ica. In a letter to her he says, "I write in this golden autumn [1888], the most beautiful I have ever known, a retrospect of my life, for myself alone. No one shall read it with the exception of a certain good lama, when she comes across the sea to visit her brother. There is nothing in it for Germans.… I mean to bury the manuscript and hide it; let it turn to mold, and when we are all mold, it may have its resurrection. Perhaps then Germans will be worthier of the great present, which I mean to make them."[1] Afterward he changed his mind, and decided to print the book. Without doubt, it is a self-glorification, but the glorifying is because of the glory of his message and in view of the peculiar and tragic situation in which he found himself. To how slight an extent he cared for himself otherwise is shown in a memorandum: "For my son Zarathustra I demand reverence, and it shall be permitted only to the fewest to listen to him. About me however, 'his father,' you may laugh, as I myself do. Or, to make use of a rhyme that stands over my house-door, and put it all in a word:
"I live in my own house,
have nowise imitated anybody else's
and laughed at every master,
who has not laughed at himself."[2]
It is as if he said, "Think of me as you will, but revere my work." Indeed, after finishing Ecce Homo, he tells a friend that now that he has got the record down, people had better not concern themselves any further about him, but about the things for which he lives (derentwegen ich da bin).[3] The fact is, the obtrusion of self was against his instincts. For long years, he testifies, he had not obtruded even his problems on the men whom he met,[4] and now he confesses that his habits and still more the pride of his instincts revolt against writing about himself as he does in Ecce Homo[5]—this though he says elsewhere that a great man may be proud enough to be unashamed even of his vanity.[6] g
Hence, though vanity and personal resentment may have
