104 Ancient Ideals
he eventually shot and consumed (the extreme of dining luxury for
him), signify his commitment to simple diet. One of Thoreau’s mo-
ments of greatest delight in Wal d e n comes when a neighboring
farmer informs him that no one can be strong and healthy eating
only vegetables. In front of the farmer, yoked to his plow, his enor-
mous bullock paws the ground, munching grass.
When Nietz sche lives in Turin, during what was probably the
only happy period of his life, he talks about his relish for the din-
ners at a certain trattoria. He boasts that in the market an old woman
who has taken a par tic u lar interest in him saves him the plumpest,
sweetest purple grapes. Does saying as much sound melancholy,
sweetly sad on Nietz sche’s part? It is part of his attempt to distance
himself from the traditional renunciations of the thinker. He
wishes to be a new kind of phi los o pher. But how much an austere
life of material simplicity actually tempts Nietz sche! In The Gene-
alogy of Morals, meaning to exorcise the spirit of the arch- ascetic
Schopenhauer, Nietz sche begins to parody the phi los o pher’s life
of renunciation. He mocks the fastidious older thinker’s re sis-
tance to certain pleasures. He laughs at Schopenhauer’s aversion to
frivolous books and to noise and seductive women. But in time the
attempted dismissal turns into something close to a panegyric.
Imagine a life that fully cleanses the body and the mind for the real
work of thinking. Imagine living in such a way that you could know
that when you left the world you had done all the work that was in
you to do. Nietz sche dreams of “a deliberate obscurity; a side-
stepping of fame; a backing away from noise, adulation, accolades,
infl uence; a modest position, a quotidian existence, something
which hides more than it reveals; occasional intercourse with
harmless and gay birds and beasts, the sight of which refreshes, a
mountainside for com pany, not a blind one but one with lakes for
eyes; sometimes even a room at a crowded inn where one is sure of