famous seemed to spill out of him like fogged breath in cold air. “Talking too
much about yourself can also be a means to conceal yourself,” he would
spontaneously add, quickly silencing the room.^2
Meta often found herself speechless in his presence, not because of any
overwhelmed emotion, but merely because her mind felt as though it were
constantly a few paces behind his and needed a moment to catch up.
Yet, Meta was no intellectual slouch. In fact, she was a badass of her time.
Meta was the first woman ever to earn a PhD in Switzerland. She was also
one of the world’s leading feminist writers and activists. She spoke four
languages fluently and published articles all over Europe arguing for women’s
rights, a radical idea at the time. She was well traveled, brilliant, and
headstrong.^3 And when she stumbled upon Nietzsche’s work, she felt she had
finally found someone whose ideas could push women’s liberation out into
the world.
Here was a man who argued for the empowerment of the individual, for
radical personal responsibility. Here was a man who believed that individual
aptitude mattered more than anything, that each human not only deserved
expansion into his or her full potential but had the duty to exercise and push
for that expansion. Nietzsche put into words, Meta believed, the core ideas
and conceptual frameworks that would ultimately empower women and lead
them out of their perpetual servitude.
But there was only one problem: Nietzsche wasn’t a feminist. In fact, he
found the whole idea of women’s liberation ridiculous.
This didn’t deter Meta. He was a man of reason; he could be persuaded.
He simply needed to recognize his own prejudice and be freed from it. She
began visiting him regularly, and soon they became close friends and
intellectual companions. They spent summers in Switzerland, winters in
France and Italy, forays into Venice, quick trips doubling back to Germany
and then Switzerland again.
As the years wore on, Meta discovered that behind Nietzsche’s
penetrating eyes and gigantic mustache was a bundle of contradictions. He
wrote obsessively of power while being himself frail and weak. He preached
radical responsibility and self-reliance despite being wholly dependent on
(mostly female) friends and family to take care of and support him. He cursed
the fickle reviewers and academics who panned his work or refused to read it,
while simultaneously boasting that his lack of popular success only proved his
brilliance—as he once proclaimed, “My time has not come yet, some men are
born posthumously.”^4