“Look,” says Rudin, in Turgenev’s story, “you see that apple tree? It has broken down with the weight and multitude of its own fruit. It is the emblem of genius.” “To perish beneath a load one can neither bear nor throw off,” wrote Nietzsche,--“that is a philosopher.”[280] I shall announce the song of the lightning, said Zarathustra, and perish in the announcing.[281] Insanity with such a man is but a matter of time; he feels it coming upon him; he values his hours like a man condemned to execution. In twenty days he writes the _Genealogy of Morals_; in one year (1888) he produces _The Twilight of the Idols_, _Antichrist_, _The Case of Wagner_, _Ecce Homo_, and his longest and greatest book, _The Will to Power_. He not only writes these books; he reads the proof-sheets, straining his eyes beyond repair. He is almost blind now; he is deceived, taken advantage of, because he can hardly see farther than his touch. “If I were blind,” he writes pitifully, “I should be healthy.”[282] Yet his body is racked with pain: “on 118 days this year I have had severe attacks.”[283] “I have given a name to my pain, and call it ‘a dog’--it is just as pitiful, just as importunate and shameless; and I can domineer over it, vent my bad humor on it, as others do with their dogs, servants, and wives.”[284] Meanwhile the world lives on unnoticing, or noticing only to misunderstand. “My foes have become mighty, and have so distorted my teaching, that my best beloved must be ashamed of the gifts that I gave them.”[285] He learns that the libertines of Europe are using his philosophy as a cloak for their sins: “I can read in their faces that they totally misunderstand me, and that it is only the animal in them which rejoices at being able to cast off its fetters.”[286] He finds one whom he thinks to make his disciple; he is buoyed up for a few days by the hope; the hope is shattered, and loneliness closes in once more upon him. “A kingdom for a kind word!” he cries out in the depth of his longing; and again he writes, “For years no milk of human kindness, no breath of love.”[287]