Thus Spoke Zarathustra Read Free Page B

that a more manly, warlike age is coming, which will, above all, bring valour again into honour! For it has to prepare the way for a yet higher age, and assemble the force which that age will one day have need of – that age which will carry heroism into knowledge and wage war for the sake of ideas and their consequences. To that end many brave pioneers are needed now…: men who know how to be silent, solitary, resolute,…who have an innate disposition to seek in all things that which must be overcome in them: men to whom cheerfulness, patience, simplicity and contempt for the great vanities belong just as much as do generosity in victory and indulgence towards the little vanities of the defeated:…men with their own festivals, their own work-days, their own days of mourning, accustomed to and assured in command and equally ready to obey when necessary, equally proud in the one case as in the other, equally serving their own cause: men more imperilled, men more fruitful, happier men! For believe me! – the secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously ! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge!…(283).
    A new image of man, of what mankind might be, begins to appear:
    Excelsior ! ‘You will never again pray, never again worship, never again repose in limitless trust – you deny it to yourself to remain halted before an ultimate wisdom, ultimate good, ultimate power, and there unharness your thoughts – you have no perpetual guardian and friend for your seven solitudes…there is no longer for you any rewarder and recompenser, no final corrector – there is no longer any reason in what happens, no longer any love in what happens to you – there is no longer any resting-place open to your heart where it has only to find and no longer to seek, you resist any kind of ultimate peace, you want the eternal recurrence of war and peace – man of renuncktion, will you renounce in all this? Who will give you the strength for it? No one has yet possessed this strength!’ – There is a lake which one day denied it to itself to flow away and threw up a dam at the place where it formerly flowed away: since then this lake has risen higher and higher. Perhaps it is precisely that renunciation which will also lend us the strength by which the renunciation itself can be endured; perhaps man will rise higher and higher from that time when he no longer flaws out into a god. (285).
    And the penultimate section of the book is a very curious suggestion for a formula of self- and life-affirmation:
    The heaviest burden . What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your loneliest solitude and said to you: ‘This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence – and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again – and you with it, you dust of dust!’ – Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine!’ If this thought gained power over you it would, as you are now, transform and perhaps crush you; the question in all and everything: ‘do you want this again and again, times without number?’ wouldlie as the heaviest burden upon all your actions. Or how well disposed towards yourself and towards life