The Finale in Turin 309Zarathustra dances like the Hindu god Shiva when he has reached this
foundation. Shortly before his breakdown, Nietzsche was observed by
his landlady, the wife of the kiosk owner in Turin, behaving in this very
way. She reported hearing the professor singing in his room. Alarmed by
a series of odd sounds, she peered through the keyhole, where she found
him "dancing naked" (Verecchia 265).
There is no doubt that, at his best moments, Nietzsche achieved a
playful facility of language and ideas and an agility suitable for dancing
even amid suffering and a heavy burden of thought. His cheerfulness
"in spite of it all" was a mixture of ecstasy and composure. He located
viewpoints from which life really did seem one big game. During his
final weeks in Turin, however, he shed the inhibitions that are necessary
even for games, and he began to let himself be pulled along by the drift
of his language and his unencumbered thoughts without offering any
resistance. This lack of restraint could no longer be considered a
"game," because the player had forfeited his sovereignty.
In addition to the morality of pity and a submissive tendency, which
self-encouragement to embrace life necessitates, so-called decadence
was also a Christian burden for Nietzsche. His Case of Wagner, a polemic
against the composer written in eady 1888, made the theme of deca-
dence its focal point. Nietzsche owned up to his brush with decadence,
but asserted that he had surmounted it, in contrast to Wagner, whose art
continued to be shaped by decadence through and through. "Just as
much as Wagner, I am a child of these times, which means a decadent: the
difference being that I understood this and resisted it. The philosopher
in me resisted it" (6,11; CITPreface).
What is decadence? For Nietzsche, it is a major cultural force, like the
Dionysian and Apollonian, shaping not only the artistic sphere but all
areas of life. Decadence can be summed up as the attempt to draw sub-
de pleasures from the phantom pain of a vanished God. "Everything
that has ever grown on the soil of impoverished life, all the counterfeiting
of transcendence and of the beyond, has its most sublime advocate in
Wagner's art" (6,43; CW Postscript). In the epoch of decadence, the