Inventing a Life 31thunder, and rainstorms poured down from the heavens, igniting his
fantasy. He pronounced such moments "deliciously ferocious."
In July 1861, at boarding school in Pforta, Nietzsche composed an
essay on Ermanarich, king of the Ostrogoths. He considered this essay
his finest work well into his college years. The essay positively reveled in
tumultuous images of the forces of nature. Every word in the Germanic
sagas was said to be "like lightning, powerful and full of significance."
He was analyzing literary texts here, but these were also the dreams of a
pubescent schoolboy who recognized that language can pierce its way
into life. Nietzsche sought the words that would wield the magical power
to "shatter his audience" (/2,285). He took pleasure in quoting a verse
from the saga: "We have fought beautifully: we sit on corpses / That we
felled, like eagles on branches" (J 2,289).
Deaths in the family were described in elaborate detail, with occa-
sional religious overtones. In his first autobiographical endeavor, which
depicted the circumstances under which he learned about the death of
his aunt, he wrote: "1 awaited the news with some trepidation, but once
I had heard the beginning, I went outside and cried bitterly" (/1,20).
Shortly thereafter, he relinquished this biblical style in both prose and
poetry, which he frequendy annotated, critiqued, and categorized as a
series of creative periods. In September 1858, he declared that his earli-
est poems had been profound, but unwieldy. The next period was
marked by a lighter tone, giving greater priority to ornamentation than
to ideas. His third period began on February 2,1858, the day his grand-
mother died. He finally discovered how to couple poetic agility with
richness of thought, "loveliness with vigor" (/1,27). He was now deter-
mined to create a new poem every night in this new mode and prepare
a catalog of his lyrical works. It was evident that he planned to fashion a
life out of jaunty words.
Nietzsche was bent on ordering and classifying his life as well as his
literature. The young author's pre-university life, as of 1864, fell into
three distinct stages. The earliest period ended when he was five, with his
father's death and the family's move from Röcken to Naumburg.