To Glorify His Majesty, King Squirrel I

So I’m reading As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, by Michael Saler. When up pops a quote from the Julian Young biography of Nietzsche, referencing a passage by Nietzsche’s sister, which reads:

My brother and I … created an imaginary world of our own in which tiny china figures of men and animals, lead soldiers, etc., all revolved round one central personality in the shape of a little porcelain squirrel about an inch and a half high whom we called King Squirrel I … It never for a moment entered our heads that there is nothing regal about a squirrel; on the contrary, we considered that it had a most majestic presence … this small king gave rise to all sorts of joyous little ceremonies. – Everything that my brother made was in honour of King Squirrel; all his musical productions were to glorify His Majesty; on his birthday … poems were recited and plays acted, all of which were written by my brother. King Squirrel was a patron of art; he must have a picture gallery. Fritz painted one hung round with Madonnas, landscapes, etc., etc. A particularly beautiful picture represented a room in an old monastery in which an old-fashioned lamp burnt in a niche and filled the whole apartment with a quaint glow.

Now we know the true meaning of ascetic ideals! It all goes back to that picture in a picture; that room in the old monastery with the old-fashioned lamp! All for King Squirrel I! All of Nietzsche’s philosophy, in honor of King Squirrel I! Such pathos of distance. Lone squirrel, so small, so high. Lone squirrel wanders in his art gallery.

As Nietzsche writes in the Prologue to Genealogy:

But the fact that today I still stand by these ideas, that in the intervening time they themselves have constantly become more strongly associated with one another, in fact, have grown into each other and intertwined, that reinforces in me the joyful confidence that they may not have originally developed in me as single, random, or sporadic ideas, but up out of a common root … For that’s the only thing appropriate to a philosopher. We have no right to be scattered in any way: we are not permitted to make isolated mistakes or to run into isolated truths. By contrast, our ideas, our values, our affirmations and denials, our if’s and whether’s, grow out of us from the same necessity which makes a tree bear its fruit—totally related and interlinked amongst each other, witnesses of one will, one health, one soil, one sun.—As for the question whether these fruits of ours taste good to you —what does that matter to the trees! What concern is that to us, we philosophers! . . .

As Zarathustra teaches: “Only through esteeming is there value, and without esteeming the nut of existence would be hollow.”

King Squirrel I is not amused by hollow nuts of existence.

From Daybreak:

This too is tolerance. -‘To have lain a minute too long on the glowing coals and have got a little burned – that does no harm, to men or to chestnuts! It is only this little bit of hardening and bitterness which will let us taste how sweet and soft the kernel is’. – Yes! That is your judgment, you who intend to enjoy these things! You sublime cannibals!

Nietzsche will feed himself to King Squirrel I – who is also … himself! We await das Ubereichhörnchen!

All this supports my contention that Nietzsche was crucially influenced by Bullwer-Lytton’s Devereux:

A miniature of Oliver Cromwell, placed over the chimney-piece, forcibly arrested my attention.

“It is the only portrait of the Protector I ever saw,” said I, “which impresses on me the certainty of a likeness; that resolute gloomy brow,—that stubborn lip,—that heavy, yet not stolid expression,—all seem to warrant a resemblance to that singular and fortunate man, to whom folly appears to have been as great an instrument of success as wisdom, and who rose to the supreme power perhaps no less from a pitiable fanaticism than an admirable genius. So true is it that great men often soar to their height by qualities the least obvious to the spectator, and (to stoop to a low comparison) resemble that animal* in which a common ligament supplies the place and possesses the property of wings.”

*The flying squirrel.

The old man smiled very slightly as I made this remark. “If this be true,” said he, with an impressive tone, “though we may wonder less at the talents of the Protector, we must be more indulgent to his character, nor condemn him for insincerity when at heart he himself was deceived.”

“It is in that light,” said I, “that I have always viewed his conduct. And though myself, by prejudice, a Cavalier and a Tory, I own that Cromwell (hypocrite as he is esteemed) appears to me as much to have exceeded his royal antagonist and victim in the virtue of sincerity, as he did in the grandeur of his genius and the profound consistency of his ambition.”

“Sir,” said my host, with a warmth that astonished me, “you seem to have known that man, so justly do you judge him. Yes,” said he, after a pause, “yes, perhaps no one ever so varnished to his own breast his designs; no one, so covetous of glory, was ever so duped by conscience; no one ever rose to such a height through so few acts that seemed to himself worthy of remorse.”

I am convinced Nietzsche is having a dark, uncharacteristic moment of doubt concerning his uncommon liege, King Squirrel I, when he quotes Cromwell – without attribution! – in “Schopenhauer as Educator”:

There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would bear you through this stream; but only at the cost of yourself: you would put yourself in pawn and lose yourself. There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead? Do not ask, go along it. Who was it who said: ‘a man never rises higher than when he does not know whither his path can still lead him’?

But how can a man rise above himself unless he is, in effect, a flying squirrel. Hence no man?

Melville meditates on the self-same Bullwer-Lytton passage, in The Confidence-Man (chapter 14):

For how does it couple with another requirement — equally insisted upon, perhaps — that, while to all fiction is allowed some play of invention, yet, fiction based on fact should never be contradictory to it; and is it not a fact, that, in real life, a consistent character is a rara avis? Which being so, the distaste of readers to the contrary sort in books, can hardly arise from any sense of their untrueness. It may rather be from perplexity as to understanding them. But if the acutest sage be often at his wits’ ends to understand living character, shall those who are not sages expect to run and read character in those mere phantoms which flit along a page, like shadows along a wall? That fiction, where every character can, by reason of its consistency, be comprehended at a glance, either exhibits but sections of character, making them appear for wholes, or else is very untrue to reality; while, on the other hand, that author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at different periods, as much at variance with itself as the butterfly is with the caterpillar into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.

As Nietzsche also wonders: how can we be true to ourselves without that tell-tale (dare I say tell-tail!) inconsistency that is the mark of truth – also, of the squirrel?

Finally, William James responds thoughtfully to all this, entering into a dialogue with Bullwer-Lytton and Nietzsche, without mentioning them by name (thanks for the reference, Josh!):

The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Every one had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: “Which party is right,” I said, “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb ‘to go round’ in one practical fashion or the other.”

Does the man go round the squirrel, or does the squirrel go round the man?

There is no more fundamental question, regarding the philosophy of Nietzsche. Or any philosophy. Nothing less than the nut of Being risks being forgotten here, in the nut-hoard of Becoming, until the spring of thought melts the winter snow drifts of complacency.