The Portable Nietzsche (41 page)

“Yes,” I answered hesitantly, “but you also know—” and I whispered something into her ear, right through her tangled yellow foolish tresses.

“You know that, O Zarathustra? Nobody knows that.”

And we looked at each other and gazed on the green meadow over which the cool evening was running just then, and we wept together. But then life was dearer to me than all my wisdom ever was.

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

If I am a soothsayer and full of that soothsaying spirit which wanders on a high ridge between two seas, wandering like a heavy cloud between past and future, an enemy of all sultry plains and all that is weary and can neither die nor live—in its dark bosom prepared for lightning and the redemptive flash, pregnant with lightning bolts that say Yes and laugh Yes, soothsaying lightning bolts—blessed is he who is thus pregnant! And verily, long must he hang on the mountains like a dark cloud who shall one day kindle the light of the future: Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?

Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you, O eternity.

If ever my wrath burst tombs, moved boundary stones, and rolled old tablets, broken, into steep depths; if ever my mockery blew moldy words into the wind, and I came as a broom to the cross-marked spiders and as a sweeping gust to old musty tomb chambers; if ever I sat jubilating where old gods lie buried, world-blessing, world-loving, beside the monuments of old world-slanders—for I love even churches and tombs of gods, once the sky gazes through their broken roofs with its pure eyes, and like grass and red poppies, I love to sit on broken churches: Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?

Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you, O eternity.

If ever one breath came to me of the creative breath and of that heavenly need that constrains even accidents to dance star-dances; if I ever laughed the laughter of creative lightning which is followed obediently but grumblingly by the long thunder of the deed; if I ever played dice with gods at the gods' table, the earth, till the earth quaked and burst and snorted up floods of fire—for the earth is a table for gods and trembles with creative new words and gods' throws: Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?

Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you, O eternity.

If ever I drank full drafts from that foaming spice-and blend-mug in which all things are well blended; if my hand ever poured the farthest to the nearest, and fire to spirit, and joy to pain, and the most wicked to the most gracious; if I myself am a grain of that redeeming salt which makes all things blend well in the Mend-mug—for there is a salt that unites good with evil; and even the greatest evil is worthy of being used as spice for the last foaming over: Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring or recurrence?

Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you, O eternity.

If I am fond of the sea and of all that is of the sea's kind, and fondest when it angrily contradicts me; if that delight in searching which drives the sails toward the undiscovered is in me, if a seafarer's delight is in my delight; if ever my jubilation cried, “The coast has vanished, now the last chain has fallen from me; the boundless roars around me, far out glisten space and time; be of good cheer, old heart!” Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?

Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you, O eternity.

If my virtue is a dancer's virtue and I have often jumped with both feet into golden-emerald delight; if my sarcasm is a laughing sarcasm, at home under rose slopes and hedges of lilies—for in laughter all that is evil comes together, but is pronounced holy and absolved by its own bliss; and if this is my alpha and omega, that all that is heavy and grave should become light; all that is body, dancer; all that is spirit, bird—and verily, that is my alpha and omega: Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?

Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you, O eternity.

If ever I spread tranquil skies over myself and soared on my own wings into my own skies; if I swam playfully in the deep light-distances, and the bird-wisdom of my freedom came—but bird-wisdom speaks thus: “Behold, there is no above, no below! Throw yourself around, out, back, you who are light! Sing! Speak no more! Are not all words made for the grave and heavy? Are not all words lies to those who are light? Sing! Speak no more!” Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence ?

Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you, O eternity.

Part Four was originally intended as an intermezzo, not as the end of the book. The very appearance of a collection of sayings is abandoned: Part Four forms a whole, and as such represents a new stylistic experiment—as well as a number of widely different stylistic experiments, held together by a unity of plot and a pervasive sense of humor.

1.
The Honey Sacrifice
: Prologue. The “queer fish” are not long in coming: the first of them appears in the next chapter.

2.
The
Cry of Distress:
Beginning of the story that continues to the end of the book. The soothsayer of Part Two reappears, and Zarathustra leaves in search of the higher man. Now that he has overcome his nausea, his final trial is: pity.

3.
Conversation with the Kings:
The first of seven encounters in each of which Zarathustra meets men who have accepted some part of his teaching without, however, embodying the type he envisages. Their revolting and tiresome flatteries might be charged to their general inadequacy. But Zarathustra's own personality, as it emerges in chapter after chapter, poses a more serious problem. At least in part, this is clearly due to the author's deliberate malice: he does not want to be a “new idol”: “I do not want to be a saint, rather even a buffoon. Perhaps I am a buffoon. And nevertheless, or rather not nevertheless—for there has never been anybody more mendacious than saints—truth speaks out of me”
(Ecce Homo).
Earlier in the same work he says of Shakespeare: “What must a man have suffered to have found it that necessary to be a buffoon!” In these pages Nietzsche would resemble the dramatist rather than the hagiographer, and a Shakespearean fool rather than the founder of a new cult.

4.
The Leech:
Encounter with “the conscientious in spirit”

5.
The
Magician:
In the magician some of Nietzsche's own features blend with some of Wagner's as conceived by Nietzsche. The poem appears again in a manuscript of 1888, which bears the title “Dionysus Dithyrambs” and the motto: “These are the songs of Zarathustra which he sang to himself to endure his ultimate loneliness.” In this later context, the poem is entitled “Ariadne's Lament,” and a new conclusion has been added by Nietzsche:

(Lightning. Dionysus becomes visible
in
emerald beauty.)

The song is not reducible to a single level of meaning. The outcry is (1) Nietzsche's own; and the unnamable, terrible thought near the beginning is surely that of the eternal recurrence; it is (2) projected onto Wagner, who is here imagined as feeling desperately forsaken after Nietzsche left him (note especially the penultimate stanza); it is (3) wishfully projected onto Cosima Wagner—Nietzsche's Ariadne (see my
Nietzsche
, 1, II)—who is here imagined as desiring and possessed by Nietzsche-Dionysus. Part Four is all but made up of similar projections.
All
the characters are caricatures of Nietzsche. And like the magician, he too would lie if he said: “‘I did all this only as a game.' There was
seriousness
in it too.”

6.
Retired:
Encounter with the last pope. Reflections on the death and inadequacies of God.

7.
The Ugliest Man
: The murderer of God. The sentence beginning “Has not all success . . .” reads in German!
War nicht aller Erfolg bisher bei den Gut-Verfolgten? Und wer gut verfolgt, lernt leicht folgen:—ist er doch einmal—hinterher!

8.
The Voluntary Beggar
: A sermon on a mount—about cows.

9.
The Shadow
: An allusion to Nietzsche's earlier work,
The Wanderer and His Shadow
(1880)
.

10.
At Noon
: A charming intermezzo.

11.
The Welcome
: Zarathustra rejects his guests, though together they form a kind of higher man compared to their contemporaries. He repudiates these men of great longing and nausea as well as all those who enjoy his diatribes and denunciations and desire recognition and consideration for being out of tune with their time. What Nietzsche envisages is the creator for whom all negation is merely incidental to his great affirmation: joyous spirits, “laughing lions.”

12.
The Last Supper
: One of the persistent themes of Part Four reaches its culmination in this chapter: Nietzsche not only satirizes the Gospels, and all hagiography generally, but he also makes fun of and laughs at himself.

13.
On the Higher Man
: A summary comparable to “On Old and New Tablets” in Part Three. Section 5 epitomizes Nietzsche's praise of “evil”—too briefly to be clear apart from the rest of his work—and the conclusion should be noted. The opening paragraph of section 7 takes up the same theme: Nietzsche opposes sublimation to both license and what he elsewhere calls “castratism.” A fine epigram is mounted in the center of section 9. The mellow moderation of the last lines of section 15 is not usually associated with Nietzsche. And the chapter ends with a praise of laughter.

14.
The Song of Melancholy:
In the 1888 manuscript of the “Dionysus Dithyrambs” this is the first poem and it bears the title “Only Fooll Only Poetl” The two introductory sections of this chapter help to dissociate Nietzsche from the poem, while the subsquent references to this song show that lie considered it far more depressing than it appears in its context. Though his solitude sometimes flattered him, “On every parable you ride te every truth” (“The Return Home”), he also knew moments when he said to himself, “I am ashamed that I must still be a poet” (“On Old and New Tablets” ). Although Zarathustra's buffooneries are certainly intended as such by the author, the thought that he might be “only” a fool,
“only”
a poet “climbing around on mendacious word bridges,” made Nietzsche feel more than despondent. Soon it led him to abandon further attempts to ride on parables in favor of some of the most supple prose in German literature.

15.
On Science
: Only the origin of science is considered The attempt to account for it in terms of fear goes back to the period of The Dawn (1881), in which Nietzsche tried to see how far he could reduce different phenomena to fear and power. Zarathustra suggests that courage is crucial —that is, the will to power over fear.

16.
Among Daughters of the Wilderness.
Zarathustra, about to slip out of his cave for the second time because he cannot stand the bad smell of the “higher men,” is called back by his shadow, who has nowhere among men smelled better air—except once. In the following song Nietzsche's buffoonery reaches its climax. But though it can and should be read as thoroughly delightful nonsense, it is not entirely void of personal significance.
Wüste
means “desert” or “wilderness,” and
wüst
can also mean wild and dissolute; and the “flimsy little fan-, flutter-, and tinsel-skirts” seem to have been suggested by the brothel to which a porter in Cologne once took the young Nietzsche, who had asked to be shown to a hotel. (He ran away, shocked; cf. my Nietzsche, 1, I.) Certainly the poem is full of sexual fantasies. But the double meaning of “date” is not present in the original.