1.
—Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans—we
know well enough how remote our place is. “Neither by land nor by water
will you find the road to the Hyperboreans”: even Pindar[1],
in his day, knew that much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the
ice, beyond death—our life, our happiness...We have
discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from
thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it?—The
man of today?—”. don't know either the way out or the way in; I am
whatever doesn't know either the way out or the way in”—so sighs
the man of today...This is the sort of modernity that made us ill,—we
sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of
the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that
“forgives” everything because it “understands”
everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern
virtues and other such south-winds! . . . We were brave enough; we spared
neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding out where
to direct our courage. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our
fate—it was the fulness, the tension, the storing up of powers.
We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from
the happiness of the weakling, from “resignation” . . . There was
thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast—for we
had not yet found the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a
straight line, a goal. . .
Footnotes
[1]
. Cf. the tenth Pythian ode. See also the
fourth hook of Herodotus. The Hyperboreans were a mythical people beyond
the Rhipaean mountains, in the far North. They enjoyed unbroken happiness
and perpetual youth.
