Nietzsche's Walk at Eze

NIETZSCHE über EZE

The Philosopher's Walk to the Sea

This page documents sketches & photographs of the walk downhill from Eze-Village to Eze-Bord-de-Mer, destined for a painting donated to the Moral Sciences Library at Cambridge University... It hangs in the Old Library on the top floor, bathed in natural light.

The work was unveiled at the lunch on Saturday 27th September, as part of the Faculty's activities for Alumni Weekend, 2008; the picture shows Professor Jane Heal (right) introducing JB (far right). The Philosophy Faculty Newsletter for 2008 contains an article (on p.6) by JB on the way Philosophy has influenced his painting; you may download the pdf from the Philosophy faculty’s website at http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/news_events/newsletters/newsletter08.pdf or go to http://www.villaparasol.com/MSFacNL08jb.htm for the article.

Eze & Nietzsche
[Not Too Much Reading]
First Walk
Colour Sketch
Map: The Philosophy Faculty

EZE, NIETZSCHE & HIS WALK

Eze is situated between Nice and Monte Carlo.

In fact, there are two: Eze-Village is perhaps the most dramatic of villes perchées, crouched as it is on a small peak of a very steep outcrop by the Mediterranean. The Moyenne Corniche passes just by. Below lies Eze-Bord-de-Mer, where the railway station and the Basse Corniche go.

The railway station at Eze Bord de Mer [left]; you can make out Eze-Village perched overhead if you follow the line of the lamp-post left of centre. Nietzsche's walk takes you from the station up round the big rocky outcrop that occupies the middle of the left picture. As you approach Eze Village [right], it looks down from above you — of course, you have approached it from the other side.

Nietzsche spent many months in various parts of Italy and along the Mediterranean coast in for instance Nice, then scarecely Frenchified from its days as Nizza under the house of Savoy. His taste for mountain walks is well known; and at Eze the path he took is commemorated by his name. He is supposed to have found special inspiration here for Also sprach Zarathustra. Whether he pioneered the path is another matter; I doubt it, but it is likely that he did however help make it popular with tourists and visitors rather than just the shepherds who may have created it before even the Romans came by.

Opposite the station, a derelict tea-room with its balcony; the ironwork permits us to fancy Nietzsche might have taken refreshment there, even if the sticker for the Süddeutsche Zeitung is more recent...

Unlike the various journeys I had in mind in RoadMovies, this journey follows a very simple pattern of three stages. For one thing, there is steep-flat-steep; but there is also the fact that in the first and third stages the sea is seen from two quite different vantages, interrupted by a promontary which briefly all but obscures the sea altogether. My idea in these new pictures will be to make the promontary 'see-through', so to speak, with the views superimposed as opposed to integrated.

I might add that while I was accused of most un-übermenschlich behaviour, walking down this path is much better than walking up, aesthetically; if you walk up, the sea is almost invariably behind you and the latter stages of the third third, from the flattish stretch on up to Eze-Village, is not only relentlessly steep but is also hedged in by thicket that even without its leaves, as in February, is quite dense enough to block out most view there could be.

Eze-Bord-de-Mer seen against the evening sun, seen from the flattish middle section of the walk.

Looking up at Eze-Village past a rock whose scale the camera obscures; a mountain perhaps? No, merely about two foot tall!

The view to sea at that point.

NOT TOO MUCH READING

It might be of interest to mention not only a short, trenchant & gripping introduction to Nietzsche's work: "Nietzsche", by Michael Tanner [Oxford, 1994], but also a volume that interweaves his setting with his thought and which dwells on the work he did in the last two productive years of his life, spent in Turin: "Nietzsche in Turin" by Lesley Chamberlain [Quartet, 1996].

But the main thing is to read Nietzsche, nipping and tucking: "Daybreak" and "Human, All Too Human" may be where to start... [Translations by R.J.Hollingdale.]

cliché Phipps