Setting the Stage for The Will to Power 299about what I might have written back then. It is completely gone from
my memory" {B 8,23). Sometimes Nietzsche even shied away from read-
ing his own writings. In 1886, the year in which he added a series of pref-
aces to his earlier books, he still resisted rereading the books themselves.
On October 31, 1886, he wrote to Gast: "It seems lucky in retrospect
that I had neither Human, All Too Human nor The Birth of Tragedy on hand
when I wrote those prefaces. Just between us, I can no longer stand all
of that stuff" (Β 7,274). This remark was written in a fit of depression.
Two years later, during his final autumn in Turin, when he was brimming
with euphoria after reading his earlier works, he wrote to Gast: "For the
past four weeks, I have finally understood my own writings; not only
that, I admire them. In all seriousness, I really never knew what they sig-
nify. I would be lying if I claimed that they (apart from Zarathustra) had
impressed me" (B 8,545; Dec 22, 1888). During the summer of that
year, he asked Meta von Salis for a copy of On the Genealogy of Morals,
which had been published the preceding year. Rereading this book,
which was barely one year old, induced him to remark: "1 was astonished
when I first looked at it Essentially, I remembered only the tides of
the three treatises; the rest, which is to say the contents, had gone right
out of my head" (Β 8,396; Aug. 22, 1888). The frequent repetitions in
Nietzsche's works are partly attributable to the fact that he simply forgot
what he had already written.
In 1888, Nietzsche remarked that his Twilight of the Idols contained his
"essential philosophical heterodoxies" (.Β 8,417; Sept. 12, 1888). The
same could be said of Beyond Good and EviL He scrutinized the series of
metaphysical fictions the Western mind had conjured up for the imagi-
nary world of durability, unity, and permanence as a bulwark against the
Heraclitean "absolute flow" (9,503) of becoming and fading. There are
no "dialectic" antitheses, he concluded, but only fluid transitions, and
most assuredly no historical laws. (Kantian) ideas of the a priori nature
of our reason are nothing but religious holdovers. They are cherished
notions of the litde eternities within finite human understanding. The
"ego" is a fiction altogether. There are only events and actions, even for