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A good roguish thing is also the long silence, and to look, like the winter-sky, out of a clear, round-eyed countenance:—
—Like it to stifle one’s sun, and one’s inflexible solar will: verily, this art and this winter-roguishness have I learnt WELL!
My best-loved wickedness and art is it, that my silence hath learned not to betray itself by silence.
Clattering with diction and dice, I outwit the solemn assistants: all those stern watchers, shall my will and purpose elude.
That no one might see down into my depth and into mine ultimate will—for that purpose did I devise the long clear silence.
Many a shrewd one did I find: he veiled his countenance and made his water muddy, that no one might see therethrough and thereunder.
But precisely unto him came the shrewder distrusters and nut-crackers: precisely from him did they fish his best-concealed fish!
But the clear, the honest, the transparent—these are for me the wisest silent ones: in them, so PROFOUND is the depth that even the clearest water doth not—betray it.—
Thou snow-bearded, silent, winter-sky, thou round-eyed whitehead above me! Oh, thou heavenly simile of my soul and its wantonness!
And MUST I not conceal myself like one who hath swallowed gold—lest my soul should be ripped up?
MUST I not wear stilts, that they may OVERLOOK my long legs—all those enviers and injurers around me?
Those dingy, fire-warmed, used-up, green-tinted, ill-natured souls—how COULD their envy endure my happiness!
Thus do I show them only the ice and winter of my peaks—and NOT that my mountain windeth all the solar girdles around it!
They hear only the whistling of my winter-storms: and know NOT that I also travel over warm seas, like longing, heavy, hot south-winds.
They commiserate also my accidents and chances:—but MY word saith: “Suffer the chance to come unto me: innocent is it as a little child!”
How COULD they endure my happiness, if I did not put around it accidents, and winter-privations, and bear-skin caps, and enmantling snowflakes!
—If I did not myself commiserate their PITY, the pity of those enviers and injurers!
—If I did not myself sigh before them, and chatter with cold, and patiently LET myself be swathed in their pity!
This is the wise waggish-will and good-will of my soul, that it CONCEALETH NOT its winters and glacial storms; it concealeth not its chilblains either.
To one man, lonesomeness is the flight of the sick one; to another, it is the flight FROM the sick ones.
Let them HEAR me chattering and sighing with winter-cold, all those poor squinting knaves around me! With such sighing and chattering do I flee from their heated rooms.
Let them sympathise with me and sigh with me on account of my chilblains: “At the ice of knowledge will he yet FREEZE TO DEATH!”—so they mourn.
Meanwhile do I run with warm feet hither and thither on mine olive-mount: in the sunny corner of mine olive-mount do I sing, and mock at all pity.—
Thus sang Zarathustra.
Thus slowly wandering through many peoples and divers cities, did Zarathustra return by round-about roads to his mountains and his cave. And behold, thereby came he unawares also to the gate of the GREAT CITY. Here, however, a foaming fool, with extended hands, sprang forward to him and stood in his way. It was the same fool whom the people called “the ape of Zarathustra:” for he had learned from him something of the expression and modulation of language, and perhaps liked also to borrow from the store of his wisdom. And the fool talked thus to Zarathustra:
O Zarathustra, here is the great city: here hast thou nothing to seek and everything to lose.
Why wouldst thou wade through this mire? Have pity upon thy foot! Spit rather on the gate of the city, and—turn back!
Here is the hell for anchorites’ thoughts: here are great thoughts seethed alive and boiled small.
Here do all great sentiments decay: here may only rattle-boned sensations rattle!
Smellest thou not already the shambles and cookshops of the spirit? Steameth not this city with the fumes of slaughtered spirit?
Seest thou not the souls hanging like limp dirty rags?—And they make newspapers also out of these rags!
Hearest thou not how spirit hath here become a verbal game? Loathsome verbal swill doth it vomit forth!—And they make newspapers also out of this verbal swill.
They hound one another, and know not whither! They inflame one another, and know not why! They tinkle with their pinchbeck, they jingle with their gold.
They are cold, and seek warmth from distilled waters: they are inflamed, and seek coolness from frozen spirits; they are all sick and sore through public opinion.
All lusts and vices are here at home; but here there are also the virtuous; there is much appointable appointed virtue:—
Much appointable virtue with scribe-fingers, and hardy sitting-flesh and waiting-flesh, blessed with small breast-stars, and padded, haunchless daughters.
There is here also much piety, and much faithful spittle-licking and spittle-backing, before the God of Hosts.
“From on high,” drippeth the star, and the gracious spittle; for the high, longeth every starless bosom.
The moon hath its court, and the court hath its moon-calves: unto all, however, that cometh from the court do the mendicant people pray, and all appointable mendicant virtues.
“I serve, thou servest, we serve”—so prayeth all appointable virtue to the prince: that the merited star may at last stick on the slender breast!
But the moon still revolveth around all that is earthly: so revolveth also the prince around what is earthliest of all—that, however, is the gold of the shopman.
The God of the Hosts of war is not the God of the golden bar; the prince proposeth, but the shopman—disposeth!
By all that is luminous and strong and good in thee, O Zarathustra! Spit on this city of shopmen and return back!
Here floweth all blood putridly and tepidly and frothily through all veins: spit on the great city, which is the great slum where all the scum frotheth together!
Spit on the city of compressed souls and slender breasts, of pointed eyes and sticky fingers—
—On the city of the obtrusive, the brazen-faced, the pen-demagogues and tongue-demagogues, the overheated ambitious:—
