Venice

 

                                        Edward Munch, Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche, c.1906 

The terminal collapse of Friedrich Nietzsche in Turin stands among the most arresting episodes in intellectual history, a moment in which philosophical ambition and neurological dissolution converge within a single, exposed life. By the time Franz Overbeck arrived to retrieve his friend in January 1889, Nietzsche had entered what he himself had once named, with bitter irony, the role of the “clown of the new eternities.” Overbeck’s private correspondence with Peter Gast records a scene of severe dissonance. Nietzsche, previously the architect of the Übermensch, oscillated between tearful embraces and frenetic improvisations at the piano. He addressed his visitor in compressed, prophetic fragments and proclaimed himself the successor to a dead god. His utterances bore the cadence of revelation rather than argument. Philosophy, once governed by discipline and polemic, had collapsed inward and begun to consume its author.

The breakdown had developed in full view. In the final months of 1888, Nietzsche lived alone near the Piazza Carlo Alberto, sustaining himself through walking, writing, and a rigidly circumscribed routine shaped by illness. His letters from this period announce sweeping political decrees and divine identities. He signs himself Dionysus, the Crucified, Nietzsche Caesar. Syntax remains controlled. Meaning migrates toward delusion. On 3 January 1889, after witnessing a cab driver strike a horse, Nietzsche rushed forward, embraced the animal, and fell to the ground. He was escorted back to his lodgings, where agitation intensified. He sang, shouted, laughed, wept, and played the piano compulsively. His landlady summoned assistance. Telegrams were sent to Basel.

When Overbeck arrived, he encountered a man whose expressive force had expanded while his capacity for reciprocal exchange had vanished. Nietzsche greeted him with extravagant affection, kissing and embracing him repeatedly. He assumed theatrical poses and delivered exalted pronouncements. He seated himself at the piano and improvised with manic intensity. Overbeck later described Nietzsche’s speech as muffled and clairvoyant, driven by conviction rather than communication. Sustained conversation proved impossible.

The journey to Basel forms a somber coda to Nietzsche’s lucid life. To secure his cooperation, Overbeck relied on a fictitious invitation to a festival in Nietzsche’s honor. The transit unfolded in a third-class railway carriage shared with a dentist, a peasant woman, and Walter Malraux. The atmosphere was marked by quiet terror and enforced ordinariness. As the train entered the St. Gotthard tunnel, it remained submerged in darkness for more than half an hour. The carriage filled with mechanical noise, human presence reduced to breathing and shifting weight. Amid the rhythmic pecking of a hen enclosed in a basket, Nietzsche began to chant his final poetic composition, Venice. The recitation proceeded without interruption. In that enclosed obscurity, the verse acquired an intensity that eclipsed his earlier poetic efforts.

This scene carries an inescapable irony. The philosopher who urged his readers to live dangerously and to stare into the abyss now found himself swallowed by it, yet still capable of producing ordered beauty from cognitive wreckage. Overbeck later admitted that the thought of a mercy killing crossed his mind, an indication of the extremity of what he witnessed. Nietzsche’s survival carried him into years of institutionalization and silence. His active intellectual life ended in that tunnel.

The persistence of Venice under such conditions has drawn me to translate the poem. Nietzsche did not revise it or prepare it for publication. He carried it in memory and voice alone, and it emerged intact at a moment when deliberative thought had already fractured. That fact confers upon the poem a peculiar authority. It survives through rhythm, habit, and bodily retention rather than compositional control.

Deborah Hayden’s Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis has sharpened my understanding of the collapse by restoring the body to the center of the narrative. Hayden situates Nietzsche within nineteenth-century diagnostic practice and argues that advanced neurosyphilis provides the most coherent account of his decline. While her conclusion remains debated, the evidence she assembles alters the scale of the discussion. Among the details she emphasizes is the observation, recorded during examinations conducted after Nietzsche entered a catatonic state, of a scar on his penis consistent with a healed chancre. Hayden also traces decades of physical suffering, including migraines with visual disturbance, gastrointestinal illness, insomnia, and progressive visual impairment. These conditions shaped Nietzsche’s working habits and eroded his physiological resilience.

Hayden also directs attention to Carl Jung’s lectures on Zarathustra, in which Jung reports testimony from unnamed individuals who claimed personal knowledge of Nietzsche and asserted that he visited homosexual brothers during his years of wandering. The claim remains undocumented and resists verification. Its circulation nevertheless reveals the extent to which Nietzsche’s bodily history, sexual life, and illness became sites of explanatory pressure in early interpretations of his madness.

Taken together, these materials depict a prolonged deterioration culminating in public collapse. Nietzsche’s madness did not arrive as a sudden rupture but as the visible outcome of sustained physical and neurological strain. Within this trajectory, the recitation of Venice stands apart. It represents an act of form preserved under extreme constraint, carried through darkness, confinement, and disintegration. As I translate the poem, I treat it less as an aesthetic artifact than as a surviving structure, one that endured when much else had fallen away.

Venice

An der Brücke stand

jüngst ich in brauner Nacht.

Fernher kam Gesang;

goldener Tropfen quoll's

über die zitternde Fläche weg.

Gondeln, Lichter, Musik -

trunken schwamm's in die Dämmrung hinaus ...

 

Meine Seele, ein Saitenspiel,

sang sich, unsichtbar berührt,

heimlich ein Gondellied dazu,

zitternd vor bunter Seligkeit.

- Hörte [ihr jemand] zu?

 

My version:

Upon the bridge I stood, lost in the copper night. 
A song arrived from far, where liquid gold took flight,
To spill its heavy drops across the trembling sea. 
The gondolas and lights, in drunken revelry, 
Were drifting toward the dusk upon a rhythmic tide.  
My soul, a secret lyre where phantom fingers glide, 
Breathed out a barcarolle, a song of silent bliss, 
To meet the water's pulse and meet the shadow's kiss. 

With kaleidoscopic fire, it shivered in the air. 
Did any spirit hear my music dwelling there?

 

The Baying of Hounds

 

                                                                Francisco de Goya, The Dog,  c. 1819–1823

Maupassant once remarked that he felt kinship with dogs who howl – that their howling amounts to a lament addressed to nobody, traveling nowhere, bearing no message fit for translation. The sound issues forth and dissipates, pure expenditure of breath and ache. I have always understood what he meant. Some expressions exist without audience or destination. They persist because the body requires them.

I learned this early, listening to dogs.

My first tutor was Maple, a Cairn Terrier with a coat the color of dry leaves and beach sand, a creature assembled from stubbornness and affection in equal measure. She belonged to my childhood with the firmness of an axiom. Maple possessed the alertness of a sentry and the dignity of a small monarch. Her ears pivoted at the slightest provocation. Her body angled itself toward the world as though expecting instruction from it.

She had a howl that emerged rarely, ceremonially, usually in response to sirens or the moon rising with particular emphasis. It was not loud, yet it carried a piercing steadiness, a narrow beam of sound that seemed to pass through walls and weather alike. When she howled, she did not look at us. Her gaze lifted elsewhere, toward something without coordinates. The sound neither asked nor accused. It existed because it had to.

As a child, I found this both beautiful and unsettling. I would sit on the floor beside her, hand resting on the coarse warmth of her flank, feeling the vibration pass through bone and muscle. The howl felt older than language, older than explanation. Maple did not seek consolation. She did not expect response. The sound seemed to complete a circuit entirely within her own being.

Years later, another dog entered my life by inheritance rather than choice. Mia arrived with my grandfather’s belongings, a Shi Tzu whose body bore the unmistakable evidence of indulgence. She was round in places dogs are rarely round, carried forward by short legs that performed their task with stoic resignation. My grandfather had loved her with the generous negligence of old age. Walks were infrequent. Treats were abundant. On occasion, fast food wrappers appeared, and with them the improbable knowledge that a dog had once eaten a cheeseburger meant for a human hand.

We tried, briefly and earnestly, to correct this legacy. Smaller portions. Encouragement. Gentle persuasion. Mia regarded these efforts with placid incomprehension. Her habits were sedimented. Her body had accepted its shape as fate. She moved through rooms like a small upholstered object with opinions.

Unlike Maple, Mia rarely howled. She communicated through sighs, through the strategic placement of her bulk, through a look that suggested ancient disappointment. When she did vocalize, it emerged as a low, wavering sound, less proclamation than leakage. Yet in those moments, I recognized the same principle at work. The sound did not seek remedy. It announced presence. It occupied air.

Living with dogs teaches a particular metaphysics. They experience emotion without narration. Grief does not require justification. Desire does not require architecture. When they suffer, the body speaks directly. When they rejoice, it does so with a simplicity that resists irony. The howl, the sigh, the whine – these are not messages encoded for interpretation. They are releases, valves opening under pressure.

Watching Maple age, then leave, I learned that the body retains its habits even as its strength recedes. Her final months were quieter, her movements economical, yet when the sirens passed and the night arranged itself just so, the howl returned. Thinner, perhaps, but resolute. As though something within her insisted on completing its gesture one last time.

Mia, too, aged into a softness that bordered on abstraction. She slept often, breathing audibly, dreaming with small movements of her paws. When she rose, it was with deliberation. Her presence filled rooms without effort. She accepted care with mild surprise, as though kindness were a phenomenon that continued to puzzle her.

I think often of Maupassant’s image: the lament that goes nowhere. It seems bleak at first, stripped of hope. Yet living alongside these animals reshaped it for me. A sound addressed to nobody is not wasted. It does not require reply to justify itself. It completes something within the one who gives it voice.

There are days when human speech feels overburdened – weighted with expectation, misdirection, the need to persuade or perform. In those moments, I think of Maple lifting her head, of Mia sighing herself into sleep. Their expressions carried no thesis. They altered nothing. Yet they mattered because they were faithful to sensation.

Perhaps that is enough. To give voice to what passes through us without demanding it arrive anywhere. To allow the body its lament, its music, its brief occupation of air. Dogs understand this without instruction. They howl, and the sound dissolves, having done exactly what it was meant to do.