40 Nietzscheity with the help of the stage, which unlocked his fantasy. He began to
write a novel as a means of trying out new roles. The narrator of this
work was a cynical nihilist, a villainous figure vaguely reminiscent of
Lord Byron or of William Lovell, the tide character of a novel by
Ludwig Tieck. The problem facing Nietzsche's narrator is that life has
lost its mystery. "I know myself through and through And now, like
a ratde on the treadmill, I lug the rope they call fate at a nice leisurely
pace" (/2,70). Reveling in adolescent and dallying fantasies, the wicked
Euphorion relates how he has made a thin nun "fat" and her fat brother
"gaunt as a corpse" (the narrator adds the last phrase so that the mur-
derous point cannot possibly be missed). This attempt at writing a novel
came to a halt after two manuscript pages. Nietzsche had wanted to cre-
ate a character who suffers from too much self-transparency, though
that was not his own situation. The charm of Nietzsche's own self-
referentiality was that he remain a secret to himself. He was altogether
determined to keep things that way. He sought the vistas of the unfore-
seeable; thus, music was his priority. A few days after breaking off his
novel project, he noted: "Our emotional life is least clear to ourselves."
For this reason, it is imperative to listen to music, because music makes
the strings of our inner life resonate. Even if the result is not complete
self-realization, at least we can still feel our essence in the "resonance"
(72,89).
A person can be creative only if he remains an enigma to himself.
Nietzsche later called himself a "fan of puzzles who does not wish to
lose the enigmatic character of things" (12,144). But his own puzzling
nature was not always a source of satisfaction to him. In September
1863, he wrote to his mother and sister: "When I am able to think over
what I want for a few minutes, I seek words to a melody I have and a
melody to words I have, yet both together fail to mesh, even though they
came from a single souL But that is my lot!" (£ 1,153).
On New Year's Eve of 1864, Nietzsche, now a university student in
Bonn, rummaged through manuscripts and letters, mixed himself a hot
punch, and played the requiem from Schumann's Manfred. Having struck