The Submarine*

As a child I always wanted to have a tiny submarine of my own that I could get on and, plunging deep under the sea, go to distant places far away from the crowd. A submarine that would hide me from people and life, that would embrace and protect me with its armored exterior. Later I discovered writing, and that a submarine could be built out of writings.
Nietzsche made himself a submarine out of madness. When he was forty years old, he decided to fall in love with a twenty-year-old girl whose face he had never even seen. Then he saw that girl. Madness came to him in the guise of love. Unfortunately the girl with whom he had chosen to fall in love was Lou Andreas Salomé, a femme fatale who circulated among people in a submarine formed of her own selfishness. She was very intelligent and very beautiful. She was getting ready to write her own books. Nietzsche was a genius, Salomé was intelligent. Intelligence did not love genius.