lizard a finger grows again which has been lost; not so in
man.—
277. It is too bad! Always the old story! When a man
has finished building his house, he finds that he has learnt
unawares something which he OUGHT absolutely to
have known before he— began to build. The eternal, fatal
‘Too late!’ The melancholia of everything
COMPLETED!—
278.—Wanderer, who art thou? I see thee follow thy
path without scorn, without love, with unfathomable eyes,
wet and sad as a plummet which has returned to the light
insatiated out of every depth—what did it seek down
there?—with a bosom that never sighs, with lips that
conceal their loathing, with a hand which only slowly
grasps: who art thou? what hast thou done? Rest thee
here: this place has hospitality for every one—refresh
thyself! And whoever thou art, what is it that now pleases
thee? What will serve to refresh thee? Only name it,
whatever I have I offer thee! ‘To refresh me? To refresh
me? Oh, thou prying one, what sayest thou! But give me,
I pray thee—-’ What? what? Speak out! ‘Another mask! A
second mask!’
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279. Men of profound sadness betray themselves when
they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon
happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out
of jealousy—ah, they know only too well that it will flee
from them!
280. ‘Bad! Bad! What? Does he not—go back?’ Yes!
But you misunderstand him when you complain about it.
He goes back like every one who is about to make a great
spring.
281.—‘Will people believe it of me? But I insist that
they believe it of me: I have always thought very
unsatisfactorily of myself and about myself, only in very
rare cases, only compulsorily, always without delight in
‘the subject,’ ready to digress from ‘myself,’ and always
without faith in the result, owing to an unconquerable
distrust of the POSSIBILITY of self- knowledge, which
has led me so far as to feel a CONTRADICTIO IN
ADJECTO even in the idea of ‘direct knowledge’ which
theorists allow themselves:—this matter of fact is almost
the most certain thing I know about myself. There must
be a sort of repugnance in me to BELIEVE anything
definite about myself.—Is there perhaps some enigma
therein? Probably; but fortunately nothing for my own
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teeth.—Perhaps it betrays the species to which I belong?—
but not to myself, as is sufficiently agreeable to me.’
282.—‘But what has happened to you?’—‘I do not
know,’ he said, hesitatingly; ‘perhaps the Harpies have
flown over my table.’—It sometimes happens nowadays
that a gentle, sober, retiring man becomes suddenly mad,
breaks the plates, upsets the table, shrieks, raves, and
shocks everybody—and finally withdraws, ashamed, and
raging at himself—whither? for what purpose? To famish
apart? To suffocate with his memories?—To him who has
the desires of a lofty and dainty soul, and only seldom finds
his table laid and his food prepared, the danger will always
be great—nowadays, however, it is extraordinarily so.
Thrown into the midst of a noisy and plebeian age, with
which he does not like to eat out of the same dish, he may
readily perish of hunger and thirst—or, should he
nevertheless finally ‘fall to,’ of sudden nausea.—We have
probably all sat at tables to which we did not belong; and
precisely the most spiritual of us, who are most difficult to
nourish, know the dangerous DYSPEPSIA which
originates from a sudden insight and disillusionment about
our food and our messmates—the AFTER-DINNER
NAUSEA.
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283. If one wishes to praise at all, it is a delicate and at
the same time a noble self-control, to praise only where
one DOES NOT agree—otherwise in fact one would
praise oneself, which is contrary to good taste:—a self-
control, to be sure, which offers excellent opportunity and
provocation to constant MISUNDERSTANDING. To
be able to allow oneself this veritable luxury of taste and
morality, one must not live among intellectual imbeciles,
but rather among men whose misunderstandings and
mistakes amuse by their refinement—or one will have to
pay dearly for it!—‘He praises me, THEREFORE he
acknowledges me to be right’—this asinine method of
inference spoils half of the life of us recluses, for it brings
the asses into our neighbourhood and friendship.
284. To live in a vast and proud tranquility; always
beyond … To have, or not to have, one’s emotions, one’s
For and Against, according to choice; to lower oneself to
them for hours; to SEAT oneself on them as upon horses,
and often as upon asses:—for one must know how to
make use of their stupidity as well as of their fire. To
conserve one’s three hundred foregrounds; also one’s black
spectacles: for there are circumstances when nobody must
look into our eyes, still less into our ‘motives.’ And to
choose for company that roguish and cheerful vice,
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politeness. And to remain master of one’s four virtues,
courage, insight, sympathy, and solitude. For solitude is a
virtue with us, as a sublime bent and bias to purity, which
divines that in the contact of man and man—‘in society’—
it must be unavoidably impure. All society makes one
somehow, somewhere, or sometime—‘commonplace.’
285. The greatest events and thoughts—the greatest
thoughts, however, are the greatest events—are longest in
being comprehended: the generations which are
contemporary with them do not EXPERIENCE such
events—they live past them. Something happens there as
in the realm of stars. The light of the furthest stars is
longest in reaching man; and before it has arrived man
DENIES—that there are stars there. ‘How many centuries
does a mind require to be understood?’—that is also a
standard, one also makes a gradation of rank and an
etiquette therewith, such as is necessary for mind and for
star.
286. ‘Here is the prospect free, the mind exalted.’
[FOOTNOTE: Goethe’s ‘Faust,’ Part II, Act V. The
words of Dr. Marianus.]— But there is a reverse kind of
man, who is also upon a height, and has also a free
prospect—but looks DOWNWARDS.
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287. What is noble? What does the word ‘noble’ still
mean for us nowadays? How does the noble man betray
himself, how is he recognized under this heavy overcast
sky of the commencing plebeianism, by which everything
is rendered opaque and leaden?— It is not his actions
which establish his claim—actions are always ambiguous,
always inscrutable; neither is it his ‘works.’ One finds
nowadays among artists and scholars plenty of those who
betray by their works that a profound longing for
nobleness impels them; but this very NEED of nobleness
is radically different from the needs of the noble soul itself,
and is in fact the eloquent and dangerous sign of the lack
thereof. It is not the works, but the BELIEF which is here
decisive and determines the order of rank—to employ
once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper
meaning—it is some fundamental certainty which a noble
soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought,
is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost.—
THE NOBLE SOUL HAS REVERENCE FOR
ITSELF.—
288. There are men who are unavoidably intellectual,
let them turn and twist themselves as they will, and hold
their hands before their treacherous eyes—as though the
hand were not a betrayer; it always comes out at last that
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they have something which they hide—namely, intellect.
One of the subtlest means of deceiving, at least as long as
possible, and of successfully representing oneself to be
stupider than one really is—which in everyday life is often
as desirable as an umbrella,—is called ENTHUSIASM,
including what belongs to it, for instance, virtue. For as
Galiani said, who was obliged to know it: VERTU EST
ENTHOUSIASME.
289. In the writings of a recluse one always hears
something of the echo of the wilderness, something of the
murmuring tones and timid vigilance of solitude; in his
strongest words, even in his cry itself, there sounds a new
and more dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. He
who has sat day and night, from year’s end to year’s end,
alone with his soul in familiar discord and discourse, he
who has become a cave-bear, or a treasure- seeker, or a
treasure-guardian and dragon in his cave—it may be a
labyrinth, but can also be a gold-mine—his ideas
themselves eventually acquire a twilight-colour of their
own, and an odour, as much of the depth as of the mould,
something uncommunicative and repulsive, which blows
chilly upon every passerby. The recluse does not believe
that a philosopher—supposing that a philosopher has
always in the first place been a recluse—ever expressed his
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actual and ultimate opinions in books: are not books
written precisely to hide what is in us?—indeed, he will
doubt whether a philosopher CAN have ‘ultimate and
actual’ opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him
there is not, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an
ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss
behind every bottom, beneath every ‘foundation.’ Every
philosophy is a foreground philosophy—this is a recluse’s
verdict: ‘There is something arbitrary in the fact that the
PHILOSOPHER came to a stand here, took a retrospect,
and looked around; that he HERE laid his spade aside and
did not dig any deeper—there is also something suspicious
in it.’ Every philosophy also CONCEALS a philosophy;
every opinion is also a LURKING-PLACE, every word is
also a MASK.
290. Every deep thinker is more afraid of being
understood than of being misunderstood. The latter
perhaps wounds his vanity; but the former wounds his
heart, his sympathy, which always says: ‘Ah, why would
you also have as hard a time of it as I have?’
291. Man, a COMPLEX, mendacious, artful, and
inscrutable animal, uncanny to the other animals by his
artifice and sagacity, rather than by his strength, has
invented the good conscience in order finally to enjoy his
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soul as something SIMPLE; and the whole of morality is a
long, audacious falsification, by virtue of which generally
enjoyment at the sight of the soul becomes possible. From
this point of view there is perhaps much more in the
conception of ‘art’ than is generally believed.
292. A philosopher: that is a man who constantly
experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams
extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as
if they came from the outside, from above and below, as a
species of events and lightning-flashes PECULIAR TO
HIM; who is perhaps himself a storm pregnant with new
lightnings; a portentous man, around whom there is
always rumbling and mumbling and gaping and something
uncanny going on. A philosopher: alas, a being who often
runs away from himself, is often afraid of himself—but
whose curiosity always makes him ‘come to himself’ again.
293. A man who says: ‘I like that, I take it for my own,
and mean to guard and protect it from every one"; a man
who can conduct a case, carry out a resolution, remain
true to an opinion, keep hold of a woman, punish and
overthrow insolence; a man who has his indignation and
his sword, and to whom the weak, the suffering, the
oppressed, and even the animals willingly submit and
naturally belong; in short, a man who is a MASTER by
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nature— when such a man has sympathy, well! THAT
sympathy has value! But of what account is the sympathy
of those who suffer! Or of those even who preach
sympathy! There is nowadays, throughout almost the
whole of Europe, a sickly irritability and sensitiveness
towards pain, and also a repulsive irrestrainableness in
complaining, an effeminizing, which, with the aid of
religion and philosophical nonsense, seeks to deck itself
out as something superior—there is a regular cult of
suffering. The UNMANLINESS of that which is called
‘sympathy’ by such groups of visionaries, is always, I
believe, the first thing that strikes the eye.—One must
resolutely and radically taboo this latest form of bad taste;
and finally I wish people to put the good amulet, ‘GAI
SABER’ ("gay science,’ in ordinary language), on heart
and neck, as a protection against it.
294. THE OLYMPIAN VICE.—Despite the
philosopher who, as a genuine Englishman, tried to bring
laughter into bad repute in all thinking minds—‘Laughing
is a bad infirmity of human nature, which every thinking
mind will strive to overcome’ (Hobbes),—I would even
allow myself to rank philosophers according to the quality
of their laughing—up to those who are capable of
GOLDEN laughter. And supposing that Gods also
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philosophize, which I am strongly inclined to believe,
owing to many reasons—I have no doubt that they also
know how to laugh thereby in an overman-like and new
fashion—and at the expense of all serious things! Gods are
fond of ridicule: it seems that they cannot refrain from
laughter even in holy matters.
295. The genius of the heart, as that great mysterious
one possesses it, the tempter-god and born rat-catcher of
consciences, whose voice can descend into the nether-
world of every soul, who neither speaks a word nor casts a
glance in which there may not be some motive or touch
of allurement, to whose perfection it pertains that he
knows how to appear,—not as he is, but in a guise which
acts as an ADDITIONAL constraint on his followers to
press ever closer to him, to follow him more cordially and
thoroughly;—the genius of the heart, which imposes
