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Oh, ye sentimental dissemblers, ye covetous ones! Ye lack innocence in your desire: and now do ye defame desiring on that account!
Verily, not as creators, as procreators, or as jubilators do ye love the earth!
Where is innocence? Where there is will to procreation. And he who seeketh to create beyond himself, hath for me the purest will.
Where is beauty? Where I MUST WILL with my whole Will; where I will love and perish, that an image may not remain merely an image.
Loving and perishing: these have rhymed from eternity. Will to love: that is to be ready also for death. Thus do I speak unto you cowards!
But now doth your emasculated ogling profess to be “contemplation!” And that which can be examined with cowardly eyes is to be christened “beautiful!” Oh, ye violators of noble names!
But it shall be your curse, ye immaculate ones, ye pure discerners, that ye shall never bring forth, even though ye lie broad and teeming on the horizon!
Verily, ye fill your mouth with noble words: and we are to believe that your heart overfloweth, ye cozeners?
But MY words are poor, contemptible, stammering words: gladly do I pick up what falleth from the table at your repasts.
Yet still can I say therewith the truth—to dissemblers! Yea, my fish-bones, shells, and prickly leaves shall—tickle the noses of dissemblers!
Bad air is always about you and your repasts: your lascivious thoughts, your lies, and secrets are indeed in the air!
Dare only to believe in yourselves—in yourselves and in your inward parts! He who doth not believe in himself always lieth.
A God’s mask have ye hung in front of you, ye “pure ones”: into a God’s mask hath your execrable coiling snake crawled.
Verily ye deceive, ye “contemplative ones!” Even Zarathustra was once the dupe of your godlike exterior; he did not divine the serpent’s coil with which it was stuffed.
A God’s soul, I once thought I saw playing in your games, ye pure discerners! No better arts did I once dream of than your arts!
Serpents’ filth and evil odour, the distance concealed from me: and that a lizard’s craft prowled thereabouts lasciviously.
But I came NIGH unto you: then came to me the day,—and now cometh it to you,—at an end is the moon’s love affair!
See there! Surprised and pale doth it stand—before the rosy dawn!
For already she cometh, the glowing one,—HER love to the earth cometh! Innocence and creative desire, is all solar love!
See there, how she cometh impatiently over the sea! Do ye not feel the thirst and the hot breath of her love?
At the sea would she suck, and drink its depths to her height: now riseth the desire of the sea with its thousand breasts.
Kissed and sucked WOULD it be by the thirst of the sun; vapour WOULD it become, and height, and path of light, and light itself!
Verily, like the sun do I love life, and all deep seas.
And this meaneth TO ME knowledge: all that is deep shall ascend—to my height!—
Thus spake Zarathustra.
When I lay asleep, then did a sheep eat at the ivy-wreath on my head,—it ate, and said thereby: “Zarathustra is no longer a scholar.”
It said this, and went away clumsily and proudly. A child told it to me.
I like to lie here where the children play, beside the ruined wall, among thistles and red poppies.
A scholar am I still to the children, and also to the thistles and red poppies. Innocent are they, even in their wickedness.
But to the sheep I am no longer a scholar: so willeth my lot—blessings upon it!
For this is the truth: I have departed from the house of the scholars, and the door have I also slammed behind me.
Too long did my soul sit hungry at their table: not like them have I got the knack of investigating, as the knack of nut-cracking.
Freedom do I love, and the air over fresh soil; rather would I sleep on ox-skins than on their honours and dignities.
I am too hot and scorched with mine own thought: often is it ready to take away my breath. Then have I to go into the open air, and away from all dusty rooms.
But they sit cool in the cool shade: they want in everything to be merely spectators, and they avoid sitting where the sun burneth on the steps.
Like those who stand in the street and gape at the passers-by: thus do they also wait, and gape at the thoughts which others have thought.
Should one lay hold of them, then do they raise a dust like flour-sacks, and involuntarily: but who would divine that their dust came from corn, and from the yellow delight of the summer fields?
When they give themselves out as wise, then do their petty sayings and truths chill me: in their wisdom there is often an odour as if it came from the swamp; and verily, I have even heard the frog croak in it!
Clever are they—they have dexterous fingers: what doth MY simplicity pretend to beside their multiplicity! All threading and knitting and weaving do their fingers understand: thus do they make the hose of the spirit!
Good clockworks are they: only be careful to wind them up properly! Then do they indicate the hour without mistake, and make a modest noise thereby.
Like millstones do they work, and like pestles: throw only seed-corn unto them!—they know well how to grind corn small, and make white dust out of it.
They keep a sharp eye on one another, and do not trust each other the best. Ingenious in little artifices, they wait for those whose knowledge walketh on lame feet,—like spiders do they wait.
I saw them always prepare their poison with precaution; and always did they put glass gloves on their fingers in doing so.
They also know how to play with false dice; and so eagerly did I find them playing, that they perspired thereby.
We are alien to each other, and their virtues are even more repugnant to my taste than their falsehoods and false dice.
And when I lived with them, then did I live above them. Therefore did they take a dislike to me.
They want to hear nothing of any one walking above their heads; and so they put wood and earth and rubbish betwixt me and their heads.
Thus did they deafen the sound of my tread: and least have I hitherto been heard by the most learned.
All mankind’s faults and weaknesses did they put betwixt themselves and me:—they call it “false ceiling” in their houses.
