no sound any longer reaches me—a land without rain."[1] He feels shut up, cut off. "How can I communicate myself? … When shall I come out of the cave into the open? I am the most hidden of all hidden things." No longer can he be "eloquent," he is like a cave-bear or hermit and talks only with himself, his ideas are acquiring a sort of twilight-color and an odor of buried things and of mold.[2] When he comes to Leipzig in 1886, he strikes his old friend, Erwin Rohde, as something almost uncanny: "it would seem as if he came from a country where no man lived."
And yet he does not wish to take his experiences too tragically, does not mean to complain; his way, he is aware, is not a way for most, it is too dangerous; e and, as men and things are in Germany at the time, not even the few he hoped for have ears for him, their interests being elsewhere. He tries manfully to accept the situation, though not without some contempt for the general milieu that makes it necessary to do so.[3] Although he has longed and waited for a strong heart and neck on which he could for an hour at least unload his burden, he is now ready for the last (or first) lesson of life-wisdom: to cease expecting; and for the second: to be courteous, to be modest, thenceforth to endure everybody, endure everything—in short, to endure yet a little more than he had endured before.[4] He even thinks that solitude may be useful for him—suspecting that, if a man can endure it, it tests him even more than sickness, i.e., hardens him, makes him great, if he has any capacities in that direction.[5] He had said in Zarathustra, "Away from the market-place and fame, all that is great betakes itself; away from the market-place and fame, the creators of new values have always dwelt."[6] Even the kindness of those who pity the solitary thinker and wish to make him more comfortable, to "save" him from himself, may be mistaken.[7] Just to be himself and apart from the world, may be his highest duty to the world. Not to lead his time, or take a part in its conflicts, but to turn away from it and develop the idea of a
