Lou Salomé and I he Quest for Intimacy 257employed this logic to defend Salomé to his sister, claiming that "any
disparagement of her is a disparagement of me first and foremost" (B
6,254; Sept. 9, 1882). When Nietzsche decried Salomé after their sepa-
ration, he was indeed hurting himself. To return to our earlier question:
What did he hold against her? The fact that she understood him so well?
Surely that could not be turned to her disadvantage. No, the truly
unbearable realization for Nietzsche was the fact that she understood
him completely and then, with her boundless curiosity for people, sim-
ply moved on to others and did not remain under his spell. To make mat-
ters worse, she left him behind as a mere stage in her educational career.
It was impossible for him to tell Salomé: You have been invited to the
table of another king. Nietzsche did not display the imperturbable sov-
ereignty of Zarathustra, who requires his disciples to let go of him and
leave once they have found him.
It deeply wounded Nietzsche that Salomé had broken free of him and
gone her way without him. He felt exploited and abused because his dis-
ciple had made it clear that she understood him, but also understood
how to find other teachers for hersel£ Nietzsche was gready offended.
He had abandoned himself to her and then found himself abandoned by
her. Now, in the winter of 1882-83, he felt that he had to rely on himself
as never before. In December 1882, he wrote to Franz Overbeck: "Now
I am facing my task all alone. ... I need a bulwark against the unen-
durable" (B 6,306). Two weeks later came the period of ten days in which
he wrote the first part of Zarathustra as though in a trance. Without a
doubt, this work was his ominous^4 'bulwark against the unendurable."
The work on Zarathustra did not really feel like work; it was more like an
ecstatic game that transformed Nietzsche, lifting him above the tumult
of everyday existence into the serene atmosphere of dignified messages.
He wrote to Franz Overbeck on February 10, 1883: "I feel as though
lightning has struck—for a brief period, I was completely in my element
and in my light. And now it is over" (B 6,325).