Nietzsche in Turin [antikvár]

PREFACE This book is an attempt to befriend Nietzsche. Philosophers may smile, other readers may doubt the efficiency of my social behaviour. But it seems to me important to know, approximately, what it was like to walk down the road with this strained, charming, malicious and misunderstood thinker so important to the present age. He was perhaps the most original European philosopher of the nineteenth century. Despite being a closet metaphysician, he wrestled with problems 'near at hand', problems of pain and loneliness and joy and uncertainty, in a thoroughly advanced way. He wondered at the inadequacy of science and the Christian church to make everyday life meaningful. He hated everything from big towns to newspapers, from nationalism to mesmerizing and narcotic modern art: anything that compromised the freedom of the human spirit - and of course all these things you may see and may still want to weigh up in the street today. Our late-flowering encounter, not the first but the most substantial, began in a Turin square where I was reading his direct, warm and surprisingly unsolemn letters of 1888. The square was small and shady, surrounded by the quiet back entrances of commercial buildings, lock-up garages and a few dwellings, not far from the cathedral which guards a piece of cloth absurdly identified as Christ's shroud. A long low wall down one side of this tranquil triangle provides a familiar place for local people to gather. I happened upon it by chance and not