Thus spake Zarathustra to himself while ascending, comforting his heart with harsh maxims: for he was sore at heart as he had never been before. And when he had reached the top of the mountain-ridge, behold, there lay the other sea spread out before him; and he stood still and was long silent. The night, however, was cold at this height, and clear and starry.
Ah, this sombre, sad sea, below me! Ah, this sombre nocturnal vexation! Ah, fate and sea! To you must I now go down!
“That would be the highest thing for me”?so faith your lying spirit unto itself?”to gaze upon life without desire, and not like the dog, with hanging-out tongue:
To be happy in gazing: with dead will, free from the grip and greed of selfishness?cold and ashy-grey all over, but with intoxicated moon-eyes!
That would be the dearest thing to me”?thus doth the seduced one seduce himself,?”to love the earth as the moon loveth it, and with the eye only to feel its beauty.
And this do I call immaculate perception of all things: to want nothing else from them, but to be allowed to lie before them as a mirror with a hundred facets.”?
Oh, ye sentimental dissemblers, ye covetous ones! Ye lack innocence in your desire: and now do ye defame desiring on that account!
Verily, not as creators, as procreators, or as jubilators do ye love the earth!
Where is innocence? Where there is will to procreation. And he who seeketh to create beyond himself, hath for me the purest will.
Where is beauty? Where I must will with my whole Will; where I will love and perish, that an image may not remain merely an image.
Loving and perishing: these have rhymed from eternity. Will to love: that is to be ready also for death. Thus do I speak unto you cowards!
But now doth your emasculated ogling profess to be “contemplation!” And that which can be examined with cowardly eyes is to be christened “beautiful!” Oh, ye violators of noble names!
But it shall be your curse, ye immaculate ones, ye pure discerners, that ye shall never bring forth, even though ye lie broad and teeming on the horizon!
Verily, ye fill your mouth with noble words: and we are to believe that your heart overfloweth, ye cozeners?
But my words are poor, contemptible, stammering words: gladly do I pick up what falleth from the table at your repasts.
Yet still can I say therewith the truth?to dissemblers! Yea, my fish-bones, shells, and prickly leaves.
Holier-than-thou is no longer an acceptable attitude.
Salvation, for Nietzsche, is about healing . . . Humanity suffers from a disease brought about by . . . the imagined comforts of Christian redemption.?
Nietzsche seeks salvation in an inverted version of Lutheranism; that is, by urging his readers to undergo, in reverse, that process by which humanity came to hate itself in the first place.
Is my experience but of yesterday? It is long ago that I experienced the reasons for mine opinions. Should I not have to be a cask of memory, if I also wanted to have my reasons with me? It is already too much for me even to retain mine opinions; and many a bird flieth away. And sometimes, also, do I find a fugitive creature in my dovecote, which is alien to me, and trembleth when I lay my hand upon it. But what did Zarathustra once say unto thee? That the poets lie too much??But Zarathustra also is a poet. Believest thou that he there spake the truth? Why dost thou believe it?”
?
“One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power.”
And you call, again.
I listen, again.
Fool.
