Thus Spoke Zarathustra Read Free Page A

premisses. Now one important duty of the second voice is to intimate, at strategic points in the books, that all the demolition going on may be only the essential preliminary and prerequisite for new construction; and none of these passages is more eloquent or revealing than that which stands at the end of Dawn :
    We aeronauts of the spirit ! All those brave birds which fly out into the distance, into the farthest distance – it is certain! somewhere or other they will be unable to go on and will perch down on a mast or a bare cliff-face – and they will even be thankful for thismiserable accommodation! But who could venture to infer from that, that there was not an immense open space before them, that they had flown as far as one could fly! All our great teachers and predecessors have at last come to a stop…; it will be the same with you and me! But what does that matter to you and me! Other birds will fly farther ! This insight and faith of ours vies with them in flying up and away; it rises above our heads and above our impotence into the heights and from there surveys the distance and sees before it the flocks of birds which, far stronger than we, still strive whither we have striven, and where everything is sea, sea, sea! – And whither then would we go? Would we cross the sea? Whither does this mighty longing draw us, this longing that is worth more to us than any pleasure? Why just in this direction, thither where all the suns of humanity have hitherto gone down? Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering westward, hoped to reach an India – but that it was our fate to be wrecked against infinity? Or, my brothers? Or? – (575).
    This makes a brave sound, and the feeling that it expresses – that there are new worlds to be opened up – came to dominate more and more from the summer of 1881 onwards. ‘Ideas have arisen on my horizon the like of which I have never seen before…’, Nietzsche wrote to Peter Gast on 14 August 1881. ‘I shall certainly have to live a few years more!…The intensity of my feelings makes me shudder and laugh – a couple of times I couldn’t leave my room for the ludicrous reason that my eyes were inflamed…. Each time I had been weeping too much on my walks the day before, not sentimental tears but tears of rejoicing; and as I wept I sang and talked nonsense, filled with a new vision…’
    This is not an altogether new note, but the intensity is new and the ‘ideas’ alluded to are also new and new in this sense that they are direct attempts to go beyond the nihilist conclusions of the past five years without being obliged to retract any of them.
    The fourth book of The Gay Science is a signpost pointing the way Nietzsche is going. Always under the influence of significant dates, he opens it with a passage written on New Year’s Day 1882:
    For the New Year . I am still living, I am still thinking: I have to go on living because I have to go on thinking. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum . Today everyone is permitted to express his desire and dearest thoughts: so I too would like to say what I have desired of myself today and what thought was the first to cross my heart this year – what thought shall be the basis, guarantee and sweetness of all my future life! I want to learn more and more to see what is necessary in things as the beautiful in them – thus I shall become one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: may that be my love from now on! I want to wage no war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. May looking away be my only form of negation! And, all in all: I want to be at all times hereafter only an affirmer (ein Ja -sagender) ! (276).
    This challenge to everything nihilist in his nature is followed a little later by a call to action, battle and positive commitment phrased in one of his most famous coinages – perhaps actually the most famous phrase in all his works:
    I greet all the signs