Safe Haven

The Eternal Return

AN EXISTENTIAL IMPERATIVE

In 1879, at only 35 years of age, Friedrich Nietzsche held the classical philology chair at the University of Basel in Switzerland—the same institution that housed the bickering Bernoullis over the preceding centuries. (It's a historic place—ground zero.) Nietzsche had held this venerable position for 10 years, which was unheard of at such a young age.

But he much preferred the country life to the city life, and he would make sojourns from Basel into the Swiss countryside whenever he could. The forests bordering the High Rhine were among his favorites, such as around Daniel Bernoulli's logarithmic Rhine Falls—whose rumbling inspired Nietzsche as it cascaded “headlong towards infinity.” The area would purportedly always have a special connection with his writings.

Unfortunately, his health had been increasingly in decline. As a result, he abruptly decided to abandon Basel and retire to the life of a full‐time wandering writer. Having revoked his Prussian citizenship, and with multiple failed awkward attempts at marriage proposals, he became a stateless, reclusive, wandering philosopher for the remaining two decades of his short life (though syphilitic insanity would tragically consume his final decade). He wintered in Nice, Genoa, and Turin, and summered in Sils‐Maria near Saint Moritz in Switzerland's Engadine Valley. He spent his ...