Entitled Opinions coming to you from the studios of KZSU on the Stanford campus,

our portal to the Elysian fields where we hold converse with both the living and the dead

and where you who tune in can hear the past speak to the future across this threshold

we call entitled opinions.

Today we're going to call up the year 1888, the Annus Mirabilis when Frederick Nietzsche and

Vincent Van Gogh went into creative overdrive before plunging into the abyss shortly thereafter.

They both made it through to the other side, though, and the two of them are standing by

waiting to join the conversation.

Luigi Pinandello once remarked that life doesn't have to follow the Aristotelian rule of plausibility

the way fiction does, since it has the privilege of being real, of being true.

Reality at times is way more improbable than readers would tolerate in a novel.

And when I think about these two figures, Nietzsche and Van Gogh,

who became such superstars in the 20th century,

and whose stock today is higher than ever,

it seems quite incredible that they ended their careers in abject obscurity,

loneliness, and psychological turmoil.

Brian Pines, the guest who joins me today, has spent a lot of time with both of them.

Brian teaches philosophy at the University of San Francisco, Mount Tamil Pius College,

and the College of Marin.

He received several fellowships to conduct research on Nietzsche at the Goethe Schiller

Archive in Weimar and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

This research enabled him to write a book entitled Nietzsche and Van Gogh imaginations of 1888.

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