This post has tHREE parts. Click here for the SECOND part, “STORM-PIECE”. CLICK HERE FOR THE THIRD PART, “OLD MEN”.
1. Stefan Zweig, Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: The Struggle with the Daemon, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (1939; New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 526.
He is in a strange room, and always it is dark. No more sunshine, no light at all, either within or without. People talk in the room. A woman among them, surely it is his sister? He had thought she was travelling. She reads aloud to him, now from one book, now from another. Books? “Was not I once a writer of books?” Comes a gentle answer, but he cannot understand. One in whose soul such a hurricane has raged grows deaf to ordinary speech.1