In Topographies, John Sallis recounts the famous tale Nietzsche tells in his autobiography Ecce Homo concerning the place where the thought of the eternal recurrence first came to him. I got to go there in the spring of 2019, after a conference in the Netherlands. I took the train down from Amsterdam, with my friend David Jones, who had talked me into taking that seminar on Thus Spoke Zarathustra so long ago when I first came to Hawaiʻi for graduate school in 1985. That time, coming to Hawaiʻi, that seminar, and that book would mark a critical turning point in my life. Thus it was quite a thing to go there with David all those years later. We spent a morning in Basel, strolling through the grounds of the university where Nietzsche once taught and where he wrote The Birth of Tragedy, a work that was a central focus of my dissertation. This concerned, in short, why Nietzsche thought the high point of Greek culture was not Socrates and Plato, but rather Aeschylus and Sophocles. We didn’t stay long in Basel as we didn’t have much time and we wanted to spend more time in Sils-Maria, the place in the upper Engadine region of the Swiss Alps where Nietzsche spent several summers writing parts of Zarathustra and other works. Our goal was, of course, the famous rock along Lake Silvaplana, the place where Nietzsche tells us the central idea of Zarathustra came to him.

The train ride up from Basel takes one along a route that is a Unesco World Heritage site which many consider the most spectacular railway journey in Europe. I think we were both filled with ecstatic exhilaration as we made our way up through the mountains with the incredible vistas, and I imagined that even despite his poor eyesight that Nietzsche must have felt something similar on his first trip up along the same route. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche notes the difference that the climate and meterology of various places had in his experience, and laments that much of his life, up until he began his ten yeas of wandering, “only played itself out in places that were wrong and practically forbidden to me” (Nietzsche 2007, 22-23). As he made his way up and could feel the change in elevation, I suspect he must have felt an exhilaration as he was leaving those forbidden places with their constricted cities and towns in the lowlands below; and perhaps he might even have felt some anticipation that he was finally at last finding his place, coming home, at least the place as close to a home such a nomad philosopher would ever find. The place would become for him the abode of Zarathustra. I felt a tingling anticipation and excitement as we approached our destination.

We arrived in Sils-Maria late in the day and checked into our lodgings just a short walk from the house where Nietzsche stayed. We had arrived in between seasons and thus everything was closed in the town except for a little store where we found some vegetables and pasta and some wine for dinner. So after we settled in, had our dinner and wine, we took a little stroll under the stars to the Nietzsche-haus. It too was closed, but I had made an appointment for a private tour the next afternoon. But first we planned fon getting up early and taking the hike around Lake Silvaplana to the rock.

Nietzsche’s attention to the significance of place, to a thinking that is not elevated above place, and thus the importance of things like climate and meterology, follows from his perspectivism, the view that we see reality, not from some God’s eye perspective or view from nowhere, but from particular perspectives of time and place. Nietzsche's favorite thinking places, encountered in those last ten years of wandering and writing, were for the most part extraordinary places, especially the place where the thought of eternal recurrence came to him. In Topographies, Sallis takes up a reflection at such extraordinary places, as Bernard Freydberg explains: “The places (topoi) that occupy Sallis’s attention are one and all extraordinary, but in a very special sense: they are seductive insofar as they elicit a response that dis-places any everyday sense of familiarity” (Freydberg 2012, 216).

I can relate to this very much as my own philosophical reflections and my art are inspired and situated from a most extraordinary place, both seductive in its beauty and also quite dangerous—the place called Halemaʻumaʻu, the inner crater within the caldera at the summit of Kīlauea on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. The name of the place means “the house (hale) lined with aʻumaʻu ferns," and it names the place long regarded by Hawaiians as the home or abode of Pele, the volcano goddess celebrated in Hawaiian myth. Over the years I have had so many incredible experiences at this place, and so that it seems, by way of introduction to my philosophy and art, I must share a few stories.