1. Complete and utter madness fell upon him [Nietzsche] in 1888, but that his mind was crumbling when he wrote Ecce Homo is shown by the chapter-headings of this extraordinary autobiography: Why I am so Wise; Why I am so Clever; Why I write such Good Books; Why I am Destiny. Or the title of the book itself, in which he challenges comparison with Christ. It ends on a prophetic note, announcing the doom of Christian civilization. In the last blaze of an expiring mind he predicts that the comfortable belief in steady progress and the very structure of bourgeois society will crumble in a fury of ideological war.

"I contradict as has never been done before, and am nevertheless the opposite of a denying spirit. . . . I am a messenger of joy, such as there never was, I am conscious of a task so lofty that the very idea of it was lacking until now: only from my time onwards do hopes arise again. In every way I am necessarily also the man of destiny. For when truth enters into conflict with the lies of thousands of years, we shall have commotions, a convulsion of earthquakes, a confounding of mountain and valley, the like of which has never been dreamed of. The conception of politics then goes over wholly into a spiritual war, all the organizations of power in the old society are blown into the air---they all rest on lies: there will be wars such as there have never been on earth. . . . Have you understood me? Dionysus against the Crucified."

In December, 1888, Nietzsche wrote a series of letters to various friends which very naturally alarmed them. To Strindberg he wrote: "I have summoned a Council of Princes at Rome, I shall have the young Kaiser shot. . . . Nietzsche Caesar." To Jacob Burckhardt: "That was only a little joke, on account of which I overtook the tedium of having created a world. Now you are---thou art---our greatest teacher; for I, together with Ariadne, have only to be the golden balance of all things, we have in every part those who are above us. Dionysus." And to Cosima Wagner: "Ariadne, I love Thee. Dionysus."

Disorientation, euphoria, and delirium led to a dreadful climax in which he danced about the room and improvised on the piano, screaming that he was the successor of the dead God. A doctor attending him noted in his report: "The patient is generally excited, eats a great deal and is continually asking for food . . . maintains he is a famous man, is constantly asking for women."

From then on he ceased to be a person, he became a mere entry in a clinical case-book. At the mental hospital in Jena he declared: "My wife Cosima Wagner brought me here." He had reached the point-of-no-return.

In the last decade of his life he was no unhappy---except perhaps during occasional maniacal outbursts---but his mind vegetated in a vacancy which was like a ghastly travesty of the Nirvana he had once repudiated.

- from The Feast of Unreason, by Hector Hawton, pp 91-92

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