"Am I old? I do not know, and moreover I do not know what kind of youth is necessary to me. "In Germany, people complain strongly of my 'eccentricities.' But as they do not know where my centre is, they can hardly discern when or how I happen to be eccentric." From the dates of his notes, it seems that Nietzsche approached a different problem in the month of January, 1888. Those humble multitudes whose rights he admits and measures would not deserve to live, if their activity were not, in the last instance, governed by an élite, utilised for glorious ends. What would be the virtues of this élite, what ends would it serve? Nietzsche was thus brought back to the problem which was his torment. Would he define at length this unknown, and perhaps unattainable grandeur, towards which his soul had for so long aspired? He was again a prey to sadness. He complained of his sensibility, of his irritability, which had become such that each day, on the arrival of the post, he hesitated and shivered before opening his letters. "Never has life appeared so difficult to me," he wrote to Peter Gast on January 15th. "I can no longer keep on terms with any sort of reality: when I do not succeed in forgetting them, they break me.... There are nights when I am overwhelmed with distress. And so much remains to be done--all, so to say!--Therefore I must hold out. To this wisdom I apply myself, at least in the mornings. Music, these days, gives me sensations which I had never known. It frees me, it lets me recover from the intoxication of myself; I seem to consider myself from a great height, to _feel_ myself from a great height; thus it renders me stronger, and regularly, after an evening's music (I have heard _Carmen_ four times), I have a morning full of energetic perceptions and lucky discoveries. It is quite admirable. It is as though I had bathed myself in a _more natural_ element. Without music life is merely a mistake, a weariness, an exile." Let us try to follow the course of his work. He subjected himself to an historical research and attempted to discover the social class, the nation, the race or the party which authorised the hope of a more noble humanity. Here was the modern European: "How could a race of strong men disengage itself from it? a race with the classical taste? The classical taste, that is, the will to simplification, to accentuation ... the courage of psychological nudity.... To raise oneself from this chaos to this organisation, one must be constrained by a _necessity._ One must be without choice; disappear or impose oneself. A dominant race can only have terrible and violent origins. Problem: where are the _barbarians_ of the twentieth century? Evidently they will only be able to appear and impose themselves after huge socialistic crises--these will be the elements most capable of the most persistent hardness in respect of themselves, and who will be able to become the guarantees of _the most persistent will._"