"Postmark Torino, 4 Jan 89
"To my friend Georg!
After you had discovered me, it was no trick to find me : the difficulty now is to lose me. . . .
The Crucified."
Did Nietzsche know that through him something was put into words that can never be lost again? Something that cannot be lost again to thinking, something to which thinking must forever come back again the more thoughtful it becomes? He knew it. For the decisive sentence, introduced by a colon, is no longer addressed only to the recipient of the paper. The sentence expresses a universal fateful state of affairs. "The difficulty now is to lose me ...." Now, and for all men, and henceforth. This is why we read the sentence, even the whole content of the paper, as if it were addressed to us. Now that we can look over the sixty-three years passed since then, at least in their broad outlines, we must admit, of course, that there remains for us the further difficulty first of all to find Nietzsche, though he has been discovered, that is, though it is known that the event of this thinker's thinking has taken place. In fact, this known fact only increases the danger that we shall not find Nietzsche, because we imagine we have already been relieved of the search. Let us not be deluded into the view that Nietzsche's thought has been found, just because there exists a Nietzsche literature that has been proliferating for the last fifty years. It is as though Nietzsche had foreseen this, too; it is not for nothing that he has Zarathustra say: "They all talk about me . . . but nobody gives a thought." Thought can be given only where there is thinking. How are to give thought to Nietzsche's thinking if are still not thinking? Nietzsche's thinking, after all, does not contain just the extravagant views of an exceptional being. This thinking puts into its own language that which is,