234 Nietzsche
sion. Sunny strolls took him to the outlying areas of Genoa. The book
is replete with references to the varied coastal landscape, the cliffs, the
villas and summer houses that dotted the hills, and the vistas of the sea.
This scenery, in which success in life was revealed to Nietzsche, crops up
rime and again in The Gay Science, as in the following passage: "This area
is studded with the images of bold and high-handed people. They have
lived and have wanted to live on—they tell me this with their houses,
which are built and decorated for centuries to come and not for the
fleeting hour; they were positively disposed to life, however angry they
often may have been at themselves" (3,531; GS§ 291).
Apart from its lighter tone, does this book offer a central focus?
Nietzsche often cautioned readers who perused the potpourri of his
thoughts not to overlook the "fundamental productive ideas," and he
pointed out the inner unity of his aphoristic production to his friends.
He claimed that his writings dealt "with the long logic of a very specific
philosophical sensibility" and not "with a hodgepodge of a hundred ran-
dom paradoxes and heterodoxies" (Löwith 120). However, there is
something forced about any attempt to grasp this "logic," which holds
everything together even while spreading it out. Nietzsche was well
aware of why he did not present it in a pure and simple form, but instead,
as a master of circuitousness, dropped hints and clues—usually from the
sidelines. He organized his gardens of theory in such a way that anyone
on the lookout for their central arguments would almost inevitably fall
flat on his face. Nietzsche hid out in his labyrinth, hoping to be discov-
ered by means of long, winding paths. And why should we not lose our
way on the search for him? Perhaps it would even be the best thing that
could happen to us. Later Nietzsche had his Zarathustra tell his disciples:
if you have yet to find yourselves, you have found me too soon. Hence
he arranged his books in such a way that the ideal outcome of a reader's
search for ideas would culminate in an encounter with the reader's own
ideas. Discovering Nietzsche in the process was almost beside the point;
the crucial question is whether one has discovered thinking per se. One's
own thinking is the Ariadne to which one should return.