(no subject)
Nietzsche=s Illnesses, The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 116-17
Stephan Zweig:
No devilish torture is lacking in this dreadful pandemonium of sickness: headaches, deafening, hammering headaches, which knock out the reeling Nietzsche for days and prostrate him on sofa and bed, stomach cramps with bloody vomiting, migraines, fevers, lack of appetite, weariness, hemorrhoids, constipation, chills, night sweat--a gruesome circle.
In addition, there are his 'three-quarters blind eyes,' which, at the least exertion, begin immediately to swell and fill with tears and grant the intellectual worker only 'an hour and a half of vision a day.'
But Nietzsche despises this hygiene of his body and works at his desk for ten hours, and for this excess his overheated brain takes revenge with raging headaches and a nervous overcharge; at night, when the body has long become weary, it does not permit itself to be turned off suddenly, but continues to burrow in visions and ideas until it is forcibly knocked out by opiates.
But ever greater quantities are needed (in two months Nietzsche uses up fifty grams of chloral hydrate to purchase this handful of sleep); then the stomach refuses to pay so high a price and rebels.
And now--vicious circle--spasmodic vomiting, new headaches which require new medicines, an inexorable, insatiable, passionate conflict of the infuriated organs, which throw the thorny ball of suffering to each other as in a mad game.
Never a point of rest in this up and down, never an even stretch of contentment or a short month full of comfort and self-forgetfulness.
~~~
even though I sort of hate him, you gotta admit that's pretty fucking metal.
Stephan Zweig:
No devilish torture is lacking in this dreadful pandemonium of sickness: headaches, deafening, hammering headaches, which knock out the reeling Nietzsche for days and prostrate him on sofa and bed, stomach cramps with bloody vomiting, migraines, fevers, lack of appetite, weariness, hemorrhoids, constipation, chills, night sweat--a gruesome circle.
In addition, there are his 'three-quarters blind eyes,' which, at the least exertion, begin immediately to swell and fill with tears and grant the intellectual worker only 'an hour and a half of vision a day.'
But Nietzsche despises this hygiene of his body and works at his desk for ten hours, and for this excess his overheated brain takes revenge with raging headaches and a nervous overcharge; at night, when the body has long become weary, it does not permit itself to be turned off suddenly, but continues to burrow in visions and ideas until it is forcibly knocked out by opiates.
But ever greater quantities are needed (in two months Nietzsche uses up fifty grams of chloral hydrate to purchase this handful of sleep); then the stomach refuses to pay so high a price and rebels.
And now--vicious circle--spasmodic vomiting, new headaches which require new medicines, an inexorable, insatiable, passionate conflict of the infuriated organs, which throw the thorny ball of suffering to each other as in a mad game.
Never a point of rest in this up and down, never an even stretch of contentment or a short month full of comfort and self-forgetfulness.
~~~
even though I sort of hate him, you gotta admit that's pretty fucking metal.