32 Nietzsche
Nietzsche provided details of these childhood years in his earlier auto-
biographical sketches. Subsequently, however, he began to wonder
whether he had actually experienced these incidents or was merely par-
roting what others had told him. Finally, unable to reconstruct his own
experiential perspective, he opted to omit this phase.
For the following period, he placed particular emphasis on the cir-
cumstance that the "death of such an outstanding father" brought him
under the exclusive care of women, thus depriving him of male super-
vision, which he sorely missed. As a result, "a yearning for something
new, perhaps also a thirst for knowledge" (/3,67), led him "to the most
diverse educational materials in a highly chaotic manner." Between the
ages of nine and fifteen, he strove to acquire "universal knowledge."
With the same "almost doctrinaire fervor," he continued to record every
last detail of his childhood games. He also claimed to have devoted the
same diligence to the^ <chorrendous poems" he composed during this
period. At the age of twenty, Nietzsche came to understand that he
knew how to construe this diligent, yet eccentric, characteristic of his
intellectual enterprises. This exuberant prodigy took an awkward and
precocious stab at self-discipline, since there was no paternal authority
to impose discipline on him. Once he was accepted into the boarding
school at Pforta, however—an event that signaled the second phase of
his young years—the teachers put an end to his "aimless wandering." A
similar development from boundless meandering to rigorous discipline
was evident in his early passion for music and composition. In the Pforta
school, he took pains "to work against the trivializing effect of 'improv-
isation' by gaining a thorough mastery of writing methods" (/3,68). His
teachers initially supported him in this effort, and later he pursued his
passion for writing on his own.
Although he would sometimes forbid himself to improvise while
playing music, when it came to writing about subjects other than his own
life, he gave free rein to his fantasy and used his characters to experiment
with his passion for writing. In April 1859, for instance, Nietzsche drafted
a free verse drama about the Titan Prometheus, who would not stand for