254 NietzscheNietzsche came to her front door every morning so that they could take
long walks and converse for hours on end. Salomé wrote: "We have been
talking ourselves absolutely to death.... Strange how in the course of
our conversations we manage inadvertendy to descend into abysses and
those dizzying places people go all alone to gaze down into the depths.
We have always chosen the mountain goat paths. If somebody had lis-
tened in on our conversations, he would have thought that two devils
were talking" (15,125; Chronik).
What were they talking about? Surely not about their feelings for
each other. On only one occasion did Nietzsche whisper to Salomé:
"Monte Sacro—I have you to thank for the most delightful dream of
my life" (Peters, Lou Andreas-Salomé 133). The death of God and reli-
gious longing were their major topics of conversation. Salomé wrote:
"We share a religious streak in our natures. Perhaps it has become so
prominent in us precisely because we are free spirits in the extreme. In a
free spirit, religious feeling cannot appeal to any divine power or heaven
and culminate in frailty, fear, and avarice, which are the cornerstones of
religion. In the free spirit the religious need that originates in religion
can ... be reflected back onto itself and become the heroic strength of
one's being, the desire to dedicate oneself to a illustrious goal." She
claimed that Nietzsche's character exhibited a high degree of this heroic
trait. For this reason, we should expect "that he will appear to us as the
promulgator of a new religion, and it will be the sort that recruits
heroes as its disciples" (Peters, Lou Andreas-Salomé 136). Salomé, a keen
observer of human nature, wrote this statement several months before
Nietzsche actually undertook the attempt to expound a kind of religion
in Zarathustra.
These weeks in Tautenburg were happy and intense, but there were
also moments in which Salomé sensed Nietzsche's alien, uncanny qual-
ity: "In some deep dark corner of our beings," she wrote, "we are
worlds apart. Nietzsche's nature is like an old casde that conceals within
it many a dark dungeon and hidden basement room, not apparent at
first glance and yet likely to contain all the essentials. It is strange, but