Why do I know more than other people? Why, in general, am I so clever? I have never pondered over questions that are not really questions. I have never wasted my strength. I have no experience, for instance, of actual religious difficulties. I am quite unfamiliar with the feeling of "sinfulness." Similarly I lack a reliable criterion for determining a prick of conscience: from what one hears, a prick of conscience does not seem to me anything very worthy of veneration. . . . I dislike to leave an action of mine in the lurch; I prefer to omit utterly the bad result, the consequences, from any problem involving values. In the face of evil . consequences it is too easy to lose the proper standpoint from which to view an action. A prick of conscience seems to me a sort of "evil eye." Something that has failed should be all the more honored just because it has failed-this agrees much better with my morality.-"God," "the immortality of the soul," tcsalvation," a "beyond"-these are mere notions, to which I paid no attention, on which I never wasted any time, even as a child-though perhaps I was never enough of a child for that-I am quite unacquainted with atheism as a result, and still less as an event: with me it is instinctive. I am too inquisitive, too skeptical, too arrogant ', to let myself be satisfied with an obvious and crass solution of things. God is such an obvious and crass solution; a solution which is a sheer indelicacy to us thinkers-at bottom He is really nothing but a coarse commandment against us: ye shall not think! . . . I am much more interested in another question@n which the "salvation of humanity" depends much more than upon any piece of theological curiosity: the question of nutrition. For ordinary purposes, it may be formulated thus: "How precisely must thou nourish thyself in order to attain to thy maximum of power, or virt@ in the Renaissance style of virtue free from moralism?" Here my experiences -have been the worst possible; I am surprised that it took me so long to become aware of this question and to derive "understanding" from my experiences. Only the utter worthlessness of our German culture-its "idealism"-can to some extent explain how it was that precisely in this matter I was so baclzward that my ignorance was almost saintly. For this "culture" from first to last teaches one to lose sight of realities and instead to hunt after thoroughly problematic, so-called ideal goals, as, for instance, "classical culture"-as if we were not doomed from the start in our endeavor to unite "classical" and "German" in one concept! It is even a little comicaljust try to picture a "classically cultured" citizen of Leipzigl-Indeed, I confess that up to a very mature age, my food was quite bad@xpressed in moral terms, it was "impersonal," "selfless," "altruistic," to the glory of cooks and other fellow-Christians. For example, it was the Leipzig cookery, together with my first study of Schopenhauer (i865), that made me gravely renounce my "Will to Live." To become a malnutritient and to spoil one's stomach in the process-this problem seemed to me to be admirably solved by the above-mentioned cookery. (It is said that the year i866 introduced changes into this department.) But as to German cookery in general-what has it not got on its conscience! Soup before the meal (still called alla tedesca in the sixteenth century Venetian cook-books; meat cooked till the flavor is gone, vegetables cooked with fat and flour; the degeneration of pastries into paper-weights! Add to this the utterly bestial postprandial habits of the ancients, not merely of the ancient Germans, and you will begin to understand where German intellect had its origin-in a disordered intestinal tract. . . . German intellect is indigestion; it can assimilate nothing. But even English, which, as against German, and indeed French, diet, seems to me to be a "return to Nature"-that is to say, to cannibalism-is basically repugnant to my own instincts. It seems to me that it gives the intellect heavy feet, Englishwomen's feet. . . . The best cooking is that of Piedmont. Alcohol does not agree with me; one glass of wine or beer a day is enough to turn life into a valley of tears for me; in Munich live my antipodes. Admitting that I came to understand this rationally rather late, yet I had experienced it as a mere child. As a boy I believed that wine-drinking and tobacco-smoking were at first but youthful vanities, and later simply bad habits. Perhaps the wine of Naumburg was partly responsible for this harsh judgment. To believe that wine was exhilarating, I should have had to be a Christian-in other words, I should have had to believe in what, for me, is an absurdity. Strangely enough, whereas small largely diluted quantities of alcohol depressed me, great quantities made me act almost like a sailor on shore leave. Even as a boy I showed my bravado in this respect. To compose and transcribe a long Latin essay in one night, ambitious of emulating with my pen the austerity and terseness of my model, Sallust, and to sprinkle the exercise with a few strong hot toddiesthis procedure, while I was a pupil at the venerable old school of Pforta, did not disagree in the least with my physiology, nor perhaps with that of Sallust-however badly it may have agreed with dignified Pforta. Later on, towards the middle of my life, I grew more and more decisive in my opposition to spirituous drinks: 1, an opponent of vegetarianism from experience-like Richard Wagner, who reconverted in annot with sufficient earnest-ness advise all more spiritual natures to abstain absolutely from alcohol. Water answers the same purpose. I prefer those places where there are numerous opportunities of drinking from running brooks as at Nice, Turin, Sils, where water follows me wherever I turn. In vino veritas: it seems that here too I disagree with the rest of the world about the concept "Truth"-with me spirit moves on the face of the waters. Here are a few more bits of advice taken from my morality. A heavy meal is digested more easily than one that is too meager. The first condition of a good digestion is that the stomach should be active as a whole. Therefore a man ought to know the size of his stomach. For the sanae reasons I advise against all those interminable meals, which I call interrupted sacrificial feasts, and which are to be had at any table d'hdte. Nothing between meals, no coffee-coffee makes onLgloomy. Tea is advisable only in the morning-in small quantities, but very strong. It may be very harmful, and indispose you for the whole day, if it is the least bit too weak. Here each one has his own standard, often between the narrowest and most delicate limits. In a very enervating climate it is, inadvisable to begin the day with tea: an hour before, it is a good thing to have a cup of thick cocoa, free from oil. Remain seated as little as possible; trust no thought that is not born in the open, to the accompaniment of free bodily motion-nor one in which your very muscles do not celebrate a feast. All prejudices may be traced back to the intestines. A sedentary life, as I have already said elsewhere, is the real sin against the Holy Ghost.
