The Bitter Cup

Bitten on the neck by an adder, Zarathustra thanks the snake. Clancy Martin loves this little fable for the way its moral misbehaves: the old morality is not refuted here, it is pronounced dead. Then the marriage speech, where the casting gets almost comically good: Nietzsche, who never married, wrote it, and Martin, with three marriages, two divorces, and five children, reads it. He tests Zarathustra's bitter cup against the advice that saved his third marriage, self-denial that worked like magic and tasted exactly as promised. The final minutes belong to Nietzsche's own life, and to the one door that closed and stayed closed.