Inventing a Life 41the proper mood, he was anxious, according to an entry in his diary, to
"leave aside everything else and to think only of myself" (/ 3,79).
Describing his New Year's Eve to his family, he wrote: "In hours such as
these, decisive resolutions are born For a few hours, one is elevated
above time and virtually steps outside of one's own development. One
secures and documents the past and gathers the courage and resolve to
continue on one's path" (B 2,34). This account to his mother and sister
is fairly conventional, tailored to their preconceptions, and not an accu-
rate reflection of the holiday's subde events, which he related to his diary
as a quasi-supernatural scene. In that account, Nietzsche was sitting in
the corner of the sofa in his room, his head resting on his hand, his
mind's eye reviewing scenes from the past year. Absorbed in the past, he
suddenly became aware of his surroundings and saw someone lying on
his bed, sofidy moanly and gasping. A dying man! Shadows whispered
and murmured to the dying man from every direction. And then he
knew: the old year is dying. A few moments later, the bed is empty. It gets
light again, the walls of the room recede, and a voice says: "You fools
and idiots of time, which is nowhere but in your heads! I ask you, what
have you done? If you want to be and have what you hope for, what you
await, do it" (J 3,9). In his diary, Nietzsche described this vision and
interpreted it on the spot. The gasping figure on the bed, he concluded,
is time personified, whose death remands the individual to himself.
One's own creative will, rather than time, is what transforms and devel-
ops a person. Objective time cannot be relied on, and the project of
fashioning one's own identity must be carried out by oneself.