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