فصل 20

CHAPTER 20

THE FOLLOWING MORNING Breuer entered Nietzsche’s room still wearing his fur-lined greatcoat and holding a black top hat. “Friedrich, look out the window! That shy orange globe low in the sky—do you recognize it? Our Viennese sun has finally made an appearance. Shall we celebrate by taking a walk today? We both say we think best while walking.” Nietzsche bounced up from his desk as though he had springs on his feet. Breuer had never seen him move so quickly. “Nothing would please me more. The nurses haven’t permitted me to set foot outdoors for three days. Where can we walk? Have we sufficient time to escape the cobblestones?” “Here’s my plan. I visit my parents’ grave on the Sabbath, once a month. Come with me today—the cemetery is less than an hour’s ride. I’ll make a short stop, just enough time to lay some flowers, and from there we’ll go on to the Simmeringer Haide for an hour’s walk in the forest and meadow. We’ll be back in time for dinner. On the Sabbath, I schedule no appointments until afternoon.” Breuer waited while Nietzsche dressed. He often said that though he liked cold weather, it did not like him—and so, to protect himself from migraine, he donned two heavy sweaters and twisted a five-foot wool scarf several times around his neck before struggling into his overcoat. Putting on a green eyeshade to protect his eyes from the light, he topped it with a green Bavarian felt hat.

During the ride, Nietzsche inquired about the stack of clinical charts, medical texts, and journals crammed in the door pockets and scattered over the empty seats. Breuer explained that his fiacre was his second office.

“There are days that I spend more time riding in here than in the Backerstrasse office. Some time ago, a young medical student, Sigmund Freud, wished to obtain a first-hand view of the everyday life of the physician and asked to accompany me for an entire day. He was aghast at the number of hours I spent in this fiacre and resolved, then and there, to pursue a research career rather than a clinical one.” In the fiacre, they circled the southern part of the city on the Ringstrasse, crossed the Wien River on the Schwarzenberg Bridge, passed the summer palace and, following the Renweg and then the Simmering Hauptstrasse, soon arrived at the City of Vienna Central Cemetery. Entering the third large gate, the Jewish division of the cemetery, Fischmann, who had been driving Breuer to his parents’ grave for a decade, unerringly traversed a maze of small paths, some barely wide enough for the fiacre to pass, and stopped before the large mausoleum of the Rothschild family. As Breuer and Nietzsche alighted, Fischmann handed Breuer a large bouquet of flowers that had been stored beneath his seat. The two men walked silently along a dirt path through rows of monuments. Some simply bore a name and death date; others had a brief statement of remembrance; others were adorned with a Star of David or with a relief of hands with outstretched fingers to denote the dead of the Cohen, the holiest tribe.

Breuer gestured toward the bouquets of fresh-cut flowers that lay before many graves. “In this land of the dead, these are the dead, and those”—he pointed to an old untended and abandoned section of the cemetery—“those are the truly dead. No one now tends their graves because no one living has ever known them. They know what it means to be dead.” Reaching his destination, Breuer stood before a large family plot encircled by a thin carved stone rail. Within lay two headstones: a small upright one reading, “Adolf Breuer 1844-1874”; and a large, flat, gray marble slab on which had been carved two inscriptions: LEOPOLD BREUER 1791–1872

Beloved Teacher and Father

Not Forgotten by His Sons

BERTHA BREUER 1818–1845

Beloved Mother and Wife

Died in the Blossom of Youth and Beauty

Breuer picked up the small stone vase sitting on the marble slab, emptied last month’s dried blossoms, and gently inserted the flowers he had brought, flouncing them into fullness. After placing a small, smooth pebble on both his parents’ slab and his brother’s headstone, he stood in silence, head bowed.

Nietzsche, respecting Breuer’s need for solitude, wandered down a path lined with granite and marble tombstones. Soon he entered the neighborhood of the wealthy Viennese Jews—Goldschmidts, Gomperzes, Altmanns, Wertheimers—who, in death as in life, sought assimilation into Christian Viennese society. Large mausoleums housing entire families, their entrances barricaded by heavy wrought-iron grills adorned with clinging iron vines, were guarded by elaborate funerary statues. Farther down the path were massive headstones upon which stood interdenominational angels, their outstretched stony arms pleading, Nietzsche imagined, for attention and remembrance.

Ten minutes later, Breuer caught up with him. “It was easy to find you, Friedrich. I heard you humming.”

“I amuse myself by composing doggerel as I stroll. Listen,” he said, as Breuer fell into step beside him. “My latest:

Though no stones hear and none can see

Each sobs softly, ‘Remember me. Remember me.’ ”

Then, without waiting for a response from Breuer, he asked, “Who was Adolf, the third Breuer next to your parents?”

“Adolf was my only sibling. He died eight years ago. My mother died, I’m told, as a consequence of his birth. My grandmother moved into our home to raise us, but she died long ago. Now,” Breuer said softly, “they are all gone and I am next in line.” “And the pebbles? I see many tombstones here with pebbles on them.”

“A very old Jewish custom—simply to honor the dead, to signify memory.”

“Signify to whom? Excuse me, Josef, if I cross the line of propriety.”

Breuer reached into his coat to loosen his collar. “No, it’s all right. In fact, you ask my type of iconoclastic question, Friedrich. How strange to squirm in the way I make others squirm! But I have no answer. I leave the pebbles for no one. Not for the sake of social form, for others to see—I have no other family and am the only one who ever visits this grave. Not for superstition or fear. Certainly not for hope of reward hereafter: since childhood, I have believed that life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.” “Life—a spark between two voids. A nice image, Josef. And isn’t it strange how we are so preoccupied with the second void and never think upon the first?”

Breuer nodded appreciatively and, after a few moments, continued, “But the pebbles. You ask, for whom I leave these pebbles? Perhaps my hand is tempted by Pascal’s wager. After all, what’s to be lost? It’s a small pebble, a small effort.” “And a small question, too, Josef. One I asked merely to gain time to ponder a much greater question!”

“Which question?”

“Why you never told me your mother’s name was Bertha!”

Breuer had never expected this question. He turned to look at Nietzsche. “Why should I have? I never thought of it. I never told you that my eldest daughter is also named Bertha. It’s not relevant. As I told you, my mother died when I was three, and I have no memories of her.” “No conscious memories,” said Nietzsche, correcting him. “But most of our memories exist in the subconscious. You’ve no doubt seen Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious? It’s in every bookstore.” Breuer nodded. “I know it well. Our café table group has spent many hours discussing it.”

“There is a real genius behind that book—but it is the publisher, not the author. Hartmann is, at best, a journeyman philosopher who has merely appropriated the thoughts of Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Shelling. But to the publisher, Duncker, I say, ‘Chapeau!’ ”—and Nietzsche flourished his green hat in the air. “There’s a man who knows how to put a book before the nose of every reader in Europe. It’s in its ninth edition! Overbeck tells me that over a hundred thousand copies have been sold! Can you imagine! And I’m grateful if one of my books sells two hundred!” He sighed and replaced his hat on his head.

“But to go back to Hartmann, he discusses two dozen different aspects of the unconscious and leaves no doubt that the greatest part of our memory and mental processes is outside consciousness. I agree, except that he doesn’t go far enough: It’s difficult, I believe, to overestimate the degree to which life—real life—is lived by the unconscious. Consciousness is only the translucent skin covering existence: the trained eye can see through it—to primitive forces, instincts, to the very engine of the will to power.

“In fact, Josef, you alluded to the unconscious yesterday when you imagined entering Bertha’s dreams. How did you put it—that you had gained access to her innermost chamber, that sanctuary in which nothing ever decays? If your image dwells eternally in her mind, then where is it housed during the moments she’s thinking of something else? Obviously there must be a vast reservoir of unconscious memories.” At that moment, they came upon a small group of mourners congregated near a canopy covering an open grave. Four burly cemetery journeymen, using heavy ropes, had lowered the casket; and the mourners, even the frail and elderly, now lined up to drop a small shovelful of soil into the grave. Breuer and Nietzsche walked in silence for several minutes, inhaling the dank, sweet-sour odor of newly turned earth. They came to a fork. Breuer touched Nietzsche’s arm to signal they must take the path to the right.

“In respect to unconscious memories,” Breuer resumed when they could no longer hear the gravel pelting the wooden coffin, “I agree entirely with you. In fact, my hypnotic work with Bertha produced much evidence of their existence. But, Friedrich, what are you suggesting? Surely not that I love Bertha because she and my mother have the same name?” “Don’t you find it remarkable, Josef, that though we’ve talked for many hours about your patient Bertha, it wasn’t till this morning that you told me that was your mother’s name?”

“I haven’t concealed it from you. I’ve simply never connected my mother and Bertha. Even now, it seems strained and far-fetched. To me, Bertha is Bertha Pappenheim. I never think about my mother. No image of her ever enters my mind.” “Yet all your life you place flowers on her grave.”

“On my whole family’s grave!”

Breuer sensed he was being obstinate but was, nonetheless, determined to continue speaking his mind truthfully. He felt a wave of admiration for Nietzsche’s stamina as he persisted, uncomplaining and undaunted, in his psychological investigation.

“Yesterday we worked on every possible meaning of Bertha. Your chimneysweeping stirred many memories. How can it be that your mother’s name never came to mind?”

“How can I answer that? Nonconscious memories are beyond my conscious control. I don’t know where they are. They have a life of their own. I can only talk about what I experience, what’s real. And Bertha qua Bertha is the most real thing in my life.” “But, Josef, that’s exactly the point. What did we learn yesterday if not that your relationship to Bertha is unreal, an illusion woven from images and longings that have nothing to do with the real Bertha?

“Yesterday we learned that your Bertha fantasy protects you from the future, from the terrors of aging, death, oblivion. Today I realize that your vision of Bertha is also contaminated by ghosts from the past. Josef, only this instant is real. In the end, we experience only ourselves in the present moment. Bertha’s not real. She’s but a phantom who comes from both the future and the past.” Breuer had never seen Nietzsche so confident—certain of every word.

“Let me put it another way!” he continued. “You think you and Bertha are an intimate twosome—the most intimate, private relationship imaginable. Not so?”

Breuer nodded.

“Yet,” Nietzsche said emphatically, “I am convinced that in no way do you and Bertha have a private relationship. I believe that your obsession will be resolved when you can answer one pivotal question: ‘How many people are in this relationship?’ ” The fiacre waited just ahead. They got in, and Breuer instructed Fischmann to take them to the Simmeringer Haide.

Once inside, Breuer took up the question. “I’ve lost your meaning, Friedrich.”

“Surely, you can see that you and Bertha have no private tête-à-tête. It’s never you and she alone. Your fantasy teems with others: beautiful women with redemptive and protective abilities; faceless men whom you defeat for Bertha’s favors; Bertha Breuer, your mother; and a ten-year-old girl with an adoring smile. If we have learned anything at all, Josef, it is that your obsession with Bertha is not about Bertha!” Breuer nodded and sank into thought. Nietzsche, too, fell silent and stared out the window for the remainder of the ride. When they alighted, Breuer asked Fischmann to pick them up in an hour.

The sun had now disappeared behind a monstrous slate-gray cloud, and the two men leaned into an icy wind, which only yesterday had swept the Russian steppes. They buttoned up to their necks and started off at a brisk pace. Nietzsche was the first to break the silence.

“It’s strange, Josef, how I’m always soothed by a cemetery. I told you my father was a Lutheran minister. But did I also tell you that my backyard and play area was the village churchyard? Incidentally, do you know Montaigne’s essay on death—where he advises us to live in a room with a window overlooking a cemetery? It clears one’s head, he claims, and keeps life’s priorities in perspective. Do cemeteries do that for you?” Breuer nodded. “I love that essay! There was a time when cemetery visits were restorative for me. A few years ago, when I felt crushed by the end of my university career, I sought solace among the dead. Somehow the tombs soothed me, allowed me to trivialize the trivial in my life. But then suddenly it changed!” “How so?”

“I don’t know why, but somehow the calming, enlightening effect of the cemetery disappeared. I lost my reverence and began to regard the funerary angels, and the epitaphs about sleeping in the arms of God, as foolish, even pathetic. A couple of years ago, I underwent another change. Everything about the cemetery—the headstones, the statues, the family houses of the dead—began to frighten me. Like a child, I felt the cemetery haunted by ghosts, and I walked to my parents’ grave swiveling my head continuously, looking around and behind me. I began to procrastinate about coming and sought someone to accompany me. Nowadays my visits get shorter and shorter. I often dread the sight of my parents’ grave and sometimes, when I stand there, fear I’ll sink into the earth and be swallowed up.” “Like your nightmare of the ground liquefying beneath you.”

“How eerie your speaking of that, Friedrich! Just a few minutes ago, that very dream passed through my mind.”

“Perhaps it is a cemetery dream. In the dream, as I remember, you fell forty feet and came to rest upon a slab—wasn’t ‘slab’ your word?”

“A marble slab! A headstone!” Breuer replied. “One with writing on it that I could not read! And there’s something else I don’t think I’ve told you. This young student, also a friend, Sigmund Freud, whom I mentioned before—the one who rode with me all day on my house calls. . . ” “Yes?”

“Well, dreams are his hobby. He often asks friends about their dreams. Precise numbers or phrases in dreams intrigue him, and when I described my nightmare, he proposed a novel hypothesis about falling precisely forty feet. Since I first dreamed this dream near my fortieth birthday, he suggested that the forty feet really stood for forty years!” “Ingenious!” Nietzsche slowed his pace and clapped his hands together. “Not feet, but years! Now the riddle of the dream begins to yield! Upon reaching your fortieth year, you imagine falling into the earth and ending up on a marble slab. But is the slab the end? Is it death? Or does it, in some way, signify a break in the fall—a rescue?” Without waiting for an answer, Nietzsche rushed on. “And still another question: The Bertha you searched for when the ground began to liquefy—which Bertha was that? The young Bertha, who offers the illusion of protection? Or the mother, who once offered real safety, and whose name is written on the slab? Or a fusion of the two Berthas? After all, in a way they are near in age, your mother dying when she was not much older than Bertha!” “Which Bertha?” Breuer shook his head. “How can I ever answer that? To think that only a few months ago I imagined that the talking cure might eventually develop into a precise science! But how to be precise about such questions? Perhaps correctness should be gauged by sheer power: your words seem powerful, they move me, they feel right. Yet can feelings. be trusted? Everywhere, religious zealots feel a divine presence. Shall I consider their feelings less trustworthy than mine?” “I wonder,” Nietzsche mused, “whether our dreams are closer to who we are than either rationality or feelings.”

“Your interest in dreams surprises me, Friedrich. Your two books barely mention them. I remember only your speculation that the mental life of primitive man still operates in dreams.”

“I think our entire prehistory can be found in the text of our dreams. But dreams fascinate me from a distance only: unfortunately, I recall very few of my own—though one recently had great clarity.” The two men walked without speaking, cracking twigs and leaves underfoot. Would Nietzsche describe his dream? Breuer had learned by now that the less he asked, the more Nietzsche gave of himself. Silence was best.

Several minutes later, Nietzsche continued. “It’s short and, like yours, involves both women and death. I dreamed I was in bed with a woman, and there was a struggle. Perhaps we each tugged at the sheets. At any rate, a couple of minutes later, I found myself tightly bound in the sheets, so tightly that I could not move and began to suffocate. I awoke in a sweat, gasping for air and calling out, ‘Live, live!’ ” Breuer tried to help Nietzsche recall more of the dream, but to no avail. Nietzsche’s only association to the dream was that being wrapped in sheets was like Egyptian embalming. He had become a mummy.

“It strikes me,” Breuer said, “that our dreams are diametrically opposite. I dream about a woman rescuing me from death, while in your dream the woman is the instrument of death!”

“Yes, that’s what my dream says. And I believe it’s so! To love woman is to hate life!”

“I don’t understand, Friedrich. You’re speaking cryptically again.”

“I mean that one can’t love a woman without blinding oneself to the ugliness beneath the fair skin: blood, veins, fat, mucus, feces—the physiological horrors. The lover must put out his own eyes, must forsake truth. And, for me, an untrue life is a living death!” “So there can never be a place for love in your life?” Breuer sighed deeply. “Even though love is ruining my life, your statement makes me sad for you, my friend.”

“I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another. Once, not long ago, I thought I had found it. But I was mistaken.”

“What happened?”

Thinking that Nietzsche had shaken his head slightly, Breuer did not press him. They walked together on until Nietzsche resumed: “I dream of a love in which two people share a passion to search together for some higher truth. Perhaps I should not call it love. Perhaps it’s real name is friendship.” How different their discussion was that day! Breuer felt close to Nietzsche, even wished to walk arm in arm with him. Yet he also felt disappointed. He knew he would not get the help he needed on this day. There was not enough compressed intensity during such a walking conversation. It was too easy, in an uncomfortable moment, to slip into silence and to let one’s attention be caught by the clouds of exhaled breath and the crackling of bare branches trembling in the wind.

Once Breuer fell behind. Nietzsche, turning to look for him, was surprised to see his companion, hat in hand, standing and bowing before a small plant of ordinary appearance.

“Foxglove,” Breuer explained. “I have at least forty patients with heart failure whose life depends upon the largesse of that plebeian plant.”

For both men, the cemetery visit had opened old childhood wounds; and, as they strolled, they reminisced. Nietzsche recounted a dream he remembered from the age of six, a year after his father had died.

“It’s as vivid today as if I’d dreamed it last night. A grave opens and my father, dressed in a shroud, arises, enters a church, and soon returns carrying a small child in his arms. He climbs back into his grave with the child. The earth closes on top of them, and the gravestone slides over the opening.

“The truly horrible thing was that shortly after I had that dream, my younger brother was taken ill and died of convulsions.”

“How ghastly!” Breuer said. “How eerie to have had such a pre-vision! How do you explain it?”

“I can’t. For a long time, the supernatural terrified me, and I said my prayers with great earnestness. Over the last few years, however, I’ve begun to suspect that the dream was unrelated to my brother, that it was me my father had come for, and that the dream was expressing my fear of death.” At ease with one another in a way they had not been before, both men continued to reminisce. Breuer recalled a dream of some calamity occurring in his old home: his father standing helplessly, praying and rocking, wrapped in his blue-and-white prayer shawl. And Nietzsche described a nightmare in which, entering his bedroom, he saw, lying in his bed, an old man dying, a death rattle in his throat.

“We both encountered death very early,” said Breuer thoughtfully, “and we both suffered a terrible early loss. I believe, speaking for myself, I’ve never recovered. But you, what about your loss? What about having had no father to protect you?” “To protect me—or to oppress me? Was it a loss? I’m not so sure. Or it may have been a loss for the child, but not for the man.”

“Meaning?” Breuer asked.

“Meaning that I was never weighed down by carrying my father on my back, never suffocated by the burden of his judgment, never taught that the object of life was to fulfill his thwarted ambitions. His death may well have been a blessing, a liberation. His whims never became my law. I was left alone to discover my own path, one not trodden before. Think about it! Could I, the antichrist, have exorcized false beliefs and sought new truths with a parson-father wincing with pain at my every achievement, a father who would have regarded my campaigns against illusion as a personal attack against him?” “But,” Breuer rejoined, “if you had had his protection when you needed it, would you have had to be the antichrist?”

Nietzsche did not respond, and Breuer pressed no further. He was learning to accommodate to Nietzsche’s rhythm: any truth-seeking inquiries were permissible, even welcomed; but added force would be resisted. Breuer took out his watch, the one given him by his father. It was time to turn back to the fiacre, where Fischmann awaited. With the wind at their backs, the walking was easier.

“You may be more honest than I,” speculated Breuer. “Perhaps my father’s judgments weighed me down more than I realized. But most of the time I miss him a great deal.”

“What do you miss?”

Breuer thought about his father and sampled the memories passing before his eyes. The old man, yarmulke on head, chanting a blessing before he tasted his supper of boiled potatoes and herring. His smile as he sat in the synagogue and watched his son wrapping his fingers in the tassels of his prayer shawl. His refusal to let his son take back a move in chess: “Josef, I cannot permit myself to teach you bad habits.” His deep baritone voice, which filled the house as he sang passages for the young students he was preparing for their bar mitzvah.

“Most of all, I think I miss his attention. He was always my chief audience, even at the very end of his life, when he suffered considerable confusion and memory loss. I made sure to tell him of my successes, my diagnostic triumphs, my research discoveries, even my charitable donations. And even after he died, he was still my audience. For years I imagined him peering over my shoulder, observing and approving my achievements. The more his image fades, the more I struggle with the feeling that my activities and successes are all evanescent, that they have no real meaning.” “Are you saying, Josef, that if your successes could be recorded in the ephemeral mind of your father, then they would possess meaning?”

“I know it’s irrational. It’s much like the question of the sound of a tree falling in an empty forest. Does unobserved activity have meaning?”

“The difference is, of course, that the tree has no ears, whereas it is you, yourself, who bestow meaning.”

“Friedrich, you’re more self-sufficient than I—more than any one I’ve known! I remember marveling, in our very first meeting, at your ability to thrive with no recognition whatsoever from your colleagues.” “Long ago, Josef, I learned that it is easier to cope with a bad reputation than with a bad conscience. Besides, I’m not greedy; I don’t write for the crowd. And I know how to be patient. Perhaps my students are not yet alive. Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some philosophers are born posthumously!” “But, Friedrich—believing you will be born posthumously—is that so different from my longing for my father’s attention? You can wait, even until the day after tomorrow, but you, too, yearn for an audience.” A long pause. Nietzsche nodded finally and then said softly, “Perhaps. Perhaps I have within me pockets of vanity yet to be purged.”

Breuer merely nodded. It did not escape his notice that this was the first time one of his observations had been acknowledged by Nietzsche. Was this to be a turning point in their relationship?

No, not yet! After a moment, Nietzsche added, “Still, there is a difference between coveting a parent’s approval and striving to elevate those who will follow in the future.”

Breuer did not respond, though it was obvious to him that Nietzsche’s motives were not purely self-transcendent; he had his own back-alley ways of courting remembrance. Today it seemed to Breuer as if all motives, his and Nietzsche’s, sprang from a single source—the drive to escape death’s oblivion. Was he growing too morbid? Maybe it was the effect of the cemetery. Maybe even one visit a month was too frequent.

But not even morbidity could spoil the mood of this walk. He thought of Nietzsche’s definition of friendship: two who join together in a search for some higher truth. Was that not precisely what he and Nietzsche were doing that day? Yes, they were friends.

That was a consoling thought, even though Breuer knew that their deepening relationship and their engrossing discussion brought him no closer to relief from his pain. For the sake of friendship, he tried to ignore this disturbing idea.

Yet, as a friend, Nietzsche must have read his mind. “I like this walk we take together, Josef, but we must not forget the raison d’être of our meetings—your psychological state.”

Breuer slipped and grabbed a sapling for support as they descended a hill. “Careful, Friedrich, this shale is slick.” Nietzsche gave Breuer his hand, and they continued their descent.

“I’ve been thinking,” Nietzsche continued, “that, though our discussions appear to be diffuse, we, nonetheless, steadily grow closer to a solution. It’s true that our direct attacks on your Bertha obsession have been futile. Yet in the last couple of days we have found out why: because the obsession involves not Bertha, or not only her, but a series of meanings folded into Bertha. We agree on this?” Breuer nodded, wanting to suggest politely that help was not going to come by way of such intellectual formulations. But Nietzsche hurried on. “It’s clear now that our primary error has been in considering Bertha the target. We have not chosen the right enemy.” “And that is—?”

“You know, Josef! Why make me say it? The right enemy is the underlying meaning of your obsession. Think of our talk today—again and again, we’ve returned to your fears of the void, of oblivion, of death. It’s there in your nightmare, in the ground liquefying, in your plunge downward to the marble slab. It’s there in your cemetery dread, in your concerns about meaningless, in your wish to be observed and remembered. The paradox, your paradox, is that you dedicate yourself to the search for truth but cannot bear the sight of what you discover.” “But you, too, Friedrich, must be frightened by death and by godlessness. From the very beginning, I have asked, ‘How do you bear it? How have you come to terms with such horrors?’ ”

“It may be time to tell you,” Nietzsche replied, his manner becoming portentous. “Before, I did not think that you were ready to hear me.”

Breuer, curious about Nietzsche’s message, chose, for once, not to object to his prophet voice.

“I do not teach, Josef, that one should ‘bear’ death, or ‘come to terms’ with it. That way lies life-betrayal! Here is my lesson to you: Die at the right time!”

“Die at the right time!” The phrase jolted Breuer. The pleasant afternoon stroll had turned deadly serious. “Die at the right time? What do you mean? Please, Friedrich, I can’t stand it, as I tell you again and again, when you say something important in such an enigmatic way. Why do you do that?” “You pose two questions. Which shall I answer?”

“Today, tell me about dying at the right time.”

“Live when you live! Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life! If one does not live in the right time, then one can never die at the right time.”

“What does that mean?” Breuer asked again, feeling ever more frustrated.

“Ask yourself, Josef: Have you consummated your life?”

“You answer questions with questions, Friedrich!”

“You ask questions to which you know the answer,” Nietzsche countered.

“If I knew the answer, why would I ask?”

“To avoid knowing your own answer!”

Breuer paused. He knew Nietzsche was right. He stopped resisting and turned his attention within. “Have I consummated my life? I have achieved a great deal, more than anyone could have expected of me. Material success, scientific achievement, family, children—but we’ve gone over all that before.” “Still, Josef, you avoid my question. Have you lived your life? Or been lived by it? Chosen it? Or did it choose you? Loved it? Or regretted it? That is what I mean when I ask whether you have consummated your life. Have you used it up? Remember that dream in which your father stood by helplessly praying while something calamitous was happening to his family? Are you not like him? Do you not stand by helplessly, grieving for the life you never lived?” Breuer felt the pressure mounting. Nietzsche’s questions bore into him; he had no defense against them. He could hardly breathe. His chest seemed about to burst. He stopped walking for a moment and took three deep breaths before answering.

“These questions—you know the answer! No, I’ve not chosen! No, I’ve not lived the life I’ve wanted! I’ve lived the life assigned me. I—the real I—have been encased in my life.”

“And that, Josef is, I am convinced, the primary source of your Angst. That precordial pressure—it’s because your chest is bursting with unlived life. And your heart ticks away the time. And time’s covetousness is forever. Time devours and devours—and gives back nothing. How terrible to hear you say that you lived the life assigned to you! And how terrible to face death without ever having claimed freedom, even in all its danger!” Nietzsche was firmly in his pulpit, his prophet’s voice ringing. A wave of disappointment swept over Breuer; he knew now that there was no help for him.

“Friedrich,” he said, “these are grand-sounding phrases. I admire them. They stir my soul. But they are far, far away from my life. What does claiming freedom mean to my everyday situation? How can I be free? It’s not the same as you, a young single man giving up a suffocating university career. It’s too late for me! I have a family, employees, patients, students. It’s far too late! We can talk forever, but I cannot change my life—it is woven too tight with the thread of other lives.” There was a long silence, which Breuer broke, his voice weary. “But I cannot sleep, and now I cannot stand the pain of this pressure in my chest.” The icy wind piercing his greatcoat, he shivered and wrapped his scarf more tightly around his neck.

Nietzsche, in a rare gesture, took his arm. “My friend,” he whispered, “I cannot tell you how to live differently because, if I did, you would still be living another’s design. But, Josef, there is something I can do. I can give you a gift, the gift of my mightiest thought, my thought of thoughts. Perhaps it may already be somewhat familiar to you, since I sketched it briefly in Human, All Too Human. This thought will be the guiding force of my next book, perhaps of all my future books.” His voice had lowered, assuming a solemn, stately tone, as if to signify the culmination of everything that had gone before. The two men walked arm in arm. Breuer looked straight ahead as he awaited Nietzsche’s words.

“Josef, try to clear your mind. Imagine this thought experiment! What if some demon were to say to you that this life—as you now live it and have lived it in the past—you will have to live once more, and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and everything unutterably small or great in your life will return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this wind and those trees and that slippery shale, even the graveyard and the dread, even this gentle moment and you and I, arm in arm, murmuring these words?” As Breuer remained silent, Nietzsche continued, “Imagine the eternal hourglass of existence turned upside down again and again and again. And each time, also turned upside down are you and I, mere specks that we are.” Breuer made an effort to understand him. “How is this—this—this fantasy———”

“It’s more than a fantasy,” Nietzsche insisted, “more really than a thought experiment. Listen only to my words! Block out everything else! Think about infinity. Look behind you—imagine looking infinitely far into the past. Time stretches backward for all eternity. And, if time infinitely stretches backward, must not everything that can happen have already happened? Must not all that passes now have passed this way before? Whatever walks here, mustn’t it have walked this path before? And if everything has passed before in time’s infinity, then what do you think, Josef, of this moment, of our whispering together under this arch of trees? Must not this, too, have come before? And time that stretches back infinitely, must it not also stretch ahead infinitely? Must not we, in this moment, in every moment, recur eternally?” Nietzsche fell silent, to give Breuer time to absorb his message. It was midday, but the sky had darkened. A light snow began to fall. The fiacre and Fischmann loomed into sight.

On the ride back to the clinic, the two men resumed their discussion. Nietzsche claimed that, though he had termed it a thought experiment, his assumption of eternal recurrence could be scientifically proven. Breuer was skeptical about Nietzsche’s proof, which was based on two metaphysical principles: that time is infinite, and force (the basic stuff of the universe) is finite. Given a finite number of potential states of the world and an infinite amount of time that has passed, it follows, Nietzsche claimed, that all possible states must have already occurred; and that the present state must be a repetition; and, likewise, the one that gave birth to it and the one that arises out of it and so on, backward into the past and forward into the future.

Breuer’s perplexity grew. “You mean that through sheer random occurrences this precise moment would have occurred previously?”

“Think of time that has always been, time stretching back forever. In such infinite time, must not recombinations of all events constituting the world have repeated themselves an infinite number of times?” “Like a great dice game?”

“Precisely! The great dice game of existence!”

Breuer continued to question Nietzsche’s cosmological proof of eternal recurrence. Though Nietzsche responded to each question, he eventually grew impatient and finally threw up his hands.

“Time and time again, Josef, you have asked for concrete help. How many times have you asked me to be relevant, to offer something that can change you? Now I give you what you request, and you ignore it by picking away at details. Listen to me, my friend, listen to my words—this is the most important thing I will ever say to you: let this thought take possession of you, and I promise you it will change you forever!” Breuer was unmoved. “But how can I believe without proof? I cannot conjure up belief. Have I given up one religion simply to embrace another?”

“The proof is extremely complex. It is still unfinished and will require years of work. And now, as a result of our discussion, I’m not sure I should even bother to devote the time to working out the cosmological proof—perhaps others, too, will use it as a distraction. Perhaps they, like you, will pick away at the intricacies of the proof and ignore the important point—the psychological consequences of eternal recurrence.” Breuer said nothing. He looked out the window of the fiacre and shook his head slightly.

“Let me put it another way,” Nietzsche continued. “Will you not grant me that eternal recurrence is probable? No, wait, I don’t need even that! Let us say simply that it is possible, or merely possible. That is enough. Certainly it is more possible and more provable than the fairy tale of eternal damnation! What do you have to lose by considering it a possibility? Can you not think of it, then, as ‘Nietzsche’s wager’?” Breuer nodded.

“I urge you, then, to consider the implications of eternal recurrence for your life—not abstractly, but now, today, in the most concrete sense!”

“You suggest,” said Breuer, “that every action I make, every pain I experience, will be experienced through all infinity?”

“Yes, eternal recurrence means that every time you choose an action you must be willing to choose it for all eternity. And it is the same for every action not made, every stillborn thought, every choice avoided. And all unlived life will remain bulging inside you, unlived through all eternity. And the unheeded voice of your conscience will cry out to you forever.” Breuer felt dizzy; it was hard to listen. He tried to concentrate on Nietzsche’s mammoth mustache pounding up and down at each word. Since his mouth and lips were entirely obscured, there was no forewarning of the words to come. Occasionally his glance would catch Nietzsche’s eyes, but they were too sharp, and he shifted his attention down to the fleshy but powerful nose, or up to the heavy overhanging eyebrows which resembled ocular mustaches.

Breuer finally managed a question: “So, as I understand it, eternal recurrence promises a form of immortality?”

“No!” Nietzsche was vehement. “I teach that life should never be modified, or squelched, because of the promise of some other kind of life in the future. What is immortal is this life, this moment. There is no afterlife, no goal toward which this life points, no apocalyptic tribunal or judgment. This moment exists forever, and you, alone, are your only audience.” Breuer shivered. As the chilling implications of Nietzsche’s proposal grew more clear, he stopped resisting and, instead, entered a state of uncanny concentration.

“So, Josef, once again I say, let this thought take possession of you. Now I have a question for you: Do you hate the idea? Or do you love it?”

“I hate it!” Breuer almost shouted. “To live forever with the sense that I have not lived, have not tasted freedom—the idea fills me with horror.”

“Then, ” Nietzsche exhorted, “live in such a way that you love the idea!”

“All that I love now, Friedrich, is the thought that I have fulfilled my duty toward others.”

“Duty? Can duty take precedence over your love for yourself and for your own quest for unconditional freedom? If you have not attained yourself, then ‘duty’ is merely a euphemism for using others for your own enlargement.” Breuer summoned the energy for one further rebuttal. “There is such a thing as a duty to others, and I have been faithful to that duty. There, at least, I have the courage of my convictions.” “Better, Josef, far better, to have the courage to change your convictions. Duty and faithfulness are shams, curtains to hide behind. Self-liberation means a sacred no, even to duty.”

Frightened, Breuer stared at Nietzsche.

“You want to become yourself,” Nietzsche continued. “How often have I heard you say that? How often have you lamented that you have never known your freedom? Your goodness, your duty, your faithfulness—these are the bars of your prison. You will perish from such small virtues. You must learn to know your wickedness. You cannot be partially free: your instincts, too, thirst for freedom; your wild dogs in the cellar—they bark for freedom. Listen harder, can’t you hear them?” “But I cannot be free,” Breuer implored. “I have made sacred marriage vows. I have a duty to my children, my students, my patients.”

“To build children you must first be built yourself. Otherwise, you’ll seek children out of animal needs, or loneliness, or to patch the holes in yourself. Your task as a parent is to produce not another self, another Josef, but something higher. It’s to produce a creator.

“And your wife?” Nietzsche went on inexorably. “Is she not as imprisoned in this marriage as you? Marriage should be no prison, but a garden in which something higher is cultivated. Perhaps the only way to save your marriage is to give it up.” “I have made sacred vows of wedlock.”

“Marriage is a something large. It is a large thing to always be two, to remain in love. Yes, wedlock is sacred. And yet. . . ” Nietzsche’s voice trailed off.

“And yet?” Breuer asked.

“Wedlock is sacred. Yet”—Nietzsche’s voice was harsh—“it is better to break wedlock than to be broken by it!”

Breuer closed his eyes and sank into deep thought. Neither man spoke for the remainder of their journey.

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Friedrich Nietzsche’s Notes on Dr. Breuer, 16 December 1882

A stroll that began in sunlight and ended darkly. Perhaps we journeyed too far into the graveyard. Should we have turned back earlier? Have I given him too powerful a thought? Eternal recurrence is a mighty hammer. It will break those who are not yet ready for it.

No! A psychologist, an unriddler of souls, needs hardness more than anyone. Else he will bloat with pity. And his student drown in shallow water.

Yet at the end of our walk, Josef seemed sorely pressed, barely able to converse. Some are not born hard. A true psychologist, like an artist, must love his palette. Perhaps more kindness, more patience was needed. Do I strip before teaching how to weave new clothing? Have I taught him “freedom from” without teaching “freedom for”?

No, a guide must be a railing by the torrent, but he must not be a crutch. The guide must lay bare the trails that lie before the student. But he must not choose the path.

“Become my teacher, ” he asks. “Help me overcome despair. ” Shall I conceal my wisdom? And the student’s responsibility? He must harden himself to the cold, his fingers must grip the railing, he must lose himself many times on wrong paths before finding the right one.

In the mountains alone, I travel the shortest way—from peak to peak. But students lose their way when I walk too far ahead. I must learn to shorten my stride. Today, we may have traveled too fast. I unraveled a dream, separated one Bertha from another, reburied the dead, and taught dying at the right time. And all of this was but the overture to the mighty theme of recurrence.

Have I pushed him too deep into misery? Often he seemed too upset to hear me. Yet what did I challenge? What destroy? Only empty values and tottering beliefs! That which is tottering, one should also push!

Today I understood that the best teacher is one who learns from his student. Perhaps he is right about my father. How different my life would be had I not lost him! Can it be true that I hammer so hard because I hate him for dying? And hammer so loud because I still crave an audience?

I worry about his silence at the end. His eyes were open, but he seemed not to see. He scarcely breathed.

Yet I know the dew falls heaviest when the night is most silent.