Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Original German
Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen.
1 Ich erzähle nunmehr die Geschichte des Zarathustra. Die Grundconception des Werks, der Ewige-Wiederkunfts-Gedanke, diese höchste Formel der Bejahung, die überhaupt erreicht werden kann —, gehört in den August des Jahres 1881: er ist auf ein Blatt hingeworfen, mit der Unterschrift: „6000 Fuß jenseits von Mensch und Zeit.“ Ich gieng an jenem Tage am See von Silvaplana durch die Wälder; bei einem mächtigen pyramidal aufgethürmten Block unweit Surlei machte ich Halt. Da kam mir dieser Gedanke. — Rechne ich von diesem Tage ein paar Monate zurück, so finde ich, als Vorzeichen, eine plötzliche und im Tiefsten entscheidende Veränderung meines Geschmacks, vor Allem in der Musik. Man darf vielleicht den ganzen Zarathustra unter die Musik rechnen; — sicherlich war eine Wiedergeburt in der Kunst zu hören, eine Vorausbedingung dazu. In einem kleinen Gebirgsbade unweit Vicenza, Recoaro, wo ich den Frühling des Jahrs 1881 verbrachte, entdeckte ich, zusammen mit meinem maestro und Freunde Peter Gast, einem gleichfalls „Wiedergebornen“, daß der Phönix Musik mit leichterem und leuchtenderem Gefieder, als er je gezeigt, an uns vorüberflog. Rechne ich dagegen von jenem Tage an vorwärts, bis zur plötzlichen und unter den unwahrscheinlichsten Verhältnissen eintretenden Niederkunft im Februar 1883 — die Schlußpartie, dieselbe, aus der ich im Vorwort ein paar Sätze citirt habe, wurde genau in der heiligen Stunde fertig gemacht, in der Richard Wagner in Venedig starb — so ergeben sich achtzehn Monate für die Schwangerschaft. Diese Zahl gerade von achtzehn Monaten dürfte den Gedanken nahelegen, unter Buddhisten wenigstens, daß ich im Grunde ein ElephantenWeibchen bin. — In die Zwischenzeit gehört die „gaya scienza“, die hundert Anzeichen der Nähe von etwas Unvergleichlichem hat; zuletzt giebt sie den Anfang des Zarathustra selbst noch, sie giebt im vorletzten Stück des vierten Buchs den Grundgedanken des Zarathustra. — Insgleichen gehört in diese Zwischenzeit jener Hymnus auf das Leben (für gemischten Chor und Orchester), dessen Partitur vor zwei Jahren bei E. W. Fritsch in Leipzig erschienen ist: ein vielleicht nicht unbedeutendes Symptom für den Zustand dieses Jahres, wo das jasagende Pathos par excellence, von mir das tragische Pathos genannt, im höchsten Grade mir innewohnte. Man wird ihn später einmal zu meinem Gedächtniß singen. — Der Text, ausdrücklich bemerkt, weil ein Mißverständniß darüber im Umlauf ist, ist nicht von mir: er ist die erstaunliche Inspiration einer jungen Russin, mit der ich damals befreundet war, des Fräulein Lou von Salomé. Wer den letzten Worten des Gedichts überhaupt einen Sinn zu entnehmen weiß, wird errathen, warum ich es vorzog und bewunderte: sie haben Größe. Der Schmerz gilt nicht als Einwand gegen das Leben: „Hast du kein Glück mehr übrig mir zu geben, wohlan! noch hast du deine Pein...“
Vielleicht hat auch meine Musik an dieser Stelle Größe. (Letzte Note der Oboe cis, nicht c. Druckfehler.) — Den darauf folgenden Winter lebte ich in jener anmuthig stillen Bucht von Rapallo unweit Genua, die sich zwischen Chiavari und dem Vorgebirge Porto fino einschneidet. Meine Gesundheit war nicht die beste; der Winter kalt und über die Maaßen regnerisch; ein kleines Albergo, unmittelbar am Meer gelegen, so daß die hohe See nachts den Schlaf unmöglich machte, bot ungefähr in Allem das Gegentheil vom Wünschenswerthen. Trotzdem und beinahe zum Beweis meines Satzes, daß alles Entscheidende „trotzdem“ entsteht, war es dieser Winter und diese Ungunst der Verhältnisse, unter denen mein Zarathustra entstand. — Den Vormittag stieg ich in südlicher Richtung auf der herrlichen Straße nach Zoagli hin in die Höhe, an Pinien vorbei und weitaus das Meer überschauend; des Nachmittags, so oft es nur die Gesundheit erlaubte, umgieng ich die ganze Bucht von Santa Margherita bis hinter nach Porto fino. Dieser Ort und diese Landschaft ist durch die große Liebe, welche Kaiser Friedrich der Dritte für sie fühlte, meinem Herzen noch näher gerückt; ich war zufällig im Herbst 1886 wieder an dieser Küste, als er zum letzten Mal diese kleine vergessne Welt von Glück besuchte. — Auf diesen beiden Wegen fiel mir der ganze erste Zarathustra ein, vor Allem Zarathustra selber, als Typus: richtiger, er überfiel mich...
2 Um diesen Typus zu verstehn, muß man sich zuerst seine physiologische Voraussetzung klar machen: sie ist das, was ich die große Gesundheit nenne. Ich weiß diesen Begriff nicht besser, nicht persönlicher zu erläutern, als ich es schon gethan habe, in einem der Schlußabschnitte des fünften Buchs der „gaya scienza.“ „Wir Neuen, Namenlosen, Schlechtverständlichen — heißt es daselbst —, wir Frühgeburten einer noch unbewiesenen Zukunft, wir bedürfen zu einem neuen Zwecke auch eines neuen Mittels, nämlich einer neuen Gesundheit, einer stärkeren gewitzteren zäheren verwegneren lustigeren, als alle Gesundheiten bisher waren. Wessen Seele darnach dürstet, den ganzen Umfang der bisherigen Werthe und Wünschbarkeiten erlebt und alle Küsten dieses idealischen „Mittelmeers“ umschifft zu haben, wer aus den Abenteuern der eigensten Erfahrung wissen will, wie es einem Eroberer und Entdecker des Ideals zu Muthe ist, insgleichen einem Künstler, einem Heiligen, einem Gesetzgeber, einem Weisen, einem Gelehrten, einem Frommen, einem Göttlich-Abseitigen alten Stils: der hat dazu zu allererst Eins nöthig, die große Gesundheit — eine solche, welche man nicht nur hat, sondern auch beständig noch erwirbt und erwerben muß, weil man sie immer wieder preisgiebt, preißgeben muß... Und nun, nachdem wir lange dergestalt unterwegs waren, wir Argonauten des Ideals, muthiger vielleicht als klug ist, und oft genug schiffbrüchig und zu Schaden gekommen, aber, wie gesagt, gesünder als man es uns erlauben möchte, gefährlich gesund, immer wieder gesund, — will es uns scheinen, als ob wir, zum Lohn dafür, ein noch unentdecktes Land vor uns haben, dessen Grenzen noch Niemand abgesehn hat, ein Jenseits aller bisherigen Länder und Winkel des Ideals, eine Welt so überreich an Schönem, Fremdem, Fragwürdigem, Furchtbarem und Göttlichem, daß unsre Neugierde sowohl als unser Besitzdurst außer sich gerathen sind — ach, daß wir nunmehr durch Nichts mehr zu ersättigen sind!... Wie könnten wir uns, nach solchen Ausblicken und mit einem solchen Heißhunger in Wissen und Gewissen, noch am gegenwärtigen Menschen genügen lassen? Schlimm genug, aber es ist unvermeidlich, daß wir seinen würdigsten Zielen und Hoffnungen nur mit einem übel aufrecht erhaltenen Ernste zusehn und vielleicht nicht einmal mehr zusehn... Ein andres Ideal läuft vor uns her, ein wunderliches, versucherisches, gefahrenreiches Ideal, zu dem wir Niemanden überreden möchten, weil wir Niemandem so leicht das Recht darauf zugestehn: das Ideal eines Geistes, der naiv, das heißt ungewollt und aus überströmender Fülle und Mächtigkeit mit Allem spielt, was bisher heilig, gut, unberührbar, göttlich hieß; für den das Höchste, woran das Volk billigerweise sein Werthmaaß hat, bereits so viel wie Gefahr, Verfall, Erniedrigung oder, mindestens, wie Erholung, Blindheit, zeitweiliges Selbstvergessen bedeuten würde; das Ideal eines menschlich-übermenschlichen Wohlseins und Wohlwollens, welches oft genug unmenschlich erscheinen wird, zum Beispiel, wenn es sich neben den ganzen bisherigen Erdenernst, neben alle bisherige Feierlichkeit in Gebärde, Wort, Klang, Blick, Moral und Aufgabe wie deren leibhafteste unfreiwillige Parodie hinstellt — und mit dem, trotzalledem, vielleicht der große Ernst erst anhebt, das eigentliche Fragezeichen erst gesetzt wird, das Schicksal der Seele sich wendet, der Zeiger rückt, die Tragödie beginnt...“
3 Hat Jemand, Ende des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, einen deutlichen Begriff davon, was Dichter starker Zeitalter Inspiration nannten? Im andren Falle will ich’s beschreiben. — Mit dem geringsten Rest von Aberglauben in sich würde man in der That die Vorstellung, bloß Incarnation, bloß Mundstück, bloß Medium übermächtiger Gewalten zu sein, kaum abzuweisen wissen. Der Begriff Offenbarung, in dem Sinn, daß plötzlich, mit unsäglicher Sicherheit und Feinheit, Etwas sichtbar, hörbar wird, Etwas, das Einen im Tiefsten erschüttert und umwirft, beschreibt einfach den Thatbestand. Man hört, man sucht nicht; man nimmt, man fragt nicht, wer da giebt; wie ein Blitz leuchtet ein Gedanke auf, mit Nothwendigkeit, in der Form ohne Zögern, — ich habe nie eine Wahl gehabt. Eine Entzückung, deren ungeheure Spannung sich mitunter in einen Thränenstrom auslöst, bei der der Schritt unwillkürlich bald stürmt, bald langsam wird; ein vollkommnes Außer-sich-sein mit dem distinktesten Bewußtsein einer Unzahl feiner Schauder und Überrieselungen bis in die Fußzehen; eine Glückstiefe, in der das Schmerzlichste und Düsterste nicht als Gegensatz wirkt, sondern als bedingt, als herausgefordert, als eine nothwendige Farbe innerhalb eines solchen Lichtüberflusses; ein Instinkt rhythmischer Verhältnisse, der weite Räume von Formen überspannt — die Länge, das Bedürfniß nach einem weitgespannten Rhythmus ist beinahe das Maaß für die Gewalt der Inspiration, eine Art Ausgleich gegen deren Druck und Spannung... Alles geschieht im höchsten Grade unfreiwillig, aber wie in einem Sturme von Freiheits-Gefühl, von Unbedingt-sein, von Macht, von Göttlichkeit... Die Unfreiwilligkeit des Bildes, des Gleichnisses ist das Merkwürdigste; man hat keinen Begriff mehr, was Bild, was Gleichniß ist, Alles bietet sich als der nächste, der richtigste, der einfachste Ausdruck. Es scheint wirklich, um an ein Wort Zarathustra’s zu erinnern, als ob die Dinge selber herankämen und sich zum Gleichniß anböten (— „hier kommen alle Dinge liebkosend zu deiner Rede und schmeicheln dir: denn sie wollen auf deinem Rücken reiten. Auf jedem Gleichniß reitest du hier zu jeder Wahrheit. Hier springen dir alles Seins Worte und Wort-Schreine auf; alles Sein will hier Wort werden, alles Werden will von dir reden lernen —“). Dies ist meine Erfahrung von Inspiration; ich zweifle nicht, daß man Jahrtausende zurückgehn muß, um Jemanden zu finden, der mir sagen darf „es ist auch die meine.“ —
4 Ich lag ein paar Wochen hinterdrein in Genua krank. Dann folgte ein schwermüthiger Frühling in Rom, wo ich das Leben hinnahm — es war nicht leicht. Im Grunde verdroß mich dieser für den Dichter des Zarathustra unanständigste Ort der Erde, den ich nicht freiwillig gewählt hatte, über die Maaßen; ich versuchte loszukommen, — ich wollte nach Aquila, dem Gegenbegriff von Rom, aus Feindschaft gegen Rom gegründet, wie ich einen Ort dereinst gründen werde, die Erinnerung an einen Atheisten und Kirchenfeind comme il faut, an einen meiner Nächstverwandten, den großen Hohenstaufen-Kaiser Friedrich den Zweiten. Aber es war ein Verhängniß bei dem Allen: ich mußte wieder zurück. Zuletzt gab ich mich mit der piazza Barberini zufrieden, nachdem mich meine Mühe um eine antichristliche Gegend müde gemacht hatte. Ich fürchte, ich habe einmal, um schlechten Gerüchen möglichst aus dem Wege zu gehn, im palazzo del Quirinale selbst nachgefragt, ob man nicht ein stilles Zimmer für einen Philosophen habe. — Auf einer loggia hoch über der genannten piazza, von der aus man Rom übersieht und tief unten die fontana rauschen hört, wurde jenes einsamste Lied gedichtet, das je gedichtet worden ist, das Nachtlied; um diese Zeit gieng immer eine Melodie von unsäglicher Schwermuth um mich herum, deren Refrain ich in den Worten wiederfand „todt vor Unsterblichkeit...“ Im Sommer, heimgekehrt zur heiligen Stelle, wo der erste Blitz des Zarathustra-Gedankens mir geleuchtet hatte, fand ich den zweiten Zarathustra. Zehn Tage genügten; ich habe in keinem Falle, weder beim ersten, noch beim dritten und letzten mehr gebraucht. Im Winter darauf, unter dem halkyonischen Himmel Nizza’s, der damals zum ersten Male in mein Leben hineinglänzte, fand ich den dritten Zarathustra — und war fertig. Kaum ein Jahr, für’s Ganze gerechnet. Viele verborgne Flecke und Höhen aus der Landschaft Nizza’s sind mir durch unvergeßliche Augenblicke geweiht; jene entscheidende Partie, welche den Titel „Von alten und neuen Tafeln“ trägt, wurde im beschwerlichsten Aufsteigen von der Station zu dem wunderbaren maurischen Felsenneste Eza gedichtet, — die Muskel-Behendheit war bei mir immer am größten, wenn die schöpferische Kraft am reichsten floß. Der Leib ist begeistert: lassen wir die „Seele“ aus dem Spiele... Man hat mich oft tanzen sehn können; ich konnte damals, ohne einen Begriff von Ermüdung, sieben, acht Stunden auf Bergen unterwegs sein. Ich schlief gut, ich lachte viel —, ich war von einer vollkommnen Rüstigkeit und Geduld.
5 Abgesehn von diesen Zehn-Tage-Werken waren die Jahre während und vor Allem nach dem Zarathustra ein Nothstand ohne Gleichen. Man büßt es theuer, unsterblich zu sein: man stirbt dafür mehrere Male bei Lebzeiten. — Es giebt Etwas, das ich die rancune des Großen nenne: alles Große, ein Werk, eine That, wendet sich, einmal vollbracht, unverzüglich gegen den, der sie that. Ebendamit, daß er sie that, ist er nunmehr schwach, — er hält seine That nicht mehr aus, er sieht ihr nicht mehr in’s Gesicht. Etwas hinter sich zu haben, das man nie wollen durfte, Etwas, worin der Knoten im Schicksal der Menschheit eingeknüpft ist — und es nunmehr auf sich haben!... Es zerdrückt beinahe... Die rancune des Großen! — Ein Andres ist die schauerliche Stille, die man um sich hört. Die Einsamkeit hat sieben Häute; es geht Nichts mehr hindurch. Man kommt zu Menschen, man begrüßt Freunde: neue Öde, kein Blick grüßt mehr. Im besten Falle eine Art Revolte. Eine solche Revolte erfuhr ich, in sehr verschiedenem Grade, aber fast von Jedermann, der mir nahe stand; es scheint, daß Nichts tiefer beleidigt als plötzlich eine Distanz merken zu lassen, — die vornehmen Naturen, die nicht zu leben wissen, ohne zu verehren, sind selten. — Ein Drittes ist die absurde Reizbarkeit der Haut gegen kleine Stiche, eine Art Hülflosigkeit vor allem Kleinen. Diese scheint mir in der ungeheuren Verschwendung aller Defensiv-Kräfte bedingt, die jede schöpferische That, jede That aus dem Eigensten, Innersten, Untersten heraus zur Voraussetzung hat. Die kleinen Defensiv-Vermögen sind damit gleichsam ausgehängt; es fließt ihnen keine Kraft mehr zu. — Ich wage noch anzudeuten, daß man schlechter verdaut, ungern sich bewegt, den Frostgefühlen, auch dem Mißtrauen allzu offen steht, — dem Mißtrauen, das in vielen Fällen bloß ein ätiologischer Fehlgriff ist. In einem solchen Zustande empfand ich einmal die Nähe einer Kuhheerde durch Wiederkehr milderer, menschenfreundlicherer Gedanken, noch bevor ich sie sah: Das hat Wärme in sich...
6 Dieses Werk steht durchaus für sich. Lassen wir die Dichter bei Seite: es ist vielleicht überhaupt nie Etwas aus einem gleichen Überfluß von Kraft heraus gethan worden. Mein Begriff „dionysisch“ wurde hier höchste That; an ihr gemessen erscheint der ganze Rest von menschlichem Thun als arm und bedingt. Daß ein Goethe, ein Shakespeare nicht einen Augenblick in dieser ungeheuren Leidenschaft und Höhe zu athmen wissen würde, daß Dante, gegen Zarathustra gehalten, bloß ein Gläubiger ist und nicht Einer, der die Wahrheit erst schafft, ein weltregierender Geist, ein Schicksal —, daß die Dichter des Veda Priester sind und nicht einmal würdig, die Schuhsohlen eines Zarathustra zu lösen, das ist Alles das Wenigste und giebt keinen Begriff von der Distanz, von der azurnen Einsamkeit, in der dies Werk lebt. Zarathustra hat ein ewiges Recht zu sagen: „ich schließe Kreise um mich und heilige Grenzen; immer Wenigere steigen mit mir auf immer höhere Berge, — ich baue ein Gebirge aus immer heiligeren Bergen“. Man rechne den Geist und die Güte aller großen Seelen in Eins: alle zusammen wären nicht im Stande, Eine Rede Zarathustra’s hervorzubringen. Die Leiter ist ungeheuer, auf der er auf und nieder steigt; er hat weiter gesehn, weiter gewollt, weiter gekonnt, als irgend ein Mensch. Er widerspricht mit jedem Wort, dieser jasagendste aller Geister; in ihm sind alle Gegensätze zu einer neuen Einheit gebunden. Die höchsten und die untersten Kräfte der menschlichen Natur, das Süßeste, Leichtfertigste und Furchtbarste strömt aus Einem Born mit unsterblicher Sicherheit hervor. Man weiß bis dahin nicht, was Höhe, was Tiefe ist; man weiß noch weniger, was Wahrheit ist. Es ist kein Augenblick in dieser Offenbarung der Wahrheit, der schon vorweggenommen, von Einem der Größten errathen worden wäre. Es giebt keine Weisheit, keine Seelen-Erforschung, keine Kunst zu reden vor Zarathustra; das Nächste, das Alltäglichste redet hier von unerhörten Dingen. Die Sentenz von Leidenschaft zitternd; die Beredsamkeit Musik geworden; Blitze vorausgeschleudert nach bisher unerrathenen Zukünften. Die mächtigste Kraft zum Gleichniß, die bisher da war, ist arm und Spielerei gegen diese Rückkehr der Sprache zur Natur der Bildlichkeit. — Und wie Zarathustra herabsteigt und zu Jedem das Gütigste sagt! Wie er selbst seine Widersacher, die Priester, mit zarten Händen anfaßt und mit ihnen an ihnen leidet! — Hier ist in jedem Augenblick der Mensch überwunden, der Begriff „Übermensch“ ward hier höchste Realität, — in einer unendlichen Ferne liegt alles Das, was bisher groß am Menschen hieß, unter ihm. Das Halkyonische, die leichten Füße, die Allgegenwart von Bosheit und Übermuth und was sonst Alles typisch ist für den Typus Zarathustra, ist nie geträumt worden als wesentlich zur Größe. Zarathustra fühlt sich gerade in diesem Umfang an Raum, in dieser Zugänglichkeit zum Entgegengesetzten als die höchste Art alles Seienden; und wenn man hört, wie er diese definirt, so wird man darauf verzichten, nach seinem Gleichniß zu suchen.
»— die Seele, welche die längste Leiter hat und am tiefsten hinunter kann,die umfänglichste Seele, welche am weitesten in sich laufen und irren und schweifen kann,die nothwendigste, welche sich mit Lust in den Zufall stürzt,die seiende Seele, welche in’s Werden, die habende, welche in’s Wollen und Verlangen will —,die sich selber fliehende, welche sich selber in weitesten Kreisen einholt,die weiseste Seele, welcher die Narrheit am süßesten zuredet,die sich selber liebendste, in der alle Dinge ihr Strömen und Widerströmen und Ebbe und Fluth haben — —«
Aber das ist der Begriff des Dionysos selbst. — Eben dahin führt eine andre Erwägung. Das psychologische Problem im Typus des Zarathustra ist, wie der, welcher in einem unerhörten Grade Nein sagt, Nein thut, zu Allem, wozu man bisher Ja sagte, trotzdem der Gegensatz eines neinsagenden Geistes sein kann; wie der das Schwerste von Schicksal, ein Verhängniß von Aufgabe tragende Geist trotzdem der leichteste und jenseitigste sein kann — Zarathustra ist ein Tänzer —; wie der, welcher die härteste, die furchtbarste Einsicht in die Realität hat, welcher den „abgründlichsten Gedanken“ gedacht hat, trotzdem darin keinen Einwand gegen das Dasein, selbst nicht gegen dessen ewige Wiederkunft findet, — vielmehr einen Grund noch hinzu, das ewige Ja zu allen Dingen selbst zu sein, „das ungeheure unbegrenzte Ja- und Amen-sagen“... „In alle Abgründe trage ich noch mein segnendes Jasagen“... Aber das ist der Begriff des Dionysos noch einmal.
7 Welche Sprache wird ein solcher Geist reden, wenn er mit sich allein redet? Die Sprache des Dithyrambus. Ich bin der Erfinder des Dithyrambus. Man höre, wie Zarathustra vor Sonnenaufgang (III, 18) mit sich redet: ein solches smaragdenes Glück, eine solche göttliche Zärtlichkeit hatte noch keine Zunge vor mir. Auch die tiefste Schwermuth eines solchen Dionysos wird noch Dithyrambus; ich nehme, zum Zeichen, das Nachtlied, — die unsterbliche Klage, durch die Überfülle von Licht und Macht, durch seine Sonnen-Natur, verurtheilt zu sein, nicht zu lieben.
»Nacht ist es: nun reden lauter alle springenden Brunnen.Und auch meine Seele ist ein springender Brunnen.Nacht ist es: nun erst erwachen alle Lieder der Liebenden.Und auch meine Seele ist das Lied eines Liebenden.Ein Ungestilltes, Unstillbares ist in mir, das will laut werden. Eine Begierde nach Liebe ist in mir, die redet selber die Sprache der Liebe.Licht bin ich: ach daß ich Nacht wäre! Aber dies ist meine Einsamkeit, daß ich von Licht umgürtet bin.Ach, daß ich dunkel wäre und nächtig! Wie wollte ich an den Brüsten des Lichts saugen!Und euch selber wollte ich noch segnen, ihr kleinen Funkelsterne und Leuchtwürmer droben! — und selig sein ob eurer Licht-Geschenke.Aber ich lebe in meinem eignen Lichte, ich trinke die Flammen in mich zurück, die aus mir brechen.Ich kenne das Glück des Nehmenden nicht; und oft träumte mir davon, daß Stehlen noch seliger sein müsse als Nehmen.Das ist meine Armuth, daß meine Hand niemals ausruht vom Schenken; das ist mein Neid, daß ich wartende Augen sehe und die erhellten Nächte der Sehnsucht.Oh Unseligkeit aller Schenkenden! Oh Verfinsterung meiner Sonne! Oh Begierde nach Begehren! Oh Heißhunger in der Sättigung!Sie nehmen von mir: aber rühre ich noch an ihre Seele?Eine Kluft ist zwischen Nehmen und Geben; und die kleinste Kluft ist am letzten zu überbrücken.Ein Hunger wächst aus meiner Schönheit: wehe thun möchte ich denen, welchen ich leuchte, berauben möchte ich meine Beschenkten — also hungere ich nach Bosheit.Die Hand zurückziehend, wenn sich schon ihr die Hand entgegenstreckt; dem Wasserfall gleich, der noch im Sturze zögert: also hungere ich nach Bosheit.Solche Rache sinnt meine Fülle aus, solche Tücke quillt aus meiner Einsamkeit.Mein Glück im Schenken erstarb im Schenken, meine Tugend wurde ihrer selber müde an ihrem Überflusse!Wer immer schenkt, dessen Gefahr ist, daß er die Scham verliere; wer immer austheilt, dessen Hand und Herz hat Schwielen vor lauter Austheilen.Mein Auge quillt nicht mehr über vor der Scham der Bittenden; meine Hand wurde zu hart für das Zittern gefüllter Hände.Wohin kam die Thräne meinem Auge und der Flaum meinem Herzen? Oh Einsamkeit aller Schenkenden! Oh Schweigsamkeit aller Leuchtenden!Viel Sonnen kreisen im öden Raume: zu Allem, was dunkel ist, reden sie mit ihrem Lichte — mir schweigen sie.Oh dies ist die Feindschaft des Lichts gegen Leuchtendes: erbarmungslos wandelt es seine Bahnen.Unbillig gegen Leuchtendes im tiefsten Herzen, kalt gegen Sonnen — also wandelt jede Sonne.Einem Sturme gleich wandeln die Sonnen ihre Bahnen, ihrem unerbittlichen Willen folgen sie, das ist ihre Kälte.Oh ihr erst seid es, ihr Dunklen, ihr Nächtigen, die ihr Wärme schafft aus Leuchtendem! Oh ihr erst trinkt euch Milch und Labsal aus des Lichtes Eutern!Ach, Eis ist um mich, meine Hand verbrennt sich an Eisigem! Ach, Durst ist in mir, der schmachtet nach eurem Durste.Nacht ist es: ach daß ich Licht sein muß! Und Durst nach Nächtigem! Und Einsamkeit!Nacht ist es: nun bricht wie ein Born aus mir mein Verlangen, — nach Rede verlangt mich.Nacht ist es: nun reden lauter alle springenden Brunnen.Und auch meine Seele ist ein springender Brunnen.Nacht ist es: nun erwachen alle Lieder der Liebenden.Und auch meine Seele ist das Lied eines Liebenden. —«
8 Dergleichen ist nie gedichtet, nie gefühlt, nie gelitten worden: so leidet ein Gott, ein Dionysos. Die Antwort auf einen solchen Dithyrambus der Sonnen-Vereinsamung im Lichte wäre Ariadne... Wer weiß außer mir, was Ariadne ist!... Von allen solchen Räthseln hatte Niemand bisher die Lösung, ich zweifle, daß je Jemand hier auch nur Räthsel sah. — Zarathustra bestimmt einmal, mit Strenge, seine Aufgabe — es ist auch die meine —, daß man sich über den Sinn nicht vergreifen kann: er ist jasagend bis zur Rechtfertigung, bis zur Erlösung auch alles Vergangenen.
»Ich wandle unter Menschen als unter Bruchstücken der Zukunft: jener Zukunft, die ich schaue.Und das ist all mein Dichten und Trachten, daß ich in Eins dichte und zusammentrage, was Bruchstück ist und Räthsel und grauser Zufall.Und wie ertrüge ich es Mensch zu sein, wenn der Mensch nicht auch Dichter und Räthselrather und Erlöser des Zufalls wäre?Die Vergangnen zu erlösen und alles „Es war“ umzuschaffen in ein „So wollte ich es!“ — das hieße mir erst Erlösung.«
An einer andren Stelle bestimmt er so streng als möglich, was für ihn allein „der Mensch“ sein kann, — kein Gegenstand der Liebe oder gar des Mitleidens — auch über den großen Ekel am Menschen ist Zarathustra Herr geworden: der Mensch ist ihm eine Unform, ein Stoff, ein häßlicher Stein, der des Bildners bedarf.
»Nicht-mehr-wollen und Nicht-mehr-schätzen und Nicht-mehr-schaffen: oh daß diese große Müdigkeit mir stets ferne bleibe!Auch im Erkennen fühle ich nur meines Willens Zeuge- und Werdelust; und wenn Unschuld in meiner Erkenntniß ist, so geschieht dies, weil Wille zur Zeugung in ihr ist.Hinweg von Gott und Göttern lockte mich dieser Wille: Was wäre denn zu schaffen, wenn Götter — da wären?Aber zum Menschen treibt er mich stets von Neuem, mein inbrünstiger Schaffens-Wille; so treibt’s den Hammer hin zum Steine.Ach, ihr Menschen, im Steine schläft mir ein Bild, das Bild der Bilder! Ach, daß es im härtesten, häßlichsten Steine schlafen muß!Nun wüthet mein Hammer grausam gegen sein Gefängniß.Vom Steine stäuben Stücke: was schiert mich das!Vollenden will ich’s, denn ein Schatten kam zu mir, — aller Dinge Stillstes und Leichtestes kam einst zu mir!Des Übermenschen Schönheit kam zu mir als Schatten: was gehen mich noch — die Götter an!...«
Ich hebe einen letzten Gesichtspunkt hervor: der unterstrichne Vers giebt den Anlaß hierzu. Für eine dionysische Aufgabe gehört die Härte des Hammers, die Lust selbst am Vernichten in entscheidender Weise zu den Vorbedingungen. Der Imperativ „werdet hart!“, die unterste Gewißheit darüber, daß alle Schaffenden hart sind, ist das eigentliche Abzeichen einer dionysischen Natur. —
Musean translation
A complete machine-assisted Musean translation directly from the German of the 1908 Insel edition, including its concluding poem. This early edition's readings and omissions are retained, not replaced with later critical restorations.
A Book for Everyone and No One.
1 I shall now tell the story of Zarathustra. The work’s fundamental conception, the thought of eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be attained, dates from August 1881: it was thrown down on a sheet of paper, with the inscription: “6000 feet beyond humanity and time.” That day I was walking through the woods beside Lake Silvaplana; I stopped near Surlei, at a mighty block of stone towering up like a pyramid. Then this thought came to me.—Counting back a few months from that day, I find, as a foretoken, a sudden and profoundly decisive change in my taste, above all in music. Perhaps the whole of Zarathustra may be reckoned as music;—certainly a rebirth in the art of hearing was a prerequisite for it. In Recoaro, a little mountain spa near Vicenza, where I spent the spring of 1881, I discovered, together with my maestro and friend Peter Gast, himself also “reborn,” that the phoenix of music was flying past us with lighter, more radiant plumage than it had ever shown before. But counting forward from that day to the sudden delivery in February 1883, under the most improbable circumstances—the concluding passage, the very one from which I quoted a few sentences in the Foreword, was finished at precisely the sacred hour in which Richard Wagner died in Venice—gives eighteen months of pregnancy. This exact figure of eighteen months might suggest, among Buddhists at least, that I am fundamentally a female elephant.—The intervening period includes “The Gay Science,” with its hundred signs that something incomparable is approaching; at the end it even gives the opening of Zarathustra itself, and in the next-to-last piece of the fourth book it gives Zarathustra’s fundamental thought.—This same intervening period also includes that Hymn to Life (for mixed chorus and orchestra), whose score appeared two years ago with E. W. Fritsch in Leipzig: a perhaps not insignificant symptom of my condition that year, when the supremely Yes-saying pathos, which I call tragic pathos, dwelt in me to the highest degree. One day it will be sung in my memory.—The text, let me expressly state, since a misunderstanding about it is in circulation, is not mine: it is the astonishing inspiration of a young Russian woman with whom I was then friends, Miss Lou von Salomé. Anyone able to find any meaning at all in the poem’s final words will divine why I preferred and admired it: they have greatness. Pain is not held to be an objection to life: “If you have no happiness left to give me, well then! You still have your torment…”
Perhaps my music, too, has greatness at this point. (The oboe’s final note is C-sharp, not C. A printer’s error.)—The following winter I lived in that charmingly quiet bay of Rapallo near Genoa, which cuts into the coast between Chiavari and the promontory of Portofino. My health was not the best; the winter was cold and excessively rainy; a little inn right beside the sea, so that the high surf made sleep impossible at night, offered in almost every respect the opposite of what one could wish. Nevertheless, and almost in proof of my proposition that everything decisive comes into being “nevertheless,” it was in this winter and these adverse circumstances that my Zarathustra came into being.—In the mornings I climbed southward along the magnificent road toward Zoagli, past pines and with a wide view over the sea; in the afternoons, whenever my health permitted, I walked around the entire bay from Santa Margherita all the way beyond to Portofino. This place and this landscape have grown still closer to my heart through the great love Emperor Friedrich the Third felt for them; by chance I was on this coast again in the autumn of 1886, when he visited this little forgotten world of happiness for the last time.—On these two walks the whole of the first Zarathustra came to me, above all Zarathustra himself, as a type: more precisely, he fell upon me…
2 To understand this type, one must first be clear about his physiological prerequisite: it is what I call great health. I know no better, no more personal way of explaining this concept than I have already given in one of the concluding sections of the fifth book of “The Gay Science.” “We new, nameless, hard-to-understand ones,” it says there, “we premature births of a future still unproven—for a new end we also need a new means, namely a new health, stronger, shrewder, tougher, more daring, more cheerful than any health has been before. Whoever’s soul thirsts to have lived through the whole compass of values and desirable things to date, and sailed around every coast of this ideal ‘Mediterranean’; whoever wants to know, from the adventures of his own most personal experience, how a conqueror and discoverer of the ideal feels, and likewise an artist, a saint, a lawgiver, a sage, a scholar, a devout man, a divinely aloof one of the old style: he needs one thing above all for this, great health—a health one not only has but also continually acquires and must acquire, because one gives it up again and again, must give it up… And now, after we have long been on our way in this fashion, we Argonauts of the ideal, more courageous perhaps than is wise, and often enough shipwrecked and injured, but, as I said, healthier than anyone would like to permit us, dangerously healthy, healthy again and again—it seems to us that, as our reward, we have before us a still undiscovered country whose boundaries no one has yet surveyed, a beyond to all the lands and corners of the ideal so far, a world so overflowing with beauty, strangeness, things questionable, terrible, and divine, that our curiosity and our thirst for possession alike have gone beyond themselves—ah, that nothing can satisfy us anymore!… After such vistas, and with such a ravenous hunger in knowledge and conscience, how could we still content ourselves with the human being of today? It is bad enough, but unavoidable, that we look on at his worthiest goals and hopes with a seriousness we can barely sustain, and perhaps no longer even look on… Another ideal runs ahead of us, a strange, tempting ideal, rich in danger, to which we would persuade no one, because we do not lightly concede to anyone the right to it: the ideal of a spirit who naively, that is, involuntarily and out of overflowing fullness and power, plays with everything hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine; for whom the highest thing by which the people rightly measure value would already signify danger, decline, abasement, or at least recreation, blindness, a temporary forgetting of oneself; the ideal of a human-superhuman well-being and benevolence that will often enough appear inhuman, for example when it takes its place beside all earthly seriousness to date, beside all solemnity hitherto found in gesture, word, sound, gaze, morality, and task, as their most incarnate, involuntary parody—and with which, for all that, perhaps great seriousness first arises, the real question mark is first set down, the soul’s destiny turns, the hand of the clock moves, tragedy begins…”
3 At the end of the nineteenth century, does anyone have a clear idea of what the poets of strong ages called inspiration? If not, I shall describe it.—With the slightest remnant of superstition in oneself, one would indeed scarcely know how to reject the notion that one was merely the incarnation, merely the mouthpiece, merely the medium of overwhelming powers. The concept of revelation, in the sense that suddenly, with inexpressible certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes and overturns one to the very depths, simply describes the facts. One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, necessarily, its form unhesitating—I have never had a choice. An ecstasy whose tremendous tension sometimes breaks into a flood of tears, in which one’s pace involuntarily now rushes, now slows; a complete being-outside-oneself with the most distinct awareness of countless delicate shudders and thrills running down to one’s toes; a depth of happiness in which the most painful and darkest things do not act as opposites, but as something entailed, something called forth, as a necessary color within such an excess of light; an instinct for rhythmic relationships that spans vast expanses of forms—the length, the need for a wide-spanning rhythm, is almost the measure of inspiration’s force, a kind of counterbalance to its pressure and tension… Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree, but as in a storm of the feeling of freedom, of being unconditioned, of power, of divinity… The involuntary nature of the image, of the metaphor, is the strangest thing; one no longer has any idea what is image, what is metaphor; everything offers itself as the nearest, truest, simplest expression. It really seems, to recall something Zarathustra says, as though things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors (—“here all things come caressingly to your speech and flatter you: for they want to ride on your back. On every metaphor you ride here to every truth. Here the words and word-shrines of all being spring open for you; all being here wants to become word, all becoming wants to learn from you how to speak—”). This is my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that one must go back thousands of years to find anyone entitled to tell me, “It is mine as well.”—
4 A few weeks later I lay ill in Genoa. Then came a melancholy spring in Rome, where I accepted life—it was not easy. At bottom, this most indecent place on earth for the poet of Zarathustra, a place I had not chosen of my own free will, vexed me beyond measure; I tried to get away—I wanted to go to Aquila, the antithesis of Rome, founded in enmity toward Rome, as I shall one day found a place, in memory of an atheist and enemy of the Church in the fullest sense, one of my closest kin, the great Hohenstaufen emperor Friedrich the Second. But fatality lay over it all: I had to return. At last I contented myself with the Piazza Barberini, after my search for an anti-Christian district had worn me out. I fear that once, to escape bad smells as far as possible, I inquired at the Palazzo del Quirinale itself whether they might have a quiet room for a philosopher.—On a loggia high above the square I have named, from which one looks out over Rome and hears the fountain rushing far below, that loneliest song ever written was composed, the Night Song; around this time a melody of inexpressible melancholy was always hovering about me, whose refrain I found again in the words “dead of immortality…” In the summer, having returned home to the sacred spot where the first lightning flash of the Zarathustra thought had shone for me, I found the second Zarathustra. Ten days sufficed; in no case, neither with the first nor with the third and last, did I need more. The following winter, under the halcyon sky of Nice, which then shone into my life for the first time, I found the third Zarathustra—and was finished. Scarcely a year for the whole. Many hidden spots and heights in the landscape of Nice are consecrated for me by unforgettable moments; that decisive passage entitled “On Old and New Tablets” was composed during the most arduous climb from the station to the marvelous Moorish crag-top eyrie of Eza—my muscular agility was always greatest when my creative power flowed most richly. The body is inspired: let us leave the “soul” out of it… I could often be seen dancing; in those days I could be out in the mountains for seven, eight hours without any notion of fatigue. I slept well, I laughed a great deal—I possessed perfect vigor and patience.
5 Apart from these ten-day works, the years during and above all after Zarathustra were a state of distress without equal. One pays dearly for being immortal: one dies for it several times while still alive.—There is something I call the resentment of greatness: everything great, a work, a deed, turns at once, as soon as it is accomplished, against the one who accomplished it. Precisely because he did it, he is now weak—he can no longer endure his deed, can no longer look it in the face. To have something behind one that one should never have dared to will, something in which the knot in humanity’s destiny is tied—and now to have it upon one!… It almost crushes one… The resentment of greatness!—Another thing is the dreadful silence one hears around oneself. Solitude has seven skins; nothing passes through them anymore. One comes among people, greets friends: fresh desolation, no glance returns the greeting. At best, a kind of revolt. I experienced such a revolt, in very different degrees, but from almost everyone close to me; it seems that nothing offends more deeply than suddenly letting a distance be felt—the noble natures who cannot live without reverence are rare.—A third thing is the skin’s absurd sensitivity to small pricks, a kind of helplessness before everything small. This seems to me to result from the tremendous expenditure of all defensive forces that every creative deed, every deed out of one’s own deepest, innermost, lowest depths, presupposes. The small defensive capacities are, as it were, unhinged by it; no strength flows into them anymore.—I venture also to suggest that one digests less well, moves reluctantly, is all too susceptible to feelings of cold, and to mistrust—to the mistrust that in many cases is merely a mistaken identification of the cause. In such a state I once felt the nearness of a herd of cows through the return of gentler, more benevolent thoughts, before I even saw it: that has warmth in it…
6 This work stands entirely alone. Let us leave the poets aside: perhaps nothing has ever been done out of an equal abundance of strength. My concept ‘Dionysian’ here became the highest deed; measured against it, all the rest of human doing appears poor and conditional. That a Goethe, a Shakespeare would not know how to breathe for a single moment in this tremendous passion and height; that Dante, held against Zarathustra, is merely a believer, not one who first creates truth, a world-ruling spirit, a destiny; that the poets of the Veda are priests, not even worthy to unfasten the soles of a Zarathustra’s shoes—all this is the least of it and gives no idea of the distance, of the azure solitude in which this work lives. Zarathustra has an eternal right to say: “I draw circles around me and holy boundaries; ever fewer climb with me up ever higher mountains—I build a mountain range of ever holier mountains.” Add together the spirit and goodness of all great souls: all together they would be incapable of producing a single discourse of Zarathustra’s. The ladder he climbs up and down is immense; he has seen farther, willed farther, been capable of more than any human being. With every word he contradicts, this most Yes-saying of all spirits; in him all opposites are bound into a new unity. The highest and the lowest forces of human nature, the sweetest, most frivolous, and most terrible, flow from a single spring with immortal certainty. Until then one does not know what height is, what depth is; still less does one know what truth is. Not a moment of this revelation of truth had already been anticipated, divined by any of the greatest. Before Zarathustra there is no wisdom, no exploration of the soul, no art of speech; here the nearest, most everyday things speak of unheard-of matters. The aphorism trembling with passion; eloquence become music; lightning bolts hurled ahead toward futures never yet divined. The mightiest power of metaphor that has ever existed is poverty and play beside this return of language to the nature of imagery.—And how Zarathustra descends and says the kindest things to everyone! How he touches even his adversaries, the priests, with tender hands, and suffers with them from them!—Here at every moment the human being is overcome, the concept ‘overman’ here became the highest reality—everything hitherto called great in humanity lies infinitely far beneath him. The halcyon quality, the light feet, the omnipresence of malice and high spirits, and everything else typical of the Zarathustra type, have never been dreamed of as essential to greatness. Precisely in this compass of space, in this openness to opposites, Zarathustra feels himself to be the highest kind of all that exists; and when one hears how he defines it, one will give up looking for his equal.
“—the soul that has the longest ladder and can descend the deepest,the most encompassing soul, which can run and wander and roam farthest within itself,the most necessary soul, which plunges with delight into chance,the soul that is, which wills to enter becoming, the soul that has, which wills to enter willing and longing—,the soul that flees itself, which catches up with itself in the widest circles,the wisest soul, to which folly speaks most sweetly,the soul that loves itself most, in which all things have their flowing and counterflowing and ebb and flood——”
But that is the concept of Dionysus himself.—Another reflection leads to the same point. The psychological problem in the Zarathustra type is how someone who says No, who does No, to an unheard-of degree, to everything to which people have hitherto said Yes, can nevertheless be the opposite of a No-saying spirit; how the spirit bearing the heaviest destiny, a fateful task, can nevertheless be the lightest and most beyond—Zarathustra is a dancer—; how someone who has the hardest, most terrible insight into reality, who has thought the ‘most abysmal thought,’ nevertheless finds in it no objection to existence, not even to its eternal recurrence—but rather one more reason to be himself the eternal Yes to all things, ‘the tremendous, unbounded saying of Yes and Amen’… ‘Into all abysses I still carry my blessing Yes-saying’… But that is the concept of Dionysus once again.
7 What language will such a spirit speak when speaking only with itself? The language of the dithyramb. I am the inventor of the dithyramb. Listen to how Zarathustra speaks with himself Before Sunrise (III, 18): such emerald happiness, such divine tenderness had no tongue before me. Even the deepest melancholy of such a Dionysus becomes a dithyramb; as evidence I take the Night Song—the immortal lament of being condemned, through an excess of light and power, through his sunlike nature, not to love.
“It is night: now all the leaping fountains speak aloud.And my soul too is a leaping fountain.It is night: now only do all the songs of lovers awaken.And my soul too is the song of a lover.There is something unappeased, unappeasable in me, that longs to speak aloud. A longing for love is in me, itself speaking the language of love.I am light: ah, if only I were night! But this is my solitude, that I am encircled by light.Ah, if I were dark and of the night! How I would suck at the breasts of light!And you yourselves I would bless, you little sparkling stars and glowworms above!—and be blissful in your gifts of light.But I live in my own light; I drink back into myself the flames that break from me.I do not know the happiness of one who receives; and often I dreamed that stealing must be more blissful still than receiving.This is my poverty, that my hand never rests from giving; this is my envy, that I see waiting eyes and the nights of longing lit up.Oh, unhappiness of all who give! Oh, darkening of my sun! Oh, longing to be longed for! Oh, ravenous hunger in satiety!They take from me: but do I still touch their souls?A gulf lies between giving and receiving; and the smallest gulf is the last to be bridged.A hunger grows out of my beauty: I would hurt those upon whom I shine; I would rob those to whom I give—thus I hunger for malice.Drawing back my hand when their hand is already stretching toward it; like the waterfall that hesitates even in its plunge—thus I hunger for malice.Such revenge my abundance devises; such treachery wells up from my solitude.My happiness in giving died in giving; my virtue grew weary of itself in its abundance!Whoever always gives is in danger of losing shame; whoever always distributes has calluses on hand and heart from all that distributing.My eye no longer overflows at the shame of those who ask; my hand has grown too hard for the trembling of hands filled with gifts.Where have the tears of my eye gone, and the down on my heart? Oh, solitude of all who give! Oh, silence of all who shine!Many suns circle in empty space: to everything dark they speak with their light—to me they are silent.Oh, this is the hostility of light toward what shines: mercilessly it follows its courses.Unjust in its deepest heart toward what shines, cold toward suns—thus every sun follows its course.Like a storm the suns follow their courses; they obey their inexorable will: that is their coldness.Oh, only you, you dark ones, you creatures of the night, draw warmth from what shines! Oh, only you drink milk and refreshment from the udders of light!Ah, ice surrounds me; my hand burns against what is icy! Ah, thirst is in me, yearning for your thirst.It is night: ah, that I must be light! And thirst for what is of the night! And solitude!It is night: now my longing bursts out of me like a spring—I long for speech.It is night: now all the leaping fountains speak aloud.And my soul too is a leaping fountain.It is night: now all the songs of lovers awaken.And my soul too is the song of a lover.—”
8 Nothing like this has ever been composed, ever felt, ever suffered: thus a god suffers, a Dionysus. The answer to such a dithyramb of the sun's solitude in the light would be Ariadne… Who besides me knows what Ariadne is!… No one until now had the solution to all such riddles; I doubt that anyone ever even saw riddles here.—Zarathustra once defines his task—it is mine too—with such rigor that one cannot mistake its meaning: he says Yes to the point of justifying, of redeeming, even everything past.
“I walk among people as among fragments of the future: that future which I behold.And this is all my composing and striving: to compose into one and gather together what is fragment and riddle and dreadful chance.And how could I endure being human if the human being were not also a poet, a solver of riddles, and a redeemer of chance?To redeem those who are past and transform every ‘It was’ into a ‘Thus I willed it!’—that alone would I call redemption.”
Elsewhere he defines as rigorously as possible what “the human being” alone can be for him—not an object of love, still less of pity—Zarathustra has mastered even the great disgust at humanity: the human being is for him an unformed thing, a material, an ugly stone that needs the sculptor.
“To will no more, to value no more, to create no more: oh, may this great weariness always remain far from me!Even in knowing I feel only my will's delight in begetting and becoming; and if there is innocence in my knowledge, it is because a will to begetting is in it.Away from God and gods this will lured me: what would there be to create if gods—existed?But toward the human being it drives me again and again, my ardent creative will; thus it drives the hammer toward the stone.Ah, you people, in the stone an image sleeps for me, the image of images! Ah, that it must sleep in the hardest, ugliest stone!Now my hammer rages cruelly against its prison.Pieces of stone scatter: what do I care!I will complete it, for a shadow came to me—the stillest and lightest of all things once came to me!The beauty of the overman came to me as a shadow: what do I care any longer—for the gods!…”
I emphasize one final point of view; the marked line gives occasion for it. For a Dionysian task, the hardness of the hammer, the pleasure even in destroying, is decisively among the preconditions. The imperative “become hard!”, the deepest certainty that all creators are hard, is the true distinguishing mark of a Dionysian nature.—
Plain English translation
A complete machine-assisted Plain English translation made independently and directly from the same German edition, including its concluding poem. This is the 1908 text, not a modern critical edition.
A Book for Everyone and No One.
1 I will now tell the story of Zarathustra. The book's basic idea, the thought of eternal recurrence, the highest possible formula of affirmation, dates from August 1881. It was jotted down on a sheet of paper, with the words underneath: “6,000 feet beyond humanity and time.” That day I was walking through the woods by Lake Silvaplana. I stopped by a huge block of stone piled up like a pyramid, not far from Surlei. That was where the thought came to me.—If I count back a few months from that day, I find an early sign: a sudden change in my taste, decisive at the deepest level, especially in music. Perhaps the whole of Zarathustra could be counted as music. Certainly a rebirth in the art of hearing was a necessary condition for it. In Recoaro, a little mountain spa near Vicenza where I spent the spring of 1881, my master and friend Peter Gast, who had also been “reborn,” joined me in discovering that music, the phoenix, was flying past us in lighter, brighter feathers than it had ever shown before. But if I count forward from that day to the sudden delivery in February 1883, under the most unlikely conditions—the closing passage, the very one I quoted a few sentences from in the Foreword, was finished at exactly the sacred hour when Richard Wagner died in Venice—the pregnancy comes to eighteen months. That exact figure of eighteen months might suggest, at least to Buddhists, that I am really a female elephant.—The intervening period includes The Gay Science, with its hundred signs that something beyond comparison is near. At the end it even gives the beginning of Zarathustra itself, and in the next-to-last piece of its fourth book it gives Zarathustra's basic idea.—The same period also includes the Hymn to Life (for mixed chorus and orchestra), whose score was published two years ago by E. W. Fritsch in Leipzig. It may be a not insignificant sign of my condition that year, when I was filled to the highest degree with the passion of saying yes above all else, what I call tragic passion. One day people will sing it in my memory.—Let me state this clearly, because a misunderstanding is going around: the words are not mine. They are the astonishing inspiration of a young Russian woman I was friends with then, Miss Lou von Salomé. Anyone who can find any meaning at all in the poem's last words will guess why I preferred and admired it: they have greatness. Pain is not treated as an objection to life: “If you have no happiness left to give me, well then! You still have your pain …”
Perhaps my music has greatness at this point too. (The oboe's last note is C-sharp, not C. A printing error.)—The following winter I lived in the lovely, quiet bay of Rapallo near Genoa, which cuts into the land between Chiavari and the headland of Portofino. My health was not the best. The winter was cold and excessively rainy. A little inn stood right by the sea, so that the high waves made sleep impossible at night; in almost every way it offered the opposite of what I wanted. Yet, almost as proof of my claim that everything decisive comes into being “in spite of everything,” it was in this winter and under these unfavorable conditions that my Zarathustra came into being.—In the morning I climbed southward along the splendid road toward Zoagli, past pine trees and with a wide view over the sea. In the afternoon, whenever my health allowed it, I walked around the whole bay from Santa Margherita all the way to beyond Portofino. This place and landscape have grown even closer to my heart because of Emperor Frederick III's great love for them. I happened to be back on this coast in the fall of 1886, when he visited this little forgotten world of happiness for the last time.—On these two walks the whole first Zarathustra came to me, above all Zarathustra himself as a type. More accurately, he ambushed me …
2 To understand this type, you first have to be clear about its physiological basis: what I call great health. I know no better or more personal way to explain this idea than I already did in one of the closing sections of the fifth book of The Gay Science. “We new, nameless, hard-to-understand people,” it says there, “we premature births of a future still unproven, also need a new means for a new purpose: a new health, stronger, shrewder, tougher, bolder, more cheerful than any health before it. Anyone whose soul thirsts to experience the full range of values and things people have wished for up to now, and to sail around every coast of this ideal ‘Mediterranean’; anyone who wants to know through the adventures of their own most personal experience how a conqueror and discoverer of the ideal feels, or an artist, a saint, a lawgiver, a wise person, a scholar, a devout person, someone divinely detached in the old style—such a person needs one thing before anything else: great health. This is a health you don't just have, but keep gaining and must keep gaining, because you keep giving it up and must give it up … And now, after we have traveled this way for a long time, we Argonauts of the ideal, perhaps braver than is wise, often enough shipwrecked and injured, but, as I said, healthier than people would like to allow us, dangerously healthy, healthy again and again—it seems to us that our reward is a still undiscovered land ahead, whose borders no one has yet seen: a world beyond all the lands and corners of the ideal known so far, a world so overflowing with beauty, strangeness, things to question, terrors, and divinity that both our curiosity and our thirst to possess have gone wild—ah, nothing can satisfy us anymore! … After such prospects, and with such a ravenous hunger in our knowledge and conscience, how could we still be satisfied with human beings as they are today? Bad enough, but it is unavoidable: we can watch their most worthy goals and hopes only with a seriousness we can barely keep up, and perhaps we no longer even watch … A different ideal runs ahead of us, a strange, tempting, dangerous ideal that we wouldn't want to persuade anyone to adopt, because we don't readily grant anyone the right to it: the ideal of a spirit that plays naturally—that is, without intending to, out of overflowing fullness and power—with everything previously called holy, good, untouchable, divine. For such a spirit, the highest things by which the people rightly measure value would already mean danger, decline, degradation, or at least relaxation, blindness, temporary self-forgetting. It is the ideal of a human and superhuman well-being and goodwill that will often enough seem inhuman: for example, when it stands beside all the seriousness the earth has known, beside all the solemnity of gesture, word, sound, look, morality, and task, as their most living, unintentional parody. And yet perhaps only with it does great seriousness start, the real question mark get put down, the soul's fate turn, the hand of the clock move, tragedy begin …”
3 Does anyone at the end of the nineteenth century have a clear idea of what the poets of strong ages called inspiration? If not, I will describe it.—With the slightest trace of superstition left in you, you could hardly shake off the idea that you were merely the incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of overwhelming powers. The idea of revelation describes the facts exactly: something suddenly becomes visible, audible, with indescribable certainty and precision, something that shakes you and knocks you over at the deepest level. You hear, you don't search; you take, you don't ask who gives. A thought flashes up like lightning, inevitably, with no hesitation over its form—I have never had a choice. A state of rapture whose tremendous tension sometimes releases itself in a flood of tears, while your steps involuntarily rush forward or slow down; a complete state of being outside yourself, with the clearest awareness of countless delicate shudders and tingles down to your toes; a depth of happiness in which the most painful and darkest things don't act as opposites, but as something required, called forth, a necessary color within such an overflow of light; an instinct for rhythmic relationships that spans broad expanses of form—the length, the need for a far-reaching rhythm, is almost the measure of the force of inspiration, a sort of counterweight to its pressure and tension … Everything happens utterly involuntarily, but as though in a storm of feeling free, unconditioned, powerful, divine … The most remarkable thing is how involuntary the image, the metaphor, is. You no longer have any idea what is an image or a metaphor. Everything offers itself as the nearest, most accurate, simplest expression. It really seems, to recall something Zarathustra says, as if things themselves came forward and offered themselves as metaphors (—“here all things come caressingly to your speech and flatter you: for they want to ride on your back. Here you ride on every metaphor to every truth. Here the words and word-shrines of all being open up for you; all being wants to become words here, all becoming wants to learn from you how to speak—”). This is my experience of inspiration. I have no doubt that you would have to go back thousands of years to find someone entitled to tell me, “It is mine too.”—
4 A few weeks later I was lying sick in Genoa. Then came a gloomy spring in Rome, where I put up with life—it wasn't easy. At bottom this place, the most improper place on earth for the poet of Zarathustra, irritated me beyond measure. I hadn't chosen it freely. I tried to get away—I wanted to go to Aquila, Rome's opposite, founded out of hostility to Rome, as I too will found a place someday, a memorial to an atheist and enemy of the church in the proper sense, one of my closest relatives, the great Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II. But fate was against all this: I had to go back. In the end I settled for the Piazza Barberini, after my efforts to find an anti-Christian area had tired me out. I'm afraid that once, to get as far as possible from bad smells, I inquired at the Palazzo del Quirinale itself whether they had a quiet room for a philosopher.—On a loggia high above that square, looking out over Rome and hearing the fountain rush far below, I wrote the loneliest song ever written, the Night Song. Around this time a melody of unspeakable sadness was always floating around me; I found its refrain again in the words “dead from immortality …” In summer, back at the sacred place where the first lightning flash of the Zarathustra idea had shone for me, I found the second Zarathustra. Ten days were enough. In no case—not for the first, nor for the third and last—did I need more. The following winter, under Nice's calm, clear sky, which then shone into my life for the first time, I found the third Zarathustra—and was finished. Barely a year, counting the whole thing. Unforgettable moments have made many hidden spots and heights in the landscape of Nice sacred to me. That decisive passage titled “On Old and New Tablets” was written during the hardest climb from the station to the wonderful Moorish village perched on the rocks at Eza. My muscles were always most agile when my creative strength flowed most richly. The body is inspired: let's leave the “soul” out of it … People could often see me dancing. In those days I could spend seven or eight hours on the move in the mountains without any sense of fatigue. I slept well, I laughed a lot—I was full of vigor and patience.
5 Apart from these ten-day works, the years during and especially after Zarathustra were a time of unmatched hardship. You pay dearly for being immortal: you die several times during your lifetime.—There is something I call the resentment of greatness: everything great, a work, a deed, turns against the person who did it as soon as it is completed. Precisely because he did it, he is now weak—he can no longer bear his deed or look it in the face. To have something behind you that you should never have dared to want, something in which the knot in humanity's fate is tied—and now to have it upon you! … It almost crushes you … The resentment of greatness!—Another thing is the terrifying silence you hear around you. Solitude has seven skins; nothing gets through anymore. You meet people, you greet friends: fresh desolation, no welcoming look anymore. At best a kind of revolt. I experienced this kind of revolt in very different degrees, but from almost everyone close to me. It seems that nothing offends more deeply than suddenly making a distance felt. Noble natures, who don't know how to live without revering something, are rare.—A third thing is the absurd sensitivity of the skin to little pinpricks, a kind of helplessness in the face of everything small. This seems to me to result from the enormous expenditure of all defensive strength required by every creative deed, every deed that comes from what is most your own, deepest within you, furthest down. The small defensive powers are, so to speak, disconnected; no strength reaches them anymore.—I will venture to add that you digest worse, dislike moving, and are all too open to feelings of cold, and also to mistrust—mistrust that in many cases is merely a mistaken diagnosis of the cause. In such a state, I once sensed a herd of cows nearby through the return of gentler, more friendly thoughts about people, even before I saw it: that has warmth in it …
6 This work stands entirely on its own. Leave the poets aside: perhaps nothing at all has ever been done from such an overflow of strength. Here my idea of the “Dionysian” became the highest deed. Measured against it, everything else humans have done looks poor and conditioned. Goethe or Shakespeare could not breathe for a moment in this tremendous passion and height; compared with Zarathustra, Dante is merely a believer, not someone who first creates truth, a world-ruling spirit, a fate; the poets of the Veda are priests, not even worthy to loosen the soles of a Zarathustra's shoes. All this is the least of it and gives no idea of the distance, the sky-blue solitude in which this work lives. Zarathustra has an eternal right to say: “I draw circles around myself and sacred boundaries; fewer and fewer climb with me up higher and higher mountains—I build a mountain range out of ever holier mountains.” Add together the spirit and goodness of all great souls: all of them together could not produce a single speech of Zarathustra's. The ladder he climbs up and down is tremendous. He has seen further, wanted more, been capable of more than any human being. With every word he contradicts, this most affirmative of all spirits. In him all opposites are bound into a new unity. The highest and lowest forces of human nature, the sweetest, most carefree, and most terrible things, flow from one spring with immortal certainty. Until this point you don't know what height or depth is; still less do you know what truth is. There is not a moment in this revelation of truth that has already been anticipated, guessed by one of the greatest people. Before Zarathustra there is no wisdom, no exploration of the soul, no art of speaking. Here the nearest, most everyday things speak of things never heard before. The saying trembles with passion; eloquence has become music; lightning flashes are hurled ahead toward futures no one has yet guessed. The greatest power to make metaphors that has existed up to now is poor child's play beside this return of language to its natural use of images.—And how Zarathustra comes down and says the kindest things to everyone! How he handles even his opponents, the priests, with gentle hands, and suffers with them and because of them!—Here at every moment the human being is overcome, the idea of the “overman” has become the highest reality. Everything previously called great in humanity lies infinitely far below him. The calm brightness, the light feet, the mischief and high spirits present everywhere, and everything else typical of Zarathustra's type—no one has ever dreamed that these were essential to greatness. It is precisely in this extent of space, this openness to opposites, that Zarathustra feels himself to be the highest kind of everything that exists. And when you hear how he defines it, you will give up looking for his equal.
“—the soul that has the longest ladder and can go down deepest,the most far-reaching soul, which can run and wander and roam furthest within itself,the most necessary soul, which throws itself joyfully into chance,the soul that is, which wants to enter becoming; the soul that has, which wants to enter willing and longing—,the soul fleeing itself, which catches up with itself in the widest circles,the wisest soul, to which folly speaks most sweetly,the soul that loves itself most, in which all things have their flow and counterflow and ebb and flood——”
But this is the idea of Dionysus himself.—Another line of thought leads to the same place. The psychological problem in the type Zarathustra is this: how can someone who says no, who acts no to an unheard-of degree toward everything people have said yes to until now, still be the opposite of a no-saying spirit? How can the spirit bearing the heaviest fate, a fateful task, still be the lightest and the one furthest beyond—Zarathustra is a dancer? How can someone with the harshest, most terrible insight into reality, someone who has thought the “most abysmal thought,” still find in it no objection to existence, not even to its eternal recurrence—but rather one more reason himself to be the eternal yes to all things, “the tremendous, boundless saying of yes and amen” … “Into every abyss I still carry my blessing yes” … But this is the idea of Dionysus once again.
7 What language will a spirit like this speak when speaking alone to itself? The language of the dithyramb. I am the inventor of the dithyramb. Listen to how Zarathustra speaks to himself before sunrise (III, 18). No tongue before mine had expressed such emerald happiness, such divine tenderness. Even the deepest sadness of a Dionysus like this becomes a dithyramb. As evidence, I take the Night Song: the immortal lament of someone condemned not to love by his excess of light and power, by his nature as a sun.
“It is night: now all the leaping fountains speak more loudly.And my soul too is a leaping fountain.It is night: only now do all the songs of lovers wake up.And my soul too is a lover's song.Something unsatisfied, impossible to satisfy, is inside me and wants to speak out. A craving for love is inside me, and it speaks the language of love itself.I am light: if only I were night! But this is my loneliness: light surrounds me.If only I were dark and full of night! How I would suck at the breasts of light!And I would even bless you, little sparkling stars and glowworms up above!—and find happiness in your gifts of light.But I live in my own light; I drink back into myself the flames that burst out of me.I don't know the happiness of receiving; often I have dreamed that stealing must be happier still than receiving.This is my poverty: my hand never rests from giving. This is my envy: I see waiting eyes and the lit-up nights of longing.Oh, the unhappiness of all who give! Oh, the darkening of my sun! Oh, the craving to be craved! Oh, the ravenous hunger in being full!They receive from me: but do I still touch their souls?There is a gap between receiving and giving; and the smallest gap is the last to be bridged.A hunger grows out of my beauty: I want to hurt those I shine on, to rob those I have given to—that is how I hunger to do harm.Pulling back my hand when another hand is already reaching toward it; like the waterfall that hesitates even as it falls—that is how I hunger to do harm.My overflowing fullness devises this revenge; my loneliness pours out this malice.My happiness in giving died away in giving; my virtue grew tired of itself because of its excess!Someone who always gives risks losing their sense of shame; someone who always hands things out gets calluses on hand and heart from all that giving.My eyes no longer overflow at the shame of those who ask; my hand has grown too hard to feel the trembling of hands it has filled.Where have the tears in my eyes and the soft down on my heart gone? Oh, the loneliness of all who give! Oh, the silence of all who shine!Many suns circle in empty space: they speak with their light to everything dark—to me they are silent.Oh, this is light's hostility toward things that shine: it follows its paths without mercy.Unfair at heart to things that shine, cold toward suns—that is how every sun moves.Like a storm the suns follow their paths; they follow their unrelenting will—that is their coldness.Oh, only you, you dark ones, you creatures of night, draw warmth from things that shine! Oh, only you drink milk and refreshment from the udders of light!Ah, ice surrounds me; my hand burns itself on icy things! Ah, there is a thirst inside me that pines for your thirst.It is night: if only I did not have to be light! And thirst for what belongs to night! And loneliness!It is night: now my longing bursts out of me like a spring—I long to speak.It is night: now all the leaping fountains speak more loudly.And my soul too is a leaping fountain.It is night: now all the songs of lovers wake up.And my soul too is a lover's song.—”
8 Nothing like this has ever been written as poetry, ever been felt, ever been suffered: this is how a god suffers, a Dionysus. The answer to such a dithyramb of a sun growing lonely in its light would be Ariadne … Who besides me knows what Ariadne is! … No one before now had the solution to any of these riddles; I doubt anyone ever even saw riddles here.—At one point Zarathustra defines his task—it is mine too—so precisely that its meaning cannot be mistaken: he says yes to the point of justifying, even redeeming, everything in the past.
“I walk among people as among fragments of the future: the future I see.And all my poetry and effort aim to compose into one whole, to gather together, what is fragment and riddle and dreadful chance.And how could I bear being human if human beings were not also poets, solvers of riddles, and redeemers of chance?To redeem those of the past and transform every ‘It was’ into ‘That is how I wanted it!’—only that would count as redemption for me.”
Elsewhere he defines as precisely as possible the only thing ‘the human being’ can be for him—not an object of love, much less of pity. Zarathustra has also mastered his great disgust at humanity: for him the human being is something unformed, a material, an ugly stone that needs a sculptor.
“No longer wanting and no longer valuing and no longer creating: oh, may this great weariness always stay far from me!Even in understanding, I feel only my will's pleasure in producing life and coming into being; and if there is innocence in my understanding, it is because there is a will to reproduce in it.This will lured me away from God and gods: what would there be to create if gods—existed?But my passionate will to create drives me back to human beings again and again; that is how the hammer is driven toward the stone.Ah, you human beings, an image lies asleep for me in the stone, the image of images! Ah, that it has to sleep in the hardest, ugliest stone!Now my hammer rages cruelly against its prison.Fragments fly off the stone: what do I care!I mean to finish it, because a shadow came to me—the stillest and lightest of all things once came to me!The beauty of the overman came to me as a shadow: what do I care now about—the gods! …”
I will stress one last point, prompted by the underlined line. The hammer's hardness, the pleasure even in destroying, is an essential requirement for a Dionysian task. The command “Become hard!”, the deepest certainty that all creators are hard, is the true distinguishing mark of a Dionysian nature.—
About this section
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is part of Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche. This page sets the German original beside 2 direct-source translations, so any line can be checked against the source. It is chapter 11 of 17 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
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