 | Thus Spake Zarathustra |  |
2.
When I came unto men, then found I them resting on an old infatuation: all of them thought they had long known what was good and bad for men.
An old wearisome business seemed to them all discourse about virtue; and he who wished to sleep well spake of "good" and "bad" ere retiring to rest.
This somnolence did I disturb when I taught that no one yet knoweth what is good and bad:-unless it be the creating one!
-It is he, however, who createth man's goal, and giveth to the earth its meaning and its future: he only effecteth it that aught is good or bad.
And I bade them upset their old academic chairs, and wherever that old infatuation had sat; I bade them laugh at their great moralists, their saints, their poets, and their saviours.
At their gloomy sages did I bid them laugh, and whoever had sat admonishing as a black scarecrow on the tree of life.
On their great grave-highway did I seat myself, and even beside the carrion and vultures-and I laughed at all their bygone and its mellow decaying glory.
Verily, like penitential preachers and fools did I cry wrath and shame on all their greatness and smallness. Oh, that their best is so very small! Oh, that their worst is so very small! Thus did I laugh.
Thus did my wise longing, born in the mountains, cry and laugh in me; a wild wisdom, verily!-my great pinion-rustling longing.
And oft did it carry me off and up and away and in the midst of laughter; then flew I quivering like an arrow with sun-intoxicated rapture:
-Out into distant futures, which no dream hath yet seen, into warmer souths than ever sculptor conceived,-where gods in their dancing are ashamed of all clothes:
(That I may speak in parables and halt and stammer like the poets: and verily I am ashamed that I have still to be a poet!)
Where all becoming seemed to me dancing of gods, and wantoning of gods, and the world unloosed and unbridled and fleeing back to itself:-
-As an eternal self-fleeing and re-seeking of one another of many gods, as the blessed self-contradicting, recommuning, and refraternising with one another of many gods:-
Where all time seemed to me a blessed mockery of moments, where necessity was freedom itself, which played happily with the goad of freedom:-
Where I also found again mine old devil and arch-enemy, the spirit of gravity, and all that it created: constraint, law, necessity and consequence and purpose and will and good and evil:-
For must there not be that which is danced over, danced beyond? Must there not, for the sake of the nimble, the nimblest,-be moles and clumsy dwarfs?-
| Thus Spake Zarathustra | |