I do not by any means know atheism as a result; even less as an event: it is a matter of course with me, from instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers— at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!
I am much more interested in a question on which the "salvation of humanity" depends far more than on any theologians' curio: the question of nutrition. For ordinary use, one may formulate it thus: "how do you, among all people, have to eat to attain your maximum of strength, of virtu in the Renaissance style, of moraline-free virtue?"
My experiences in this matter are as bad as possible; I am amazed how late I heard this question, how late I learned "reason" from these experiences. Only the complete worthlessness of our German education—its "idealism"—explains to me to some extent why at precisely this point I was backward to the point of holiness. This "education" which teaches one from the start to ignore realities and to pursue so-called "ideal" goals—a "classical education," for example—as if it were not hopeless from the start to unite "classical" and "German" into a single concept! More, it is amusing: only imagine a "classically educated" man with a Leipzig dialect!
Indeed, till I reached a very mature age I always ate badly: morally speaking, "impersonally," "selflessly," "altruistically"— for the benefit of cooks and other fellow Christians. By means of Leipzig cuisine, for example, I very earnestly denied my "will to life" at the time when I first read Schopenhauer (1865). To upset one's stomach for the sake of inadequate nutrition—this problem seemed to me to be solved incredibly well by the aforementioned cuisine. (It is said that 1866 brought about a change in this respect. ) But German cuisine quite generally—what doesn't it have on its conscience! Soup before the meal (in Venetian cookbooks of the sixteenth century this is still called alia tedesca); overcooked meats, vegetables cooked with fat and flour; the degeneration of pastries and puddings into paperweights! Add to this the virtually bestial prandial drinking habits of the ancient, and by no means only the ancient Germans, and you will understand the origin of the German spirit—from distressed intestines.
The German spirit is an indigestion: it does not finish with anything.
But English diet, too—which is, compared to the German and even to the French, a kind of "return to nature," meaning to cannibalism—is profoundly at odds with my instincts: it seems to me that it gives the spirit heavy feet—the feet of English women.
The best cuisine is that of Piedmont.
Alcohol is bad for me: a single glass of wine or beer in one day is quite sufficient to turn my life into a vale of misery—the people of Munich are my antipodes. Assuming that I did not comprehend this until rather late, I really experienced it from childhood. As a boy I believed that drinking wine was, like smoking, to begin with merely a vanity of young men, and later on a bad habit. Perhaps this harsh judgment should be blamed in part on the wine of Naumburg. To believe that wine exhilarates I should have to be a Christian - believing what is for me an absurdity. Strangely enough, in spite of this extreme vulnerability to small, strongly diluted doses of alcohol, I almost become a sailor when it is a matter of strong doses. Even as a boy, my fortitude appeared at that point. Writing a long Latin essay in a single night, and copying it over, too, with the ambition in my pen to emulate my model, Sallust, in severity and compactness, and to pour some grog of the heaviest caliber over my Latin—even when I was a student at the venerable Schulpforta, that did not in any way disagree with my physiology, nor perhaps with that of Sallust - however it disagreed with the venerable Schulpforta.
Later, around the middle of life, to be sure, I decided more and more strictly against all "spirits": I, an opponent of vegetarianism from experience, just like Richard Wagner, who converted me, cannot advise all more spiritual natures earnestly enough to abstain entirely from alcohol. Water is sufficient.
I prefer towns in which opportunities abound for dipping from running wells (Nizza, Turin, Sils); a small glass accompanies me like a dog. In vino veritas: [truth is in wine] it seems that here, too, I am at odds with all the world about the concept of "truth" - in my case, the spirit moves over water.
A few more hints from my morality. A hearty meal is easier to digest than one that is too small. That the stomach as a whole becomes active is the first presupposition of a good digestion. One has to know the size of one's stomach. For the same reason one should be warned against those long drawn-out meals which I call interrupted sacrificial feasts - those at a table d'hote.
No meals between meals, no coffee: coffee spreads darkness. Tea is wholesome only in the morning. A little, but strong: tea is very unwholesome and sicklies one o'er the whole day if it is too weak by a single degree. Everybody has his own measure, often between the narrowest and most delicate limits. In a climate that is very agagant,ls tea is not advisable for a beginning: one should begin an hour earlier with a cup of thick, oil-less cocoa.
Sit as little as possible; give no credence to any thought that was not born outdoors while one moved about freely—in which the muscles are not celebrating a feast, too. All prejudices come from the intestines.
The sedentary life—as I have said once before - is the real sin against the holy spirit.
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