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Amor Fati
It was Meta’s last day in Sils Maria, Switzerland, and she planned to spend as much of it as she
could outdoors.
Friedrich’s favorite walk was around the east bank of Lake Silvaplana, half a kilometer from
town. The lake was a shimmering, crystalline thing this time of year, wreathed by the mountains
on a horizon pulverized by white peaks. It was on walks around this lake that he and Meta had
first bonded four summers ago. This was how she wanted to spend her last day with him. This
was how she wanted to remember him.
They left shortly after breakfast. The sun was perfect, and the air was silky. She led, and he
hobbled along behind her with his walking stick. They passed barns and fields of cattle and a
small sugar beet farm. Friedrich joked that the cows would be his most intellectual companions
once Meta left. The two laughed and sang and picked walnuts as they went.
They stopped and ate around noon, beneath a larch tree. It was then that Meta began to
worry. They had come far in their excitement. Much farther than she had anticipated. And now
she could see that Friedrich was struggling, both physically and mentally, to keep it together.
The walk back was arduous for him. He dragged noticeably now. And the reality of her
leaving the next morning fell over them like an ominous moon, a pall upon their words.
He had grown grumpy, and achy. The stops were frequent. And he began muttering to
himself.
Not like this, Meta thought. She didn’t want to leave him like this, but she must.
It was late afternoon by the time they approached the village. The sun was waning, and the
air was now a burden. Friedrich lagged by a good twenty meters, yet Meta knew the only way to
get him all the way home was by not stopping for him.
They passed the same sugar beet farm, the same barn and the same cattle, his new
companions.
“What was that?” Friedrich shouted. “Where has God gone, you say?”
Meta turned around and knew what she would find before she even saw it: Friedrich, walking
stick waving in the air, shouting maniacally at a small group of cows chewing in front of him.
“I shall tell you,” he said, breathing heavily. He raised his stick and gestured to the
mountains around. “We have killed him—you and I! We are his murderers. But how have we
done this?”
The cows chewed placidly. One swatted a fly with its tail.
“How were we able to drink up the seas? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon?
What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Are we not perpetually falling in all
directions? Are we not straying as though through some Infinite nothing?”
22
“Friedrich, this is silly,” Meta said, trying to grab his sleeve and pull him along. But he
yanked his arm away; there was madness in his eyes.
23
“Where is God? God is Dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him,” he declared.
“Please, stop this nonsense, Friedrich. Come on, let’s go to the house.”
“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and
mightiest of all has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?”
Meta shook her head. It was no use. This was it. This was how it would end. She began to
walk away.
“What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred
games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we
ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
Silence. A moo rang out in the distance.
“Man is a rope, tied between beast and Superman—a rope over an abyss. What is great in
man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture [to
something greater.]”
24
The words struck her. She turned and locked her gaze on his. It was this idea of man being an
overture to something greater that had drawn her to Nietzsche so many years ago. It was this
thought that had intellectually seduced her, because, for her, feminism and women’s liberation
(her ideological religion) were that “something greater.” But, she realized, to Nietzsche, it was
simply another construct, another conceit, another human failure, another dead god.
Meta would go on and do great things. In Germany and Austria, she would organize marches
for women’s suffrage—and achieve it. She would inspire thousands of women worldwide to
stand up for their own god projects, for their own redemption, their own liberation. She would
quietly, anonymously, change the world. She would liberate and free more human beings than
Nietzsche and most other “great” men, yet she would do this from the shadows, from the
backstage of history. Indeed, today, she is known mostly for being the friend of Friedrich
Nietzsche—not as a star of women’s liberation, but as a supporting character in a play about a
man who correctly prophesized a hundred years of ideological destruction. Like a hidden thread,
she would hold the world together, despite being barely seen and quickly forgotten.
She would go on, though. She knew she would. She must go on and attempt to cross the
abyss, as we all must do; to live for others despite still not knowing how to live for herself.
“Meta,” Nietzsche said.
“Yes?”
“I love those who do not know how to live,” he said. “For they are the ones who cross over.”
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