THIRD PERIOD
CHAPTER XIII
GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD, AND VIEW OF THE WORLD
I
In the spring of 1879 Nietzsche resigned his professorship at Basel. Already—some three years earlier—he had been obliged to give up his work at the Pädagogium there. There were intervals of exuberant animal spirits, but as a whole his life appears to have been one of suffering. He was not teaching to his satisfaction—he confesses this in his letter of resignation.[1] Moreover, the thought came over him at times that his strength, supposing that he could turn it to account, lay in writing rather than in teaching—in any case that he was coming to have views of his own and that he ought to be developing them. Questions of this sort had disturbed his academic serenity before. Twice—in 1874 and even as early as 1870—he had been tempted to renounce his university work: his free time was too little, and he could not say his best "to the boys."[2] But now a grave illness precipitated matters, and he definitively put an end to his teaching career. The University granted him a pension of 3,000 francs a year, and with this and a little income of his own (the whole amounting to around $1,000.00) he began that entirely private life as a thinker which ended with his apoplectic stroke ten years later. The intervening years were spent mostly in the south of Europe—as stated in the opening chapter. It was a lonely existence for the most part; he sorely missed the presence and sympathy of friends. Indeed, he had already lost many of his early friends, so unusual was the course his thinking had taken. He found refuge with books
