“Evening of my life! the sun sets; soon thou wilt no longer thirst, O thirsty heart.” He wrote the Ecce Homo; he wrote to Peter Gast, signing himself “The Crucified,” and to Cosima Wagner, saying, “Ariadne, I love thee.” In these two last letters—which seemed to carry the final evidence of his madness—we have the clearest confessions of his destiny. Nietzsche was content to be an Antichrist, and in being an Antichrist he was perforce to some extent a Christ. He was a Dionysos of grief, a man tormented by others and by himself. He died, I assure you, as on a Palestinian cross.
To Cosima Wagner, in the last hour before the clouding of his mind, he wrote his love. Cosima Wagner was to him Ariadne, and Ariadne meant love. Perhaps he had loved her secretly; perhaps in his break with Wagner there was an element of jealousy. However that may be, that final declaration of his is far more profound, far more weighty than it seems. For Cosima-Ariadne was to him humanity itself, joyous, laughing, full of life and strength—that same humanity that had been the support of Wagner in his triumph.
For Nietzsche, that support had failed. His love had found no chance to spend itself in fullness and in liberty. It was indeed of love, shut in and unappeased, that Nietzsche died. We slew him—all of us—by our common human behavior. Nor will he be our last victim.
