The following letter, handwritten on the thinnest pastel blue stationery, was exquisitely folded and inserted in a book George picked up in an antiquarian bookshop off Harbord Street. It was a well-thumbed, mud- or blood-spattered edition of Also sprach Zarathustra. The book dealer claimed that German soldiers were gifted copies of a war-durable Zarathustra during World War I and that this was one of them. She convinced George of its authenticity, so he bought the book and the letter outright for $500 CAD, cash money. The translation of the letter from German is George's.

 

My Dearest Elsbeth,

 

I haven't written in months, and I'm truly sorry. There's not a day I don't think of you, dear Elsbeth. You alone understand me, and in you alone have I confided my darkest thoughts, my dearest. Those most recent letters were written in an extended period of stillness, though the quiet is never total as it is not infrequently punctuated by rifle fire. I have read and re-read my Zarathustra ... really for lack of anything else to read or do here in this grey-brown world ... in the ground but not yet underground. The prose has nothing of the beauty I had so enjoyed when I was at the university. And many has been the time I have screamed (in my mind) at the author to live first and write later. He hounds me relentlessly from the grave. I feel the force of his ideas in this netherworld where I pass every second, every minute, every hour, every day as a man not quite underground but conscious of being slowly buried.

 

The calm and the killing alternate in great waves, sweeping over whole armies of men, numbing them with the emptiness of a changeless calm or rousing them with the elevated anxiety of a present that jerks along like a moving picture.

 

Rolf died. A sniper bullet to the face. He was beside me. I was no comfort.

 

For days afterward, I functioned like an automaton. Everything I thought, everything I said, every move I made was as if from memory. My will seemed suspended. Remember that hot summer day we spent on the Rügen coast? We thought the sun was standing still. It felt like that, only it was not at all pleasant.

 

The calm didn't last. The bullets and shells started up again and came faster and heavier. The swarm of metal in the air was visible. Arrhythmic concussive explosions one after another shook the very earth in which we hid. Our trenches filled with dirt and mud, shrapnel and bodies. The smells were too horrid to describe. An instinct to survive kept me sensible enough to avoid becoming a moving target like those in the carnivals we sneaked off to as children at the end of summer vacation. One day I was hit. I was in an embarrassing position, but we don't always get shot when we're at our soldierly best. It was minor ... so much so that I was bandaged and back in the trenches later that afternoon.

 

Then, again there was calm. 

 

It is during this most recent calm that I find myself able to write to you again, my dear Elsbeth. I have much to say, although I'm not sure how much of it will make sense to you where you live, but you always were the intuitive and empathetic one. Please bear with me, dear sister. I'm not a madman ... yet. And I hope I can come home to you much like I was before I went away. You don't deserve me as I am, but in the interim, I am too weak to keep inside what I think and feel in this inhuman clime.

 

As I recall, Nietzsche, after writing "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," had said all he needed to say in renouncing the unwarranted arrogance of human knowledge. But he ventured too far with his metaphor of the faraway planet inhabited by self-enamoured, godlike beings. Instead of asserting an omniscient and remote eminence in allegorically predicting the inevitable demise of our fragile race—albeit seemingly deserved—N. should have simply repudiated the value of human existence in toto by terminating his own, leaving others alone to work out their own ends. However, his continuing to philosophize demonstrated that he, too, had given in to becoming a lawgiver and not just an iconoclast. He was in search of a legacy ... but would it survive the extinction of humanity? To me, he seems too kin to the extended family of kings and emperors who have sent us to be buried in the Belgian mud and our own blood. 

 

But, N. did what we humans do—he contradicted himself, reasoning himself into confusion and madness, and his vast oeuvre implicates him. Having attempted to undermine human knowledge on account of its inherent and mendacious fallibility—evidence of a recidivist Christian dogma of 'fallen man'—he negated the existential value of being human and in the same breath legislated a super-human existentialism. So, what started as a mission to tear down the idols of human self-worship became a prelude to the creation of new idols of intellectual narcissism, e.g., der Übermensch, eternal recurrence, amor fati, and the will to power. New philosophies to wage war.

 

But what if N. had topped himself in 1873? (Heinrich, a former neighbour in this ditch, had studied in London before the war and came away with some stupid English words and expressions—to 'top' oneself is to kill oneself, but in an English sort of way, I suppose.)

 

Objectively speaking—objectivity being a fleeting position for me here and now—those who came after N. but not necessarily as followers would be poorer in philosophical literature, missing out on some of the most severe extant critiques of Western civilization if not human society. The rest of us who have been influenced by his writing, in one way or another, to one degree or another, would have been without an invaluable source of human self-reflection. 

 

Then again, had he topped himself, N. would have better made his own existential point, by refusing to participate in meaningless philosophical gambits with a predetermined outcome. Best to leave, not in protest or disgust—which are more than the world deserves—but from boredom ... the profound inability and unwillingness to be entertained any longer.

 

Here, I spurn the meek dependency religion creates, disgorge the conceit and fraud of the Enlightenment, question my former taste for Zarathustra' aphorisms. One needn't believe that we—even N.—leave an indelible and eternal mark on the world. Whether we succeed in small or in great things or protest against participating in what we believe to be an absurdity or do nothing at all, I fear it will all return to nothing, perhaps even recursively. So, from that perspective, N. needn't have topped himself. It becomes a matter of no real importance.

 

Yours everlastingly,

 

Jürgen

 

P.S. How are Otto and Willy? Does Father still refuse to take them hunting with him? I will ask about Father and Mother when I write them ... another day.

 

Where some might have hesitated to profit by another's private correspondence, George was a practical man. He considered the letter to be part of a transaction. Besides, he persuaded himself that retailing Jürgen's letter would achieve a degree of immortality for him (Jürgen), which in a way put him (Jürgen) in George's debt. It's all a matter of how you look at things, George used to say.

 

He sold Zarathustra and Jürgen at a rare book auction in West Berlin for DM 10,000. The English version of the letter he published in a scholarly journal and leveraged to obtain speaking engagements at colleges across North America.

 

George—no one called him Professor—was a lecturer at Knox College. That's where I met him. I never liked the man. But the story he told—and he told it too often—was a story worth retelling. Insignificant as he was, George had wanted to be remembered. I was pleased to help.

 

Jürgen's identity remains unknown.

 

Adam Mac is the ‘brain in the vat’ guy who worries about philosophers who get really excited about mind games with absurd thought experiments, but his real fear is that smooth lobes will be our future. He lives in a windowless, mirrorless library carrel. His stories appear in An Anthology of Hardly 20/20 Flash! Fiction and Missing Stories: An Anthology of Hardly 20/20 Flash! Fiction.

 

Bienvenue au Danse, Adam.

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