southerly direction up the glorious road to Zoagli, which rises aloft
through a forest of pines and gives one a view far out into the sea. In
the afternoon, as often as my health permitted, I walked round the whole
bay from Santa Margherita to beyond Porto Fino. This spot was all the more
interesting to me, inasmuch as it was so dearly loved by the Emperor
Frederick III. In the autumn of 1886 I chanced to be there again when he
was revisiting this small, forgotten world of happiness for the last time.
It was on these two roads that all 'Zarathustra' came to me, above all
Zarathustra himself as a type;--I ought rather to say that it was on these
walks that these ideas waylaid me."

The first part of "Zarathustra" was written in about ten days--that is to
say, from the beginning to about the middle of February 1883. "The last
lines were written precisely in the hallowed hour when Richard Wagner gave
up the ghost in Venice."

With the exception of the ten days occupied in composing the first part of
this book, my brother often referred to this winter as the hardest and
sickliest he had ever experienced. He did not, however, mean thereby that
his former disorders were troubling him, but that he was suffering from a
severe attack of influenza which he had caught in Santa Margherita, and
which tormented him for several weeks after his arrival in Genoa. As a
matter of fact, however, what he complained of most was his spiritual
condition--that indescribable forsakenness--to which he gives such
heartrending expression in "Zarathustra". Even the reception which the
first part met with at the hands of friends and acquaintances was extremely
disheartening: for almost all those to whom he presented copies of the
work misunderstood it. "I found no one ripe for many of my thoughts; the
case of 'Zarathustra' proves that one can speak with the utmost clearness,
and yet not be heard by any one." My brother was very much discouraged by