312 Nietzsche
again:^4 There are nights in which I can no longer endure myself; it is
thoroughly humiliating" (B 8,231).
Several years earlier, he had asserted that "nothing is true, and every-
thing is allowed," but added the encouraging remark that we would be
able to let our creative power have free rein to invent practical and life-
enhancing truths. Now, he declared, we can establish principles that will
advance the finest exemplars of the human race; we can move ahead in
free territory and embark on a voyage to unknown shores of the creative
spirit. Horizons will recede and the unknown penetrate into us.
Nietzsche had written all of this and worked it through in his mind.
Having done so, he sensed that the boundless horizon was no longer just
a conceivable notion. It began to suffuse his basic disposition and his
entire attitude toward life. He was being taken over by something oddly
lacking in resistance, as though his thinking were breaking free of its
supports and drifting away. Nothing could hold him back.
It is quite easy to locate the very moment of Nietzsche's transition
from breaking free to letting go. In a letter to Franz Overbeck on
February 3, 1888, he depicted the "black despair" that was clutching at
him, and lamented the "perpetual lack of a truly refreshing and healing
human love, the absurd isolation it involves and the fact that any remain-
ing connection to people only causes afflictions" (B 8,242). Because he
considered himself a monster in the captivity of people to whom he
meant nothing, and because he was surrounded by people who were not
there (to state it paradoxically), he had to fight, struggle, and rant. In a
condition like this, "any emotion does a person good, provided it is a
violent emotion. People should no longer expect ^beautiful things' of
me" (B 8,242). So much for "breaking free."
Three months later in Turin came the moment of "letting go." On
May 17,1888, Nietzsche wrote to Peter Gast: "Dear Friend, forgive me
this letter, which is perhaps overly cheerful, but after I have been deval-
uating values' day after day and had reason to be very serious, there is a
certain disastrous inevitability to cheerfulness" (B 8,317). Cheerfulness
became a disaster, causing him to drift away. The intoxicated current