Of the Horse, We Know Nothing

“What is the reward for knowing the worst?” — Donald Barthelme

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In Turin, on January 3rd, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche stepped out the door of Number 6, Via Carlo Alberto, perhaps to take a stroll, perhaps to collect his mail. Nearby, a cabman struggled with a stubborn horse. Despite repeated urging, the animal refused to move. The cabman lost his patience and took his whip to it.

Nietzsche, solidly built, full-mustached, approached and ended the brutality. The cabman, by then, was foaming with rage. Nietzsche threw his arms around the horse’s neck and sobbed. Shortly afterward, a neighbor led him back inside, where he lay motionless on a divan for two days before muttering, “Mutter, ich bin dumm.” Mother, I am dumb.

He lived another ten years, gentle and broken, in the care of his sister and mother.

Of the horse, we know nothing.

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Decades earlier, in Paris, gaslight flickered across a cluttered desk in Gérard de Nerval’s garret. The air was thick with the musk of old paper, stale tobacco, and the metallic scent of winter seeping through ill-fitting windowpanes. It had been weeks since the news arrived, though his mind still resisted its permanence. Jenny Colon—radiant, unattainable—was married. Not to him. Never to him.

There was no letter, no formal dismissal, no final farewell. No polite note to tuck into a drawer, no tangible proof of severing. Only the slow spread of rumor through the literary salons, each confirmation a fresh incision. It was as if she had simply ceased to exist—not only for him, but within the world he inhabited. Where was she now?

He walked the boulevards, cane tapping a hollow rhythm against the cobblestones, scanning every carriage, every face. He knew it was futile. He knew she was gone. Still, the compulsion persisted, a phantom limb of hope that twitched at the sight of a similar gait, a flash of red hair, a laugh carried on the wind.

His friends, those who still dared approach the increasingly eccentric poet, spoke of his “melancholy,” his “nervous disposition.” They did not understand. This was not sadness but diminishment. The world had lost its meaning because the one who gave it meaning, for him, had vanished.

On the night of January 26, 1855, Nerval wandered the frozen streets of Paris one final time. He was found at dawn, hanging from a lantern post on the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, his body stiff with cold. In his pocket was an unfinished manuscript—later titled Aurélia, his final attempt to map the geography of madness.

Of Jenny, we know nothing.

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The boulevards change: the diminishment and desolation endure. They remain, I learned again, one January afternoon when my friend Peter called and said, “She ended it. Just like that.”

In New York City, on January 3rd, 2023, Peter received a text: I'm downstairs.

It was Courtney texting from the lobby. She was an hour early for the dinner reservation Peter had made to celebrate her promotion. Peter buzzed her in and greeted her with a smile and a hug when she entered his apartment. Holding her, he sensed at once that something was wrong. Courtney was cold, nervous. Her eyes were open, but she wasn't looking anywhere. The faint, clean scent of her shampoo, something citrus and familiar, seemed at odds with the chill she brought into the room.

Two years earlier, Peter had phoned me with unguarded excitement the day he first met her.

"She's the real thing," he said. "I've never met anyone like her."

He described the color of her hair, her faint smile, the way she held herself browsing the fiction section of a small bookstore.

"Easy," I said. "You've only just met her."

"I know. But there's magic here."

"No doubt. But we've both seen magic vanish without a trace."

"You're right," he said. "Still, I think I finally found what I've been looking for."

He hung up all aglow. I shook my head.

Peter loved living in New York, though he’d begun to grow weary of the city's transactional nature. We often compared dating notes, concluding that genuine intimacy felt nearly impossible, a cycle of brief affairs and shallow conversations that left us both exhausted. I sometimes suggested—too lightly—that perhaps we were the problem all along.

He laughed.

Shortly before meeting Courtney, he had stopped looking altogether, tired of endings that promised friendship but delivered only silence. Then, at a small bookstore, the magic returned. They exchanged numbers and when, a few days later, Peter asked Courtney for lunch, it felt momentous to him. After lunch, he walked her to the subway. They eagerly agreed to see each other again.

Within two months, they were lovers.

Now, two years later, Courtney stood shuffling in his apartment, head lowered, unable to meet his eyes.

"I can't go to dinner," she said.

"You're kidding. What happened? What's wrong?"

"Nothing happened. I came to tell you it's over. I'm sorry."

"What do you mean it's over? What the hell is going on? Is it something I did? Something I said?

Did you find someone new? Tell me."

Her hands were trembling.

"I don't want to talk. There's nothing to say. I'm sorry. I can't do this anymore."

Peter pressed his hand to his chest. He tried to speak but couldn’t breach the internal wall of silence, bewilderment, and pain. Words remained trapped in his throat.

After a few moments, he collapsed on the sofa.

"I'll gather my things," Courtney said.

Courtney walked about the apartment collecting the few items she kept at his place.

"Goodbye," she said, not looking at him.

"I'll walk you down to the lobby," Peter offered.

"No," Courtney said. "I'd rather you didn’t."

She stood shivering, regret, perhaps, mixed with resolve. As she turned to leave, Peter asked for a hug.

She moved toward him; arms lifted not in welcome but obligation, the choreography of goodbye, performed by two people who once knew every curve and hollow of each other. There was no warmth, no softening, only the need to mark an ending. The hug lasted three seconds, perhaps four, brief enough to bear. When they separated, neither looked into the other's eyes. They had already seen too much.

When Courtney left, what remained was the ghost of an embrace, the peculiar ache of touching someone whose body you know but whose heart has traveled beyond your reach. No words, whispered or shouted, could traverse the distance that now existed between them. Peter stood there for a moment, tears coming, then collapsed face down on the sofa, where he remained motionless for hours.

Two days later he called me, his voice thinner.

"I'm not doing well," he said. "I keep checking my phone. Nothing."

"I'm so sorry."

"It hurts like hell. I should have seen it coming."

We talked for an hour. By the end, Peter had provided a complete diagnosis of Courtney's "problem." He had figured it out.

We spoke often in the weeks that followed. I took his calls because I know what it's like to need someone to witness your unraveling, even if they can't stop it. The conversations were always a litany of clinical explanations. He quoted lengthy passages from books on attachment theory, childhood trauma, and the psychology of love but his voice still shook. He had built a fortress of terminology, yet the winter blew right through it. I would set the phone on the counter and listen to the hum of his theories while I made tea. When he finally paused for breath, the ache that followed was always the same; cold, unchanged, and entirely unhealed by what he had just said. His words offered brief shelter, a futile anesthetic. Knowledge can offer insight but does not provide solace. His heart remained untouched.

His need to understand became obsessive. Like Nerval, Peter haunted the streets, checking coffee shop windows and subway entrances, hoping for a glimpse that would never come. The old platitude—that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger—offers comfort to those still standing. It says nothing about those who cannot—and what of them? Nietzsche sobbing into a horse's neck, Nerval knotting rope in the cold, Peter collapsed face-down on the sofa for hours. People for whom the pain lingers in ways that fundamentally alter who they are. Some blows are simply too difficult to bear; the loss cannot be metabolized. They chew on them repeatedly, never digesting the bitter fruit. They are left with the shame of being broken. But there is no shame in breaking. Only in pretending otherwise.

Weeks later we met for coffee. He looked diminished, carved smaller by whatever had been quietly removed. Within minutes, he was rehearsing the logic again, the timeline, the signs he had missed.

"Peter," I interrupted.

He stopped. "You're still spinning with it. Talking instead of letting it be. Just sit with it."

A long pause. "Understanding is not healing," I added quietly. "I know you don't want to hear that."

He smiled—wan, but genuine.

"You're absolutely right," he said.

We finished our coffee, made plans to talk the following week.

A week later he called to tell me about a dream in which Courtney explained everything, and how, in the dream, it finally made sense. I listened, then said little. My well had gone dry.

After the call, I thought again of Nietzsche's words. Mother, I am dumb. And of Nerval's final walk. And of Peter, destined for his own slow diminishment. It's been a good while since that call, and Peter has not reached out. Perhaps he stopped calling because he finally moved on, or grew tired of my useless sympathy, or simply found the wound had closed over in that mysterious way wounds sometimes do. I don't know. I haven't called to check. But life, I've learned, holds countless unwritten chapters, even for those who seem most lost.

Of Courtney, we know nothing.