My most startling experience of this kind came to me, as it must have done, in regard to the Nibelungen. I shaped the poem at a time when I had built myself a conceptual universe upon the Hellenic-optimistic model, which I believed entirely possible of realization if mankind would only will it, and in it I attempted ingeniously to bridge for myself the problem as to why, in that case, they do not actually will it. I recollect now having evolved the character of my Siegfried to this very end, with the will to present a life without sorrow; but I counted on expressing myself still more plainly through the presentation of the whole Nibelung myth, with its exposure of a first wrong, from which springs a whole world of evil, which therefore perishes, and so teaches us all a lesson on how we should recognize the evil, tear it out by the roots, and establish a righteous world in its stead. And all the time I scarcely noticed that in the execution, indeed at bottom even in the planning of my design, I was unconsciously following a quite different and far deeper perception and, instead of a phase of world evolution, had discerned the nature of the universe itself in all its conceivable phases and had recognized its nothingness; whence it naturally happened that, since I was faithful not to my concepts but to my intuitions, something emerged quite different from what I had actually proposed./ And yet I recollect that I at last succeeded in making my intention tell, by force as it were, in one single passage (in the significant words of Brünnhilde in which she tells the bystanders to look away from the evil thing, property, to the only satisfying thing, love), without (unfortunately!) actually quite coming to an understanding with myself as to this “love,” which, after all, as we see, appears in the course of the myth as an utterly devastating force. In this one passage then, I was blinded by the interposition of my conscious intentions. Well, curiously enough, this passage continually tormented me and it required the great revolution in my rational concepts, ultimately affected through Schopenhauer, to disclose to me the cause of my trouble and to give my poem a fitting keystone – a sincere recognition of the true underlying nature of things – without, on that account, rendering my work in the least propagandist…. << less