56 Nietzsche
my thoughts, and how do my thoughts form me?" inevitably becomes
the self-portrayer of his thinking·
Nietzsche began to see himself as a philosophical writer who had
moved beyond the confines of philology to a state of "drifting" into
the "unknown with the resdess hope of at some point finding a goal at
which to rest" (/ 3,336). During this period, he made the personal
acquaintance of Richard Wagner. Just a few weeks before this
encounter, he had written quite critically about Wagner in a letter to
Rohde. He portrayed the composer as the "representative of a modern
dilettantism that ingests and digests all kinds of ardstic interests" (B
2,322; Oct. 8,1868). The qualities he cherished in Schopenhauer—"the
ethical air, the Faustian odor, cross, death, and grave, etc."—turned out
to be the very ones he revered in Wagner. Three weeks later, he attended
a concert in which the overtures to Tristan and Isolde and Die Meisterringer
were performed. He resolved to keep his distance, but to no avail. "I
cannot find it in my heart to keep a cool critical detachment from this
music: every fiber and nerve of my being is tingling, and it has been a
long time since I experienced such a perpetual feeling of rapture" (Β
2,332; Oct. 27,1868).
Wagner heard about the talented student and connoisseur of music
Friedrich Nietzsche during a visit to the home of Heinrich Brockhaus,
an Orientalist in Leipzig, and expressed his wish to meet the young clas-
sical philologist Nietzsche was bursting with pride when he received his
invitation to meet the great composer. He ordered a new suit from the
tailor, which was delivered without delay, but he did not have the money
on hand to pay for it The tailor's assistant wanted to leave with it, where-
upon Nietzsche seized the assistant and a scuffle ensued, with both men
pulling at the trousers. The assistant prevailed, and fled with Nietzsche's
outfit Nietzsche described this scene to his friend Rohde: "I sit on the
sofa brooding in my shirtsleeves and examining a black cloak, trying to