“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.
3
One!
O man, take care!
Two!
What does the deep midnight declare?
Three!
“I was asleep—
Four!
“From a deep dream I woke and swear:
Five!
“The world is deep,
Six!
“Deeper than day had been aware.
Seven!
“Deep is its woe;
Eight!
“Joy—deeper yet than agony:
Nine!
“Woe implores: Go!
Ten!
“But all joy wants eternity—
Eleven!
“Wants deep, wants deep eternity.”
Twelve!
THE SEVEN SEALS (OR: THE YES AND AMEN SONG)
1
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.
For I love you, O eternity!
2
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.
For I love you, O eternity!
3
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.
For I love you, O eternity!
4
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.
For I love you, O eternity!
5
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.
For I love you, O eternity!
6
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.
For I love you, O eternity!
7
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.
For I love you, O eternity!
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Fourth and Last Part
Alas, where in the world has there been more folly than among the pitying? And what in the world has caused more suffering than the folly of the pitying? Woe to all who love without having a height that is above their pity!
Thus spoke the devil to me once: “God too has his hell: that is his love of man.” And most recently I heard him say this: “God is dead; God died of his pity for man.” (Zarathustra, II, p. 202)
EDITOR’S NOTES
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 anybod
y 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.)
DIONYSUS: Be clever, Ariadne!
You have small ears, you have my ears:
Put a clever word into them!
Must one not first hate each other if one is to love each other?
I am your labyrinth.
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.
17. The Awakening: The titles of this and the following chapter might well be reversed; for it is this chapter that culminates in the ass festival, Niehrsche’s version of the Black Mass. But “the awakening” here does not refer to the moment when an angry Moses holds his people accountable for their worship of the golden calf, but to the moment when “they have learned to laugh at themselves.” In this art, incidentally, none of the great philosophers excelled the author of Part Four of Zarathustra.
8. The Ass Festival: Five of the participants try to justify themselves. The pope satirizes Catholicism (Luther was last made fun of at the end of the song in Chapter 16), while the conscientious in spirit develops a new theology —and suggests that Zarathustra himself is pretty close to being an ass.
19. The Drunken Song: Nietzsche’s great hymn to joy invites comparison with Schiller’s—minus Beethoven’s music. That they use different German words is the smallest difference. Schiller writes:Suffer bravely, myriads!
Suffer for the better world!
Up above the firmament
A great God will give rewards.
Nietzsche wants the eternity of this life with all its agonies —and seeing that it flees, its eternal recurrence. As it is expressed in sections 9, 10, and 11, the conception of the eternal recurrence is certainly meaningful; but its formulation as a doctrine depended on Nietzsche’s mistaken belief that science compels us to accept the hypothesis of the eternal recurrence of the same events at gigantic intervals. (See “On the Vision and the Riddle” and “The Convalescent,” both in Part Three, and, for a detailed discussion, my Nietzsche, 11, II.)
20. The Sign: In “The Welcome,” Zarathustra repudiated the “higher men” in favor of “laughing lions.” Now a lion turns up and laughs, literally. And in place of the single dove in the New Testament, traditionally understood as a symbol of the Holy Ghost, we are presented with a whole flock. Both the lion and the doves were mentioned before (“On Old and New Tablets,” section 1) as the signs for which Zarathustra must wait, and now afford Nietzsche an opportunity to preserve his curious blend of myth, irony, and hymn to the very end.
THE HONEY SACRIFICE
And again months and years passed over Zarathustra’s soul, and he did not heed them; but his hair turned white. One day when he sat on a stone before his cave and looked out—and one looks on the sea from there, across winding abysses—his animals walked about him thoughtf
ully and at last stood still before him.
“O Zarathustra,” they said, “are you perhaps looking out for your happiness?”
“What matters happiness?” he replied; “I have long ceased to be concerned with happiness; I am concerned with my work.”
“O Zarathustra,” the animals spoke again, “you say that as one having overmuch of the good. Do you not lie in a sky-blue lake of happiness?”
“You buffoons,” Zarathustra replied and smiled; “how well you chose your metaphor. But you also know that my happiness is heavy and not like a flowing wave of water: it presses me and will not leave me and acts like melted tar.”
Again the animals walked about him thoughtfully and then stood still before him. “O Zarathustra,” they said, “is that why you yourself are becoming ever yellower and darker, although your hair wants to look white and flaxen? You are in a dreadful mess!”
“What are you saying there, my animals?” Zarathustra said and laughed; “verily, I was abusive when I spoke of tar. What is happening to me, happens to every fruit when it grows ripe. It is the honey in my veins that makes my blood thicker and my soul calmer.”
“That is what it will be, Zarathustra,” the animals answered and nestled against him; “but do you not want to climb a high mountain today? The air is clear and one sees more of the world today than ever before.”
“Yes, my animals,” he replied, “your advice is excellent and quite after my own heart: I want to climb a high mountain today. But see to it that honey will be at hand there: yellow, white, good, ice-fresh, golden comb honey. For you should know that up there I want to offer the honey sacrifice.”