting, singing in the "Balalaika." And from the tavern, a number of big and very drunken peasants came out, wearing red and blue shirts and coats thrown over their shoulders. "Get in, get in!" shouted one of them, a young, thick-naked peasant, with a fleshy face, red as a carrot. "I'll take you all, get in!" But at once there was an outbreak of laughter and exclamations from the crowd. "Take us all, with a beast like that!" "Why, Mikoka, are you crazy to put a nag like that in such a cart?" And this mare is 20, if she is a day, mates. "Get in, get in, I'll take you all," Mikoka shouted again, leaping first into the cart, seizing the reins and standing straight up in front. "The bay has gone with the mat-v," he shouted from the cart. "And this brute, mates, is just breaking my heart. I feel as if I could kill her. She's just eating her head off. Get in, I tell you, get in, I'll make her gallop, oh, she'll gallop, alright?" And he picked up the whip, preparing himself with relish to flog the little mare. "Get in, come along, the crowd laughed. Do you hear? She'll gallop. Gallop, indeed. She's not had a gallop in her for the last ten years. Oh, she'll jog along. Don't you mind her, mates? Bring a whip, each of you. Get a whip, get ready. Alright, give it to her." They all clambered into Mikoka's cart, laughing and making jokes. Six men got in and there was still room for more. They hauled in a fat, rosy-cheeked woman. She was dressed in red cotton in a painted, beaded headdress and thick leather shoes. She was cracking nuts and laughing. The crowd round them was laughing too, and indeed, how could they help laughing? The wretched nag was to drag all that cart load of them at a gallop. Two young fellows in the cart were just getting whips ready to help Mikoka. With the cry of "Now!" the mare tugged with all her might, but far from galloping could scarcely move forward. She struggled with her legs, gasping and shrieking from the blows of the three whips which were showered upon her like hail. The laughter in the cart and in the crowd was redoubled, but Mikoka flew into a rage and furiously thrashed the mare, as though he suppose she really could gallop. "Let me get in, too, mates!" shouted a young man and the crowd whose appetite was aroused. "Get in! All! Get in!" cried Mikoka. "She will draw you all! I'll beater to death!" And he thrashed and thrashed at the mare beside himself with fury. "Father! Father!" he cried. "Father, what are they doing? Father, why are they beating that poor horse?" "Come along! Come along!" said his father. "They're drunken and foolish, and they're in fun. Come away, don't look." And he tried to draw a skull macaw away, but he tore himself away from his hand and beside himself with horror ran to the horse. The poor beast was in a bad way. She was gasping, standing still, then tugging again and almost failing. "Beater to death!" cried Mikoka. "It's come to that. I'll do for her." "What are you about? Are you a Christian you devil?" shouted an old man in the crowd. "Did anyone ever see the like? A wretched nag like that pulling such a cart load," said another. "You'll kill her!" shouted the third. "Don't meddle! It's my property! I'll do what I choose. Get in! More of you! Get in! All of you! I will have her go at a gallop!" All it once laughed her broke into a roar and covered everything. The mare, roused by the shower of blows, began feebly kicking. Even the old man could not help smiling. To think of a wretched little beast like that trying to kick. Two lads in the crowd snatched up whips and ran to the mare to beat her about the ribs. One ran each side. "Hitter in the face! In the eyes! In the eyes!" cried Mikoka. "Give us a song, mates!" shouted someone in the cart and everyone in the cart joined and a riotous song jingling, a tambourine and whistling. The woman went on cracking nuts and laughing. He ran beside the mare, ran in front of her, saw her being whipped across the eyes, right in the eyes. He was crying. He felt choking. His tears were streaming. One of the men gave him a cut with the whip across the face. He did not feel it. Bringing his hands and screaming, he rushed up to the grey-headed old man with the grey beard who was shaking his head and disapproval. One woman seized him by the hand and would have taken him away, but he tore himself from her and ran back to the mare. She was almost at the last gas, but began kicking once more. "I'll teach you to kick!" Mikoka shouted ferociously. He threw down the whip, bent forward and picked up from the bottom of the cart, a long, thick shaft. He took hold of one end with both hands and with an effort brandished it over the mare. He'll crush her, was shouted round him. He'll kill her. "It's my property!" shouted Mikoka and brought down the shaft with a heavy swinging blow. There was a sound of a heavy thud. "Thrash her! Thrash her! Why have you stopped?" shouted voices in the crowd. And Mikoka swung the shaft a second time, and it fell a second time on the spine of the luckless mare. She sank back on her haunches, but lurched forward and tugged forward with all her force, tugged first on one side and then on the other trying to move the cart, but the six whips were attacking her in all directions. And the shaft was raised again and fell upon her a third time and a fourth, with a heavy measured blows. Mikoka was in a fury that he could not kill her at one blow. She's a tough one, was shouted in the crowd. She'll fall in a minute, in a minute, mates. There will soon be an end of her, said an admiring spectator in the crowd. "Fetch an axe to her! Finish her off!" said a third. "I'll show you! Stand off!" Mikoka screamed frantically as he threw down the shaft, stopped down, stooped down in the cart and picked up an iron crowbar. "Look out!" he shouted, and with all his might dealt a stunning blow at the poor mare. The blow fell, the mare staggered, sank back, tried to pull up, but the bar fell again with a swinging blow on her back and she fell on the ground like a log. "Finish her off!" shouted Mikoka, and he leap beside himself. Out of the cart. Several young men also flushed with drinks, seized anything they could come across, whips, sticks, poles, and ran to the dying mare. Mikoka stood on one side and began and dealing random blows with the crowbar. The mayor stretched out. her head, drew a long breath, and died. "You butchered her," someone shouted in the crowd. "Why wouldn't she gallop then? My property," shouted McCulchukah, with bloodshot eyes, brandishing the barn his hands. He stood as though regretting that he had nothing more to beat. No mistake about it. Your no-Christian, many voices in the crowd were shouting. But the poor boy beside himself made his way screaming through the crowd to the sorrel nag and put his arms around her bleeding dead head and kissed it, kissed the eyes and kissed the lips. Then he jumped up and flew in a frenzy with his little fists out at McCulchukah, and at that instant, his father, who had been running after him, snatched him up and carried him out of the crowd. "Come along, come. Let us go home," he said to him. "Father, why did they kill the poor horse?" He sobbed but his voice broke and the words came in shrieks from his panting chest. "They're drunk. They're brutal. It's not our business," said his father. He put his arms around his father, but he felt choked. Choked. He tried to draw a breath to cry out, and he woke up. End quote. "There's a line from William Blake that goes, a horse misused upon the road calls to heaven for human blood. When Raskolnikov wakes up, he imagines the murder he's been planning. He just had this violent dream, and now he's thinking about the violence that he's been planning to carry through. He's still wrestling over whether to carry it through. So the violence of his dream makes him realize that he could never do it, that he would never have done it. That the obsession had just been a fantasy and intellectual exercise, and he really renounces it. For the text says that he felt the weight of it, lift from his shoulders. He'd been sleeping during the day when he was dreaming just now, and so Raskolnikov, despite feeling sick and exhausted, went for a walk. He's wandering along the never-river, relieved that having put this evil thought behind him once and for all. He was evening, and he crossed a bridge, and there he stares into the glowing red sun, setting in the glowing sky. And to describe Raskolnikov, the word Dostoevsky chooses to use his pale. And then, quote, "Later on, when he recalled that time and all that happened to him during those days, minute by minute, point by point, he was superstitiously impressed by one circumstance, which always seemed to him afterwards, the predest-interning point of his fate." He could never understand and explain to himself why, when he was tired and worn out, when it would have been more convenient for him to go home by the shortest and most direct way, he had returned by the hay market, where he had no need to go. He was obviously and quite unnecessarily out of his way. It is true that it had happened to him dozens of times to return home without noticing what streets he passed through, but why? He was asking himself, why had such an important, such a decisive, and at the same time such an absolutely chance meeting happened in the hay market, where he moreover had no reason to go, at the very hour, the very minute of his life, when he was just in the very mood and in the very circumstances in which that meeting was able to exert the gravest and most decisive influence on his whole destiny. So there in the hay market, he happens to see the sister of the old pawnbroker that he had just given up his plan to kill. He overhears her in conversation with some people and learns that she's going to be out of the apartment that she shares with her sister the following evening, meaning that the pawnbroker will be left all alone. When Reskondlokov heard that, a shiver ran down his spine. He went home and "he went in like a man condemned to death. He thought of nothing and was incapable of thinking, but he felt suddenly in his whole being that he had no more freedom of thought, no will, and that everything was suddenly and irrevocably decided." And then, why had he happened to hear such a discussion and such ideas at the very moment when his own brain was just conceiving at the same ideas? The coincidence always seemed strange to him, as though there had really been in it something preordained. The writer Leonard Sachs writes that "The lesson Nietzsche took from Dostoevsky was that criminals represent strong minds under sickness. The lesson could have been taken from several of Dostoevsky's characters, but especially Reskondlokov, but perhaps Nietzsche would have applied that description to no one more than himself. During this time, he reported having recurring nightmares about horses. They were frequent and frightening enough that he was writing to other people about them. In one letter he wrote, "Winter landscape, an old coachman with an expression of the most brutal cynicism, harder than the surrounding winter, urinates on his horse. The horse, poor, ravaged creature, looks around, thankful, very thankful." Nietzsche, a man near his end now, who had let himself be photographed as a horse under a yoke being whipped, wrote that he woke up from that dream in tears. Reskondlokov's doom, Nietzsche would say, his failure, was not that he murdered, but that he lacked the strength to bear the weight of it, or simply to throw it off. Before he ever committed the act, he became feverish and pale whenever he thought of it, he became pale and delirious whenever he remembered what he had done. Dostoevsky describes Reskondlokov as pale, well over a dozen times in the book. This is a section from Nietzsche's book, "Dustsbok Zarathustra" again written long before he ever discovered Dostoevsky, and the section is called "The Pale Criminal." But thought of it is one thing, the deed is another, and the image of the deed still another. The wheel of causality does not roll between them. An image made this pale man pale. He was equal to his deed when he did it, but he could not bear its image after it was done. Now he always saw himself as the doer of one deed. Madness, I call this. The exception now became the essence for him. A chalk streak stops a hen. The stroke that he himself struck stopped his poor reason. Madness after the deed I call this. Listen, O judges, there is yet another madness, and that comes before the deed. Alas, you have not yet crept deep enough into this soul, thus speaks the red judge. Why did this criminal murder? He wanted to rob. But I say unto you, his soul wanted blood, not robbery. He thirsted after the bliss of the knife. His poor reason, however, did not comprehend this madness, and so persuaded him, what matters blood, it asked, don't you at least want to commit robbery with it, or to take revenge? And so he listened to his poor reason. It speech lay upon him like lead, so he robbed when he murdered. He did not want to be ashamed of his madness. And now the lead of his guilt lies upon him, and again, his poor reason is so stiff, so paralyzed, so heavy. If only he could shake his head, then the burden would roll off, but who could shake his head? What is this man? A heap of diseases which, through his spirit, reach out into the world. There they want to catch their prey. End quote. That passage so starkly and forcibly reminds us of Raskolnikov and crime and punishment that many people over the years, just sort of without checking, just assumed that Nietzsche must have written it based on crime and punishment. The novelist Thomas Mann wrote that, and then many people must have read Thomas Mann saying it, and they repeated it. And so it was just an assumption for a long time, but in fact, we know that Nietzsche wrote that years before he had ever heard of Dusty Evsky. One of the great insights of crime and punishment is that whatever one thinks of the ubermensch as an idea, the people most likely to glom onto it are those who are least similar to what it describes, and very often the kind of people who it's going to do a lot of damage with. He's kind of like the old saying that the problem of government is that the people who would like to be rulers are exactly the kind of people you don't want in charge. Well the person who reads about the ubermensch, the superman who has nothing to learn from this bland world of conformist normies around him, and is sufficient in himself as a source of morality and truth and creativity. What kind of person in general is going to think, "Yeah, totally, this describes me." It's going to be someone who feels special, different, unique when all the circumstances of his life seem to be proof that he is none of those things. You offer somebody like that an idea that makes that the rest of the world's fault for not understanding them and all their depth and complexity, rather than their own fault, for being unable to adapt themselves to the only world that actually exists, and you're going to get some takers. In its essence, it is an ideological justification for and defense of the narcissistic personality. By the summer and fall of 1888, Nietzsche's behavior is becoming erratic. His landlord reports hearing him talking to himself, loudly in his room. One time he was caught shredding currency and throwing it in his waste paper basket, and he's demanding that the paintings in his room be removed in order to make it more resemble a temple, a home for a God. He told people in person that he had arrived to take the place of God now that the old one had gone away. He was approaching strangers on the street and he'd slap him on the back and ask them what they think of this creation of his. In Nietzsche's last stretch of sanity in late 1888, early 1889, he wrote and spoke very frequently of coincidences that he had been experiencing, and of the feeling that fate was now drawing him on. To a friend, he wrote that there's no longer any element of chance in my life. To another, he wrote, nothing happens by chance anymore. In the closing words of his autobiography, Ekihoma, which he wrote in his last 10 weeks or so of sanity, he wrote that the formula for human greatness was to learn to love one's fate. Nine days after he wrote, nothing happens by chance. Nietzsche was out walking the streets of Turin, Italy when the friend with whom he'd been staying was called to retrieve him. He found Nietzsche on the ground, surrounded by a gawking crowd and some policeman and he was weeping with his arms thrown around the neck of a horse. It's his friend that we have these details from. A policeman told his friend that Nietzsche had seen a man beating this horse and so Nietzsche ran and threw his arms around the horse to protect it from further blows and then collapsed hysterical and weeping. And Nietzsche went insane that day. Friedrich Nietzsche never came back. The next day after he'd been brought back and put to bed, he wrote a note saying, "Sing me a new song, the world is transfigured and all the heavens are full of joy." And he signed it, the crucified. A few days later, perhaps for the first and only time, I think as far as we know, he wrote a letter to Cosm of Agner to express his love for her. And it read, "Ariadne, I love you, Dionysus." He signed all the letters he wrote and notes that he wrote from that time on as either the crucified or Dionysus. Having associated madness with the death of God in his writings, he identified himself now as gods who had been killed after he himself went mad. At times, he would fall into spells where he would simply repeat the same phrases over and over. I am dead because I am stupid. I am stupid because I am dead. He would say, "I have a fine feeling for things. I have a fine feeling for things." Or very often, "I do not like horses." If Dusty Ebsky's arc is that of Job or the prodigal son, reduced to nothing, humbled, returning with his head bowed to submit to the will of the Father and being welcomed home and celebrated, then maybe Nietzsche's is that of Prometheus, who has chained to a rock for defying Zeus and an eagle pecked out and ate his liver every day, only for it to grow back again every night. And others came to Prometheus and asked him to just repent, just say you're sorry, we've talked to Zeus, we assure you all you gotta do is make a show of humility and Zeus will let you go. And Prometheus spat on the ground and said, "I have contempt for his punishment, "to whom to do as he likes." Which sounds heroic, but I've never had my liver pecked out by an eagle. It may be that everything great about Nietzsche was whispered into his ear by the same demons that drove him mad. Nietzsche's greatness is not that he was right about everything or even the most important things, but that he paid his bill down to the very last penny for being wrong. And that's what made him great. Even while he still lived, people heard about this genius who had been driven mad in Turin, Italy, and for the first time, his work began to acquire a large audience. And I suppose the rest, as they say, is history. (guitar music) ♪ And I feel so it's been all alone ♪ ♪ And how did I wonder if it's a far from my own ♪ ♪ He starts to run through me, stolen my face ♪ ♪ Please don't build my father ♪ ♪ But I fall in the breeze ♪ ♪ To road to travel ♪ ♪ And to chose the wrong one ♪ ♪ Hidden down the lost highway ♪ ♪ With my back to the sun ♪ ♪ Something that holds me ♪ ♪ In a cold, dark embrace ♪ ♪ Please don't build my father ♪ ♪ But I fall in the breeze ♪ ♪ To live here forever ♪ ♪ To live here to die ♪ ♪ But I ask for the answers ♪ ♪ You know I get no reply ♪ ♪ I want it on the bottom ♪ ♪ But it's in the grave ♪ ♪ Please don't build my father ♪ ♪ But I fall in the breeze ♪ [BLANK_AUDIO]