1
With this book I open my campaign against morality. Not that it is at
all redolent of powder--you will find quite other and much nicer smells
in it, provided that you have any keenness in your nostrils. There
is nothing either of light or of heavy artillery in its composition,
and if its general end be a negative one, its means are not so--means
out of which the end follows like a logical conclusion, _not_ like a
cannon-shot. And if the reader takes leave of this book with a feeling
of timid caution in regard to everything which has hitherto been
honoured and even worshipped under the name of morality, it does not
alter the fact that there is not one negative word, not one attack,
and not one single piece of malice in the whole work--on the contrary,
it lies in the sunshine, smooth and happy, like a marine animal,
basking in the sun between two rocks. For, after all, I was this marine
animal: almost every sentence in the book was thought out, or rather
_caught,_ among that medley of rocks in the neighbourhood of Genoa,
where I lived quite alone, and exchanged secrets with the ocean. Even
to this day, when by chance I happen to turn over the leaves of this
book, almost every sentence seems to me like a hook by means of which I
draw something incomparable out of the depths; its whole skin quivers
with delicate shudders of recollection. This book is conspicuous for no
little art in gently catching things which whisk rapidly and silently
away, moments which I call godlike lizards--not with the cruelty of
that young Greek god who simply transfixed the poor little beast;
but nevertheless with something pointed--with a pen. "There are so
many dawns which have not yet shed their light"--this Indian maxim is
written over the doorway of this book. Where does its author seek that
new morning, that delicate red, as yet undiscovered, with which another
day--ah! a whole series of days, a whole world of new days!--will
begin? In the _Transvaluation of all Values,_ in an emancipation from
all moral values, in a saying of yea, and in an attitude of trust, to
all that which hitherto has been forbidden, despised, and damned. This
yea-saying book projects its light, its love, its tenderness, over all
evil things, it restores to them their soul, their clear conscience,
and their superior right and privilege to exist on earth. Morality is
not assailed, it simply ceases to be considered. This book closes with
the word "or?"--it is the only book which closes with an "or?".
2
My life-task is to prepare for humanity one supreme moment in which it
can come to its senses, a Great Noon in which it will turn its gaze
backwards and forwards, in which it will step from under the yoke
of accident and of priests, and for the first time set the question
of the Why and Wherefore of humanity as a whole--this life-task
naturally follows out of the conviction that mankind does _not_ get
on the right road of its own accord, that it is by no means divinely
ruled, but rather that it is precisely under the cover of its most
holy valuations that the instinct of negation, of corruption, and of
degeneration has held such a seductive sway. The question concerning
the origin of moral valuations is therefore a matter of the highest
importance to me because it determines the future of mankind. The
demand made upon us to believe that everything is really in the best
hands, that a certain book, the Bible, gives us the definite and
comforting assurance that there is a Providence that wisely rules the
fate of man,--when translated back into reality amounts simply to this,
namely, the will to stifle the truth which maintains the reverse of
all this, which is that hitherto man has been in the _worst possible_
hands, and that he has been governed by the physiologically botched,
the men of cunning and burning revengefulness, and the so-called
"saints"--those slanderers of the world and traducers of humanity.
The definite proof of the fact that the priest (including the priest
in disguise, the philosopher) has become master, not only within a
certain limited religious community, but everywhere, and that the
morality of decadence, the will to nonentity, has become morality
_per se,_ is to be found in this: that altruism is now an absolute
value, and egoism is regarded with hostility everywhere. He who
disagrees with me on this point, I regard as infected. But all the
world disagrees with me. To a physiologist a like antagonism between
values admits of no doubt. If the most insignificant organ within the
body neglects, however slightly, to assert with absolute certainty its
self-preservative powers, its recuperative claims, and its egoism, the
whole system degenerates. The physiologist insists upon the removal of
degenerated parts, he denies all fellow-feeling for such parts, and
has not the smallest feeling of pity for them. But the desire of the
priest is precisely the degeneration of the whole of mankind; hence his
preservation of that which is degenerate--this is what his dominion
costs humanity. What meaning have those lying concepts, those handmaids
of morality, "Soul," "Spirit," "Free will," "God," if their aim is not
the physiological ruin of mankind? When earnestness is diverted from
the instincts that aim at self-preservation and an increase of bodily
energy, _i.e._ at an _increase of life_; when anæmia is raised to an
ideal and the contempt of the body is construed as "the salvation of
the soul," what is all this if it is not a recipe for decadence? Loss
of ballast, resistance offered to natural instincts, selflessness,
in fact--this is what has hitherto been known as morality. With _The
Dawn of Day_ I first engaged in a struggle against the morality of
self-renunciation.
"JOYFUL WISDOM: LA GAYA SCIENZA"
1
_Dawn of Day_ is a yea-saying book, profound, but clear and kindly. The
same applies once more and in the highest degree to _La Gaya Scienza:_
in almost every sentence of this book, profundity and playfulness go
gently hand in hand. A verse which expresses my gratitude for the most
wonderful month of January which I have ever lived--the whole book is a
gift--sufficiently reveals the abysmal depths from which "wisdom" has
here become joyful.
"Thou who with cleaving fiery lances
The stream of my soul from its ice dost free,
Till with a rush and a roar it advances
To enter with glorious hoping the sea:
Brighter to see and purer ever,
Free in the bonds of thy sweet constraint,--
So it praises thy wondrous endeavour,
January, thou beauteous saint!"[1]
Who can be in any doubt as to what "glorious hoping" means here, when
he has realised the diamond beauty of the first of Zarathustra's
words as they appear in a glow of light at the close of the fourth
book? Or when he reads the granite sentences at the end of the third
book, wherein a fate for all times is first given a formula? The songs
of Prince Free-as-a-Bird, which, for the most part, were written in
Sicily, remind me quite forcibly of that Provencal notion of "_Gaya
Scienza,_" of that union of _singer, knight, and free spirit,_ which
distinguishes that wonderfully early culture of the Provencals from
all ambiguous cultures. The last poem of all, "To the Mistral,"--an
exuberant dance song in which, if you please, the new spirit dances
freely upon the corpse of morality,--is a perfect Provençalism.
[Footnote 1: Translated for _Joyful Wisdom_ by Paul V. Cohn.--TR.]
"THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA: A BOOK FOR ALL AND NONE"
1
I now wish to relate the history of _Zarathustra._ The fundamental
idea of the work, the _Eternal Recurrence,_ the highest formula of
a Yea-saying to life that can ever be attained, was first conceived
in the month of August 1881. I made a note of the idea on a sheet of
paper, with the postscript: "Six thousand feet beyond man and time."
That day I happened to be wandering through the woods alongside of the
Lake of Silvaplana, and I halted not far from Surlei, beside a huge
rock that towered aloft like a pyramid. It was then that the thought
struck me. Looking back now, I find that exactly two months before
this inspiration I had an omen of its coming in the form of a sudden
and decisive change in my tastes--more particularly in music. The
whole of _Zarathustra_ might perhaps be classified under the rubric
music. At all events, the essential condition of its production was
a second birth within me of the art of hearing. In Recoaro, a small
mountain resort near Vicenza, where I spent the spring of 1881, I and
my friend and maestro, Peter Gast--who was also one who had been born
again, discovered that the phœnix music hovered over us, in lighter
and brighter plumage than it had ever worn before. If, therefore, I
now calculate from that day forward the sudden production of the book,
under the most unlikely circumstances, in February 1883,--the last
part, out of which I quoted a few lines in my preface, was written
precisely in the hallowed hour when Richard Wagner gave up the ghost
in Venice,--I come to the conclusion that the period of gestation
covered eighteen months. This period of exactly eighteen months,
might suggest, at least to Buddhists, that I am in reality a female
elephant The interval was devoted to the _Gaya Scienza,_ which contains
hundreds of indications of the proximity of something unparalleled;
for, after all, it shows the beginning of _Zarathustra,_ since it
presents _Zarathustra's_ fundamental thought in the last aphorism
but one of the fourth book. To this interval also belongs that _Hymn
to Life_ (for a mixed choir and orchestra), the score of which was
published in Leipzig two years ago by E. W. Fritsch, and which gave
perhaps no slight indication of my spiritual state during this year,
in which the essentially yea-saying pathos, which I call the tragic
pathos, completely filled me heart and limb. One day people will sing
it to my memory. The text, let it be well understood, as there is
some misunderstanding abroad on this point, is not by me; it was the
astounding inspiration of a young Russian lady, Miss Lou von Salome,
with whom I was then on friendly terms. He who is in any way able
to make some sense of the last words of the poem, will divine why I
preferred and admired it: there is greatness in them. Pain is not
regarded as an objection to existence: "And if thou hast no bliss now
left to crown me--Lead on! Thou hast thy Sorrow still."
Maybe that my music is also great in this passage. (The last note of
the oboe, by the bye, is C sharp, not C. The latter is a misprint.)
During the following winter, I was living on that charmingly peaceful
Gulf of Rapallo, not far from Genoa, which cuts inland between Chiavari
and Cape Porto Fino. My health was not very good; the winter was cold
and exceptionally rainy; and the small _albergo_ in which I lived
was so close to the water that at night my sleep was disturbed if
the sea was rough. These circumstances were surely the very reverse
of favourable; and yet, in spite of it all, and as if in proof of my
belief that everything decisive comes to life in defiance of every
obstacle, it was precisely during this winter and in the midst of these
unfavourable circumstances that my _Zarathustra_ originated. In the
morning I used to start out in a southerly direction up the glorious
road to Zoagli, which rises up through a forest of pines and gives
one a view far out to sea. In the afternoon, or as often as my health
allowed, I walked round the whole bay from Santa Margherita to beyond
Porto Fino. This spot affected me all the more deeply because it was
so dearly loved by the Emperor Frederick III. In the autumn of 1886 I
chanced to be there again when he was revisiting this small forgotten
world of happiness for the last time. It was on these two roads that
all _Zarathustra_ came to me, above all, Zarathustra himself as a
type--I ought rather to say that it was on these walks that _he waylaid
me_.
2
In order to understand this type, you must first be quite clear
concerning its fundamental physiological condition: this condition
is what I call _great healthiness._ In regard to this idea I cannot
make my meaning more plain or more personal than I have done already
in one of the last aphorisms (No. 382) of the fifth book of the _Gaya
Scienza_: "We new, nameless, and unfathomable creatures," so reads
the passage, "we firstlings of a future still unproved--we who have a
new end in view also require new means to that end, that is to say,
a new healthiness, a stronger, keener, tougher, bolder, and merrier
healthiness than any that has existed heretofore. He who longs to
feel in his own soul the whole range of values and aims that have
prevailed on earth until his day, and to sail round all the coasts
of this ideal 'Mediterranean Sea'; who, from the adventures of his
own inmost experience, would fain know how it feels to be a conqueror
and discoverer of the ideal;--as also how it is with the artist, the
saint, the legislator, the sage, the scholar, the man of piety and the
godlike anchorite of yore;--such a man requires one thing above all
for his purpose, and that is, _great healthiness_--such healthiness as
he not only possesses, but also constantly acquires and must acquire,
because he is continually sacrificing it again, and is compelled to
sacrifice it! And now, therefore, after having been long on the way,
we Argonauts of the ideal, whose pluck is greater than prudence would
allow, and who are often shipwrecked and bruised, but, as I have said,
healthier than people would like to admit, dangerously healthy, and for
ever recovering our health--it would seem as if we had before us, as
a reward for all our toils, a country still undiscovered, the horizon
of which no one has yet seen, a beyond to every country and every
refuge of the ideal that man has ever known, a world so overflowing
with beauty, strangeness, doubt, terror, and divinity, that both our
curiosity and our lust of possession are frantic with eagerness. Alas!
how in the face of such vistas, and with such burning desire in our
conscience and consciousness, could we still be content with _the man
of the present day_? This is bad indeed; but, that we should regard
his worthiest aims and hopes with ill-concealed amusement, or perhaps
give them no thought at all, is inevitable. Another ideal now leads
us on, a wonderful, seductive ideal, full of danger, the pursuit of
which we should be loath to urge upon any one, because we are not so
ready to acknowledge any one's _right to it:_ the ideal of a spirit who
plays ingenuously (that is to say, involuntarily, and as the outcome
of superabundant energy and power) with everything that, hitherto,
has been called holy, good, inviolable, and divine; to whom even the
loftiest thing that the people have with reason made their measure of
value would be no better than a danger, a decay, and an abasement, or
at least a relaxation and temporary forgetfulness of self: the ideal
of a humanly superhuman well-being and goodwill, which often enough
will seem inhuman--as when, for instance, it stands beside all past
earnestness on earth, and all past solemnities in hearing, speech,
tone, look, morality, and duty, as their most lifelike and unconscious
parody--but with which, nevertheless, _great earnestness_ perhaps alone
begins, the first note of interrogation is affixed, the fate of the
soul changes, the hour hand moves, and tragedy begins."
3
Has any one at the end of the nineteenth century any distinct notion
of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration?
If not, I will describe it. If one had the smallest vestige of
superstition left in one, it would hardly be possible completely to
set aside the idea that one is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece, or
medium of an almighty power. The idea of revelation, in the sense
that something which profoundly convulses and upsets one becomes
suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and
accuracy--describes the simple fact. One hears--one does not seek; one
takes--one does not ask who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like
lightning, it comes with necessity, without faltering--I have never had
any choice in the matter. There is an ecstasy so great that the immense
strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, during which
one's steps now involuntarily rush and anon involuntarily lag. There
is the feeling that one is utterly out of hand, with the very distinct
consciousness of an endless number of fine thrills and titillations
descending to one's very toes;--there is a depth of happiness in which
the most painful and gloomy parts do not act as antitheses to the rest,
but are produced and required as necessary shades of colour in such an
overflow of light. There is an instinct for rhythmic relations which
embraces a whole world of forms (length, the need of a wide-embracing
rhythm, is almost the measure of the force of an inspiration, a sort
of counterpart to its pressure and tension). Everything happens
quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom,
of absoluteness, of power and divinity. The involuntary nature of
the figures and similes is the most remarkable thing; one loses all
perception of what is imagery and metaphor; everything seems to present
itself as the readiest, the truest, and simplest means of expression.
It actually seems, to use one of Zarathustra's own phrases, as if all
things came to one, and offered themselves as similes. ("Here do all
things come caressingly to thy discourse and flatter thee, for they
would fain ride upon thy back. On every simile thou ridest here unto
every truth. Here fly open unto thee all the speech and word shrines
of the world, here would all existence become speech, here would
all Becoming learn of thee how to speak.") This is my experience of
inspiration. I do not doubt but that I should have to go back thousands
of years before I could find another who could say to me: "It is mine
also!"
4
For a few weeks afterwards I lay an invalid in Genoa. Then followed
a melancholy spring in Rome, where I only just managed to live--and
this was no easy matter. This city, which is absolutely unsuited to
the poet-author of _Zarathustra,_ and for the choice of which I was
not responsible, made me inordinately miserable. I tried to leave it.
I wanted to go to Aquila--the opposite of Rome in every respect, and
actually founded in a spirit of hostility towards that city, just as
I also shall found a city some day, as a memento of an atheist and
genuine enemy of the Church, a person very closely related to me, the
great Hohenstaufen, the Emperor Frederick II. But Fate lay behind it
all: I had to return again to Rome. In the end I was obliged to be
satisfied with the Piazza Barberini, after I had exerted myself in
vain to find an anti-Christian quarter. I fear that on one occasion,
to avoid bad smells as much as possible, I actually inquired at the
Palazzo del Quirinale whether they could not provide a quiet room for
a philosopher. In a chamber high above the Piazza just mentioned, from
which one obtained a general view of Rome, and could hear the fountains
plashing far below, the loneliest of all songs was composed--"The
Night-Song." About this time I was obsessed by an unspeakably sad
melody, the refrain of which I recognised in the affords, "dead through
immortality," ... In the summer, finding myself once more in the sacred
place where the first thought of _Zarathustra_ flashed like a light
across my mind, I conceived the second part. Ten days sufficed. Neither
for the second, the first, nor the third part, have I required a day
longer. In the ensuing winter, beneath the halcyon sky of Nice, which
then for the first time poured its light into my life, I found the
third _Zarathustra_--and came to the end of my task: the whole having
occupied me scarcely a year. Many hidden corners and heights in the
country round about Nice are hallowed for me by moments that I can
never forget. That decisive chapter, entitled "Old and New Tables,"
was composed during the arduous ascent from the station to Eza--that
wonderful Moorish village in the rocks. During those moments when my
creative energy flowed most plentifully, my muscular activity was
always greatest. The body is inspired: let us waive the question of
"soul." I might often have been seen dancing in those days, and I could
then walk for seven or eight hours on end over the hills without a
suggestion of fatigue. I slept well and laughed a good deal--I was
perfectly robust and patient.
5
With the exception of these periods of industry lasting ten days, the
years I spent during the production of _Zarathustra,_ and thereafter,
were for me years of unparalleled distress. A man pays dearly for
being immortal: to this end he must die many times over during his
life. There is such a thing as what I call the rancour of greatness:
everything great, whether a work or a deed, once it is completed, turns
immediately against its author. The very fact that he is its author
makes him weak at this time. He can no longer endure his deed. He can
no longer look it full in the face. To have something at one's back
which one could never have willed, something to which the knot of human
destiny is attached--and to be forced thenceforward to bear it on one's
shoulders! Why, it almost crushes one! The rancour of greatness! A
somewhat different experience is the uncanny silence that reigns about
one. Solitude has seven skins which nothing can penetrate. One goes
among men; one greets friends: but these things are only new deserts,
the looks of those one meets no longer bear a greeting. At the best
one encounters a sort of revolt. This feeling of revolt, I suffered,
in varying degrees of intensity, at the hands of almost every one who
came near me; it would seem that nothing inflicts a deeper wound than
suddenly to make one's distance felt. Those noble natures are scarce
who know not how to live unless they can revere. A third thing is
the absurd susceptibility of the skin to small pin-pricks, a kind of
helplessness in the presence of all small things. This seems to me a
necessary outcome of the appalling expenditure of all defensive forces,
which is the first condition of every _creative_ act, of every act
which proceeds from the most intimate, most secret, and most concealed
recesses of a man's being. The small defensive forces are thus, as it
were, suspended, and no fresh energy reaches them. I even think it
probable that one does not digest so well, that one is less willing
to move, and that one is much too open to sensations of coldness and
suspicion; for, in a large number of cases, suspicion is merely a
blunder in etiology. On one occasion when I felt like this I became
conscious of the proximity of a herd of cows, some time before I could
possibly have seen it with my eyes, simply owing to a return in me of
milder and more humane sentiments: _they_ communicated warmth to me....
6
This work stands alone. Do not let us mention the poets in the
same breath; nothing perhaps has ever been produced out of such a
superabundance of strength. My concept "Dionysian" here became the
_highest_ deed; compared with it everything that other men have done
seems poor and limited. The fact that a Goethe or a Shakespeare would
not for an instant have known how to take breath in this atmosphere of
passion and of the heights; the fact that by the side of Zarathustra,
Dante is no more than a believer, and not one who first _creates_ the
truth--that is to say, not a world-ruling spirit, a _Fate_; the fact
that the poets of the Veda were priests and not even fit to unfasten
Zarathustra's sandal--all this is the least of things, and gives no
idea of the distance, of the azure solitude, in which this work dwells.
Zarathustra has an eternal right to say: "I draw around me circles and
holy boundaries. Ever fewer are they that mount with me to ever loftier
heights. I build me a mountain range of ever holier mountains." If all
the spirit and goodness of every great soul were collected together,
the whole could not create a single one of Zarathustra's discourses.
The ladder upon which he rises and descends is of boundless length;
he has seen further, he has willed further, and _gone_ further than
any other man. There is contradiction in every word that he utters,
this most yea-saying of all spirits. Through him all contradictions
are bound up into a new unity. The loftiest and the basest powers of
human nature, the sweetest, the lightest, and the most terrible, rush
forth from out one spring with everlasting certainty. Until his coming
no one knew what was height, or depth, and still less what was truth.
There is not a single passage in this revelation of truth which had
already been anticipated and divined by even the greatest among men.
Before Zarathustra there was no wisdom, no probing of the soul, no art
of speech: in his book, the most familiar and most vulgar thing utters
unheard-of words. The sentence quivers with passion. Eloquence has
become music. Forks of lightning are hurled towards futures of which
no one has ever dreamed before. The most powerful use of parables that
has yet existed is poor beside it, and mere child's-play compared with
this return of language to the nature of imagery. See how Zarathustra
goes down from the mountain and speaks the kindest words to every
one! See with what delicate fingers he touches his very adversaries,
the priests, and how he suffers with them from themselves! Here, at
every moment, man is overcome, and the concept "Superman" becomes the
greatest reality,--out of sight, almost far away beneath him, lies
all that which heretofore has been called great in man. The halcyonic
brightness, the light feet, the presence of wickedness and exuberance
throughout, and all that is the essence of the type Zarathustra, was
never dreamt of before as a prerequisite of greatness. In precisely
these limits of space and in this accessibility to opposites
Zarathustra feels himself the _highest of all living things_: and when
you hear how he defines this highest, you will give up trying to find
his equal.
"The soul which hath the longest ladder and can step down deepest,
"The vastest soul that can run and stray and rove furthest in its own
domain,
"The most necessary soul, that out of desire flingeth itself to chance,
"The stable soul that plungeth into Becoming, the possessing soul that
must needs taste of willing and longing,
"The soul that flyeth from itself, and over-taketh itself in the widest
circle,
"The wisest soul that folly exhorteth most sweetly,
"The most self-loving soul, in whom all things have their rise, their
ebb and flow."
But this is the very idea of Dionysus. Another consideration leads
to this idea. The psychological problem presented by the type of
Zarathustra is, how can he, who in an unprecedented manner says
no, and _acts_ no, in regard to all that which has been affirmed
hitherto, remain nevertheless a yea-saying spirit? how can he who
bears the heaviest destiny on his shoulders and whose very life-task
is a fatality, yet be the brightest and the most transcendental
of spirits--for Zarathustra is a dancer? how can he who has the
hardest and most terrible grasp of reality, and who has thought the
most "abysmal thoughts," nevertheless avoid conceiving these things
as objections to existence, or even as objections to the eternal
recurrence of existence?--how is it that on the contrary he finds
reasons for _being himself_ the eternal affirmation of all things, "the
tremendous and unlimited saying of Yea and Amen"?... "Into every abyss
do I bear the benediction of my yea to Life." ... But this, once more,
is precisely the idea of Dionysus.
7
What language will such a spirit speak, when he speaks unto his soul?
The language of the _dithyramb._ I am the inventor of the dithyramb.
Hearken unto the manner in which Zarathustra speaks to his soul _Before
Sunrise_ (iii. 48). Before my time such emerald joys and divine
tenderness had found no tongue. Even the profoundest melancholy of
such a Dionysus takes shape as a dithyramb. As an example of this I
take "The Night-Song,"--the immortal plaint of one who, thanks to his
superabundance of light and power, thanks to the sun within him, is
condemned never to love.
"It is night: now do all gushing springs raise their voices. And my
soul too is a gushing spring.
"It is night: now only do all lovers burst into song. And my soul too
is the song of a lover.
"Something unquenched and unquenchable is within me, that would raise
its voice. A craving for love is within me, which itself speaketh the
language of love.
"Light am I: would that I were night! But this is my loneliness, that I
am begirt with light.
"Alas, why am I not dark and like unto the night! How joyfully would I
then suck at the breasts of light!
"And even you would I bless, ye twinkling starlets and glow-worms on
high! and be blessed in the gifts of your light.
"But in mine own light do I live, ever back into myself do I drink the
flames I send forth.
"I know not the happiness of the hand stretched forth to grasp; and oft
have I dreamt that stealing must be more blessed than taking.
"Wretched am I that my hand may never rest from giving: an envious fate
is mine that I see expectant eyes and nights made bright with longing.
"Oh, the wretchedness of all them that give! Oh, the clouds that cover
the face of my sun! That craving for desire! that burning hunger at the
end of the feast!
"They take what I give them; but do I touch their soul? A gulf is there
'twixt giving and taking; and the smallest gulf is the last to be
bridged.
"An appetite is born from out my beauty: would that I might do harm to
them that I fill with light; would that I might rob them of the gifts I
have given:--thus do I thirst for wickedness.
"To withdraw my hand when their hand is ready stretched forth like the
waterfall that wavers, wavers even in its fall:--thus do I thirst for
wickedness.
"For such vengeance doth my fulness yearn: to such tricks doth my
loneliness give birth.
"My joy in giving died with the deed. By its very fulness did my virtue
grow weary of itself.
"He who giveth risketh to lose his shame; he that is ever distributing
groweth callous in hand and heart therefrom.
"Mine eyes no longer melt into tears at the sight of the suppliant's
shame; my hand hath become too hard to feel the quivering of laden
hands.
"Whither have ye fled, the tears of mine eyes and the bloom of my
heart? Oh, the solitude of all givers! Oh, the silence of all beacons!
"Many are the suns that circle in barren space; to all that is dark do
they speak with their light--to me alone are they silent.
"Alas, this is the hatred of light for that which shineth: pitiless it
runneth its course.
"Unfair in its inmost heart to that which shineth; cold toward
suns,--thus doth every sun go its way.
"Like a tempest do the suns fly over their course: for such is their
way. Their own unswerving will do they follow: that is their coldness.
"Alas, it is ye alone, ye creatures of gloom, ye spirits of the night,
that take your warmth from that which shineth. Ye alone suck your milk
and comfort from the udders of light.
"Alas, about me there is ice, my hand burneth itself against ice!
"Alas, within me is a thirst that thirsteth for your thirst!
"It is night: woe is me, that I must needs be light! And thirst after
darkness! And loneliness!
"It is night: now doth my longing burst forth like a spring,--for
speech do I long.
"It is night: now do all gushing springs raise their voices. And my
soul too is a gushing spring.
"It is night: now only do all lovers burst into song. And my soul too
is the song of a lover."
8
Such things have never been written, never been felt, never been
_suffered:_ only a God, only Dionysus suffers in this way. The reply
to such a dithyramb on the sun's solitude in light would be Ariadne.
... Who knows, but I, who Ariadne is! To all such riddles no one
heretofore had ever found an answer; I doubt even whether any one had
ever seen a riddle here. One day Zarathustra severely determines his
life-task--and it is also mine. Let no one misunderstand its meaning.
It's a yea-saying to the point of justifying, to the point of redeeming
even all that is past.
"I walk among men as among fragments of the future: of that future
which I see.
"And all my creativeness and effort is but this, that I may be able to
think and recast all these fragments and riddles and dismal accidents
into one piece.
"And how could I bear to be a man, if man were not also a poet, a
riddle reader, and a redeemer of chance!
"To redeem all the past, and to transform every 'it was' into 'thus
would I have it'--that alone would be my salvation!"
In another passage he defines as strictly as possible what to him alone
"man" can be,--not a subject for love nor yet for pity--Zarathustra
became master even of his loathing of man: man is to him a thing
unshaped, raw material, an ugly stone that needs the sculptor's chisel.
"No longer to will, no longer to value, no longer to create! Oh, that
this great weariness may never be mine!
"Even in the lust of knowledge, I feel only the joy of my will to beget
and to grow; and if there be innocence in my knowledge, it is because
my procreative will is in it.
"Away from God and gods did this will lure me: what would there be to
create if there were gods?
"But to man doth it ever drive me anew, my burning, creative will.
Thus driveth it the hammer to the stone.
"Alas, ye men, within the stone there sleepeth an image for me, the
image of all my dreams! Alas, that it should have to sleep in the
hardest and ugliest stone!
"_Now rageth my hammer ruthlessly against its prison._ From the stone
the fragments fly: what's that to me?
"I will finish it: for a shadow came unto me--the stillest and lightest
thing on earth once came unto me!
"The beauty of the Superman came unto me as a shadow. Alas, my
brethren! What are the--gods to me now?"
Let me call attention to one last point of view. The line in italics is
my pretext for this remark. A Dionysian life-task needs the hardness of
the hammer, and one of its first essentials is without doubt the _joy
even of destruction._ The command, "Harden yourselves!" and the deep
conviction that _all creators are hard,_ is the really distinctive sign
of a Dionysian nature.