I was thinking of that other guy, who went mad. What other guy? I asked. The famous philosopher, she answered. Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer or someone; the one who said that God was dead. Oh, I told her: you mean Nietzsche. Maybe, she said. I’m pretty sure it was Nietzsche, I said. Whoever, she replied; it doesn’t matter: the point is—I found this out later—he saw a horse being beaten in a square in Turin, and he lost it. Can you imagine? After all the questions that he must have grappled with, the complex, universal stuff he’d thought and written about, it was a horse that did his mind in: a
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