“I am now telling the story of Zarathustra. The basic concept of the work, the idea of eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that can be achieved at all – belongs to August 1881: it is thrown on a sheet of paper with the signature: ‘6000 feet beyond man and time’. That day I was walking through the woods by the lake of Silvaplana; I stopped at a mighty, pyramidal-piled block not far from Surlei. Then this thought occurred to me.”(
Today’s Engadin is of course slightly different from that in Nietzsche’s time and you can rarely actually feel “beyond man and time”, as many people have now discovered this paradise. However, I had the fantastic opportunity to spend a night 10.000 feet beyond man and time, completely alone in a gondola at the summit of Piz Nair that has been converted into a hotel room, which can be booked from the beginning of July to the beginning of October for a special kind of overnight stay. When I read about the possibility of booking an overnight stay there for the first time in the first week of July, I was unfortunately disappointed because the entire 3 months were booked out within 10 hours 😲. My disappointment grew even bigger when I was up on Piz Nair one day while hiking and was able to see this fantastic view live.
To be able to spend a night there all alone, to experience the sunset, the starry sky and the sunrise – what a dream, which unfortunately I was denied to experience. A look at the booking page still showed no days left, but only one day later I was lucky because someone had actually canceled the booking. At first I couldn’t believe my luck. Completely hectic and nervous, I filled out the booking form, afraid that someone might come ahead of me when booking and be a few seconds faster than me. Fortunately, that was not the case and the following days were characterized by an unbelievable anticipation and excitement about this unique experience that was ahead of me 🤩.
Then the time had finally come and after my arrival at 3 p.m. I was actually completely alone at over 3000 meters from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m. A really indescribable feeling and a unique experience 🥰. It actually felt like 10,000 feet beyond man and time. That I was able to experience this makes me incredibly happy and it is something I will surely remember for the rest of my life. The Upper Engadin had already given me the most beautiful impressions and awakened incredible feelings of happiness and an unexpected sense of wellbeing in me, but this experience really surpasses everything 🥰.
Words cannot do it justice and I cannot find any suitable descriptions for it, but a few words of Nietzsche spontaneously came to my mind as I sat on the terrace and waited for the sunset, so I leave the last sentences of this blog entry to the master of words (although it’s a crime itself to translate the words of Nietzsche into another language ;-)):
“One must be accustomed to living on mountain tops, looking at the wretched ephemeral babble of politics and national self-seeking as beneath oneself. One must have become indifferent, one must never ask whether the truth brings profit or becomes one’s undoing. The predilection of strength for questions which no one today has the courage to ask; the courage for the forbidden, the predestination for the labyrinth. An experience from seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for the most distant. A new conscience for truths that have so far remained silent. And the will to economize on a grand scale, holding your strength, your enthusiasm together. Reverence for oneself, love of oneself, unconditional freedom towards oneself.” (
