Nietzsche for Creative Spirits
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Genius Depends on Dry Air
...The question of place and climate is most closely related to the question of nutrition...The influence of climate on our metabolism, its retardation, its acceleration, goes so far that a mistaken choice of place and climate can not only estrange a man from his task but can actually keep it from him: he never gets to see it.
...genius depends on dry air, on clear skies - that is, on a rapid metabolism, on the possibility of drawing again and again on great, even tremendous quantities of strength
from Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, (trans. W. Kaufmann), p2 s2The question of place and climate is most closely related to the question of nutrition. Nobody is free to live everywhere; and whoever has to solve great problems that challenge all his strength actually has a very restricted choice in this matter. The influence of climate on our metabolism, its retardation, its acceleration, goes so far that a mistaken choice of place and climate can not only estrange a man from his task but can actually keep it from him: he never gets to see it. His animal vigor has never become great enough for him to attain that freedom which overflows into the most spiritual regions and allows one to recognize: this only I can do.The slightest sluggishness of the intestines is entirely sufficient, once it has become a bad habit, to turn a genius into something mediocre, something "German." The German climate alone is enough to discourage strong, even inherently heroic, intestines. The tempo of the metabolism is strictly proportionate to the mobility or lameness of the spirit's feet; the "spirit" itself is after all merely an aspect of this metabolism.
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from Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, (trans. W. Kaufmann), p2 s2List the places where men with esprit1 are living or have lived, where wit, subtlety, and malice belonged to happiness, where genius found its home almost of necessity: all of them have excellent dry air. Paris, Provence, Florence, Jerusalem, Athens - these names prove something: genius depends on dry air, on clear skies - that is, on a rapid metabolism, on the possibility of drawing again and again on great, even tremendous quantities of strength. I know of a case in which a spirit of generous predisposition, destined for greatness, became, merely because he lacked any delicate instinct for climate, narrow, withdrawn, a peevish specialist. And I myself might ultimately have become just such a case, if my sickness had not forced me to see reason, to reflect on reason in reality. Now that the effects of climate and weather are familiar to me from long experience and I take readings from myself as from a very subtle and reliable instrument—and even during a short journey, say, from Turin to Milan, my system registers the change in the humidity - I reflect with horror on the dismal fact that my life, except for the last ten years, the years when my life was in peril, was spent entirely in the wrong places that were nothing short of forbidden to me. Naumburg, Schulpforta, the province of Thuringia quite generally, Leipzig, Basel, Venice—so many disastrous places for my physiology.
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