Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A Book for All and None
1
Now I shall relate the history of Zarathustra. The fundamental conception of this work, the idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable, belongs in August 1881: it was penned on a sheet with the notation underneath, “6000 feet beyond man and time.” That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana; at a powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei I stopped.1 It was then that this idea came tome.
If I reckon back a few months from this day, I find as an omen a sudden and profoundly decisive change in my taste, especially in music. Perhaps the whole of Zarathustra may be reckoned as music; certainly a rebirth of the art of hearing was among its preconditions. In a small mountain spa not far from Vicenza, Recoaro, where I spent the spring of 1881, I discovered together with my maestro and friend, Peter Gast, who was also “reborn,” that the phoenix of music flew past us with lighter and more brilliant feathers than it had ever displayed before. But if I reckon forward from that day to the sudden birth that occurred in February 1883 under the most improbable circumstances—the finale from which I have quoted a few sentences in the Preface was finished exactly in that sacred hour in which Richard Wagner died in Venice—we get eighteen months for the pregnancy. This figure of precisely eighteen months might suggest, at least to Buddhists, that I am really a female elephant.
My gaya scienza belongs in the interval and contains a hundred signs of the proximity of something incomparable; in the end it even offers the beginning of Zarathustra, and in the penultimate section of the fourth book the basic idea of Zarathustra.2
Something else also belongs in this interval: that Hymn to Life (for mixed choir and orchestra) whose score was published two years ago by E. W. Fritzsch in Leipzig—a scarcely trivial symptom of my condition during that year when the Yes-saying pathos par excellence, which I call the tragic pathos, was alive in me to the highest degree. The time will come when it will be sung in my memory.3
The text, to say this expressly because a misunderstanding has gained currency, is not by me: it is the amazing inspiration of a young Russian woman who was my friend at that time, Miss Lou von Salomé.4 Whoever can find any meaning at all in the last words of this poem will guess why I preferred and admired it: they attain greatness. Pain is not considered an objection to life: “If you have no more happiness to give me, well then! you still have suffering.” Perhaps my music, too, attains greatness at this point. (Last note of the A-clarinet, c flat, not c: misprint.)
The following winter I stayed in that charming quiet bay of Rapallo which, not far from Genoa, is cut out between Chiavari and the foothills of Portofino. My health could have been better; the winter was cold and excessively rainy; my small albergo5 situated right at the sea so that the high sea made it impossible to sleep at night, was in just about every way the opposite of what one might wish for. In spite of this and almost in order to prove my proposition that everything decisive comes into being “in spite of,” it was that winter and under these unfavorable circumstances that my Zarathustra came into being.
Mornings I would walk in a southerly direction on the splendid road to Zoagli, going up past pines with a magnificent view of the sea; in the afternoon, whenever my health permitted it, I walked around the whole bay from Santa Margherita all the way to Portofino. This place and this scenery came even closer to my heart because of the great love that Emperor Frederick III felt for them; by chance, I was in this coastal region again in the fall of 1886 when he visited this small forgotten world of bliss for the last time.6 —It was on these two walks that the whole of Zarathustra I occurred to me,7 and especially Zarathustra himself as a type: rather, he overtook me.8
2
To understand this type, one must first become clear about his physiological presupposition: this is what I call the great health. I don’t know how I could explain this concept better, more personally, than I have done it in one of the last sections of the fifth book of my gaya scienza.1
Being new, nameless, self-evident, we premature births of an as yet unproven future, we need for a new goal also a new means—namely, a new health, stronger, more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health. Whoever has a soul that craves to have experienced the whole range of values and desiderata to date, and to have sailed around all the coasts of this ideal “mediterranean”; whoever wants to know from the adventures of his own most authentic experience how a discoverer and conqueror of the ideal feels, and also an artist, a saint, a legislator, a sage, a scholar, a pious man,2 and one who stands divinely, apart in the old style—needs one thing above everything else: the great health—that one does not merely have but also acquires continually, and must acquire because one gives it up again and again, and must give it up.
And now, after we have long been on our way in this manner, we argonauts of the ideal, with more daring perhaps than is prudent, and have suffered shipwreck and damage often enough, but are, to repeat it, healthier than one likes to permit us, dangerously healthy, ever again healthy—it will seem to us as if, as a reward, we now confronted an as yet undiscovered country whose boundaries nobody has surveyed yet, something beyond all the lands and nooks of the ideal so far, a world so overrich in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine that our curiosity as well as our craving to possess it has got beside itself—alas, now nothing will sate us any more!
After such vistas and with such a burning hunger in our conscience and science,3 how could we still be satisfied with present-day man? It may be too bad but it is inevitable that we find it difficult to remain serious when we look at his worthiest goals and hopes, and perhaps we do not even bother to look any more.
Another ideal runs ahead of us, a strange, tempting, dangerous ideal to which we should not wish to persuade anybody because we do not readily concede the right to it to anyone: the ideal of a spirit who plays na?vely—that is, not deliberately but from overflowing power and abundance—with all that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine; for whom those supreme things that the people naturally accept as their value standards, signify danger, decay, debasement, or at least recreation, blindness, and temporary self-oblivion; the ideal of a human, superhuman well-being and benevolence4 that will often appear inhuman—for example, when it confronts all earthly seriousness so far, all solemnity in gesture, word, tone, eye, morality, and task so far, as if it were their most incarnate and involuntary parody—and in spite of all of this, it is perhaps only with him that great seriousness really begins, that the real question mark is posed for the first time, that the destiny of the soul changes, the hand moves forward, the tragedy begins5
3
Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a clear idea of what poets of strong ages have called inspiration? If not, I will describe it.—If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one’s system, one could hardly reject altogether the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely a medium of overpowering forces. The concept of revelation—in the sense that suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down—that merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form—I never had any choice.
A rapture whose tremendous tension occasionally discharges itself in a flood of tears—now the pace quickens involuntarily, now it becomes slow; one is altogether beside oneself, with the distinct consciousness of subtle shudders and of one’s skin creeping1 down to one’s toes; a depth of happiness in which even what is most painful and gloomy does not seem something opposite but rather conditioned, provoked, a necessary color in such a superabundance of light; an instinct for rhythmic relationships that arches over wide spaces of forms—length, the need for a rhythm with wide arches,2 is almost the measure of the force of inspiration, a kind of compensation for its pressure and tension.
Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree but as in a gale of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity.—The involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all; one no longer has any notion of what is an image or a metaphor: everything offers itself as the nearest, most obvious, simplest expression. It actually seems, to allude to something Zarathustra says, as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors (“Here all things come caressingly to your discourse and flatter you; for they want to ride on your back. On every metaphor you ride to every truth…. Here the words and word-shrines of all being open up before you; here all being wishes to become word, all becoming wishes to learn from you how to speak”)-3
This is my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that one has to go back thousands of years in order to find anyone who could say to me, “it is mine as well.”4
4
Afterwards I was sick for a few weeks in Genoa. Then came a melancholy spring in Rome where I put up with life—it was not easy. Fundamentally, this most indecent place on earth for the poet of Zarathustra distressed me exceedingly, and I had not chosen it voluntarily. I wanted to go to Aquila,1 Rome’s counterconcept, founded from hostility against Rome, as I shall one day found a place, in2 memory of an atheist and enemy of the church comme il faut3 one of those most closely related to me, the great Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II.4 But some fatality was at work: I had to go back again.5 In the end I resigned myself to the Piazza Barberini, after my exertions to go to an anti-Christian environment had wearied me. I fear that in order to avoid bad odors as far as possible I once inquired at the Palazzo del Quirinale itself6 whether they did not have a quiet room for a philosopher.
It was on a loggia high above that Piazza, from which one has a fine view of Rome and hears the fontana splashing far below, that the loneliest song was written that has ever been written, the “Night Song.”7 Around that time a melody of indescribable melancholy was always about me, and I found its refrain in the words, “dead from immortality.”
That summer, back home at the holy spot where the first lightning of the Zarathustra idea had flashed for me, I found Zarathustra II. Ten days sufficed; in no case, neither for the first nor for the third and last,8 did I require more. The next winter, under the halcyon sky of Nizza, which then shone into my life for the first time, I found Zarathustra III—and was finished. Scarcely a year for the whole of it.
Many concealed spots and heights in the landscape around Nizza are hallowed for me by unforgettable moments; that decisive passage which bears the title “On Old and New Tablets”9 was composed on the most onerous ascent from the station to the marvelous Moorish eyrie, Eza—the suppleness of my muscles has always been greatest when my creative energies were flowing most abundantly. The body is inspired; let us keep the “soul” out of it.—Often one could have seen me dance; in those days I could walk in the mountains for seven or eight hours without a trace of weariness. I slept well, I laughed much—my vigor and patience were perfect.
5
Except for these ten-day works, the years during and above all after my Zarathustra were marked by distress without equal. One pays dearly for immortality: one has to die several times while still alive.
There is something I call the rancune1 of what is great: everything great—a work, a deed—is no sooner accomplished than it turns against the man who did it. By doing it, he has become weak; he no longer endures his deed, he can no longer face it. Something one was never permitted to will lies behind one, something in which the knot in the destiny of humanity is tied—and now one labors under it!—It almost crushes one.—The rancune of what is great.
Then there is the gruesome silence one hears all around one. Solitude has seven skins; nothing penetrates them any more. One comes to men, one greets friends—more desolation, no eye offers a greeting. At best, a kind of revolt. Such revolts I experienced, very different in degree but from almost everybody who was close to me. It seems nothing offends more deeply than suddenly letting others feel a distance;2 those noble natures who do not know how to live without reverence are rare.
Thirdly, there is the absutd sensitivity of the skin to small stings, a kind of helplessness against everything small.3 This seems to me to be due to the tremendous squandering of all defensive energies which is a presupposition of every creative deed, every deed that issues from one’s most authentic, inmost, nethermost regions. Our small defensive capacities are thus, as it were, suspended; no energy is left for them.
I still dare to hint that one digests less well, does not like to move, is all too susceptible to feeling chills as well as mistrust—mistrust that is in many instances merely an etiological blunder. In such a state I once sensed the proximity of a herd of cows even before I saw it, merely because milder and more philanthropic thoughts came back to me: they had warmth.
6
This work stands altogether apart. Leaving aside the poets: perhaps nothing has ever been done from an equal excess of strength. My concept of the “Dionysian” here became a supreme deed; measured against that, all the rest of human activity seems poor and relative. That a Goethe, a Shakespeare, would be unable to breathe even for a moment in this tremendous passion and height, that Dante is, compared with Zarathustra, merely a believer and not one who first creates truth, a world-governing spirit, a destiny—that the poets of the Veda are priests and not even worthy of tying the shoelaces of a Zarathustra—that is the least thing and gives no idea of the distance, of the azure solitude in which this work lives. Zarathustra possesses an eternal right to say: “I draw circles around me and sacred boundaries; fewer and fewer men climb with me on ever higher mountains: I am building a mountain range out of ever more sacred mountains.”1
Let anyone add up the spirit and good nature of all great souls:2 all of them together would not be capable of producing even one of Zarathustra’s discourses. The ladder on which he ascends and descends3 is tremendous; he has seen further, willed further, been capable further than any other human being. In every word he contradicts, this most Yes-saying of all spirits; in him all opposites are blended into a new unity. The highest and the lowest energies of human nature, what is sweetest, most frivolous, and most terrible wells forth from one fount with immortal assurance. Till then one does not know what is height, what depth; one knows even less what truth is. There is no moment in this revelation of truth that has been anticipated or guessed by even one of the greatest. There is no wisdom, no investigation of the soul, no art of speech before Zarathustra; what is nearest and most everyday, here speaks of unheard-of things. Epigrams trembling with passion, eloquence become music, lightning bolts hurled forward into hitherto unfathomed futures. The most powerful capacity for metaphors that has existed so far is poor and mere child’s play compared with this return of language to the nature of imagery.
And how Zarathustra descends and says to everyone what is most good-natured! How gently he handles even his antagonists, the priests, and suffers of them with them!—Here man has been overcome at every moment; the concept of the “overman” has here become the greatest reality—whatever was so far considered great in man lies beneath him at an infinite distance. The halcyon, the light feet, the omnipresence of malice and exuberance, and whatever else is typical of the type of Zarathustra—none of this has ever before been dreamed of as essential to greatness. Precisely in this width of space and this accessibility for what is contradictory, Zarathustra experiences himself as the supreme type of all beings; and once one hears how he defines this, one will refrain from seeking any metaphor for it.4
“The soul that has the longest ladder and reaches down deepest—the most comprehensive soul, which can run and stray and roam farthest within itself; the most necessary soul that plunges joyously into chance; the soul that, having being, dives into becoming; the soul that has, but wants to want and will; the soul that flees itself and catches up with itself in the widest circles; the wisest soul that folly exhorts most sweetly; the soul that loves itself most, in which all things have their sweep and countersweep and ebb and flood—”5
But that is the concept of Dionysus himself.—Another consideration leads to the very same result. The psychological problem in the type of Zarathustra is how he that says No and does No to an unheard-of degree, to everything to which one has so far said Yes, can nevertheless be the opposite of a No-saying spirit; how the spirit who bears the heaviest fate, a fatality of a task, can nevertheless be the lightest and most transcendent—Zarathustra is a dancer—how he that has the hardest, most terrible insight into reality, that has thought the “most abysmal idea,” nevertheless does not consider it an objection to existence, not even to its eternal recurrence—but rather one reason more for being himself the eternal Yes to all things, “the tremendous, unbounded saying Yes and Amen.”6—“Into all abysses I still carry the blessings of my saying Yes.”—But this is the concept of Dionysus once again.
7
What language will such a spirit speak when he speaks to himself? The language of the dithyramb. I am the inventor of the dithyramb. Listen to how Zarathustra speaks to himself before sunrise: such emerald happiness, such divine tenderness did not have a tongue before me. Even the deepest melancholy of such a Dionysus still turns into a dithyramb. To give some indication of this, I choose the “Night Song,” the immortal lament at being condemned by the overabundance of light and power, by his sun-nature, not to love.
Night has come; now all fountains speak more loudly. And my soul, too, is a fountain.
Night has come; only now all the songs of lovers awaken. And my soul, too, is the song of a lover.
Something unstilled, unsuitable is within me; it wants to be voiced. A craving for love is within me; it speaks the language of love.
Light am I; ah, that I were night! But this is my loneliness that I am girt with light. Ah, that I were dark and nocturnal! How I would suck at the breasts of light! And even you would I bless, you little sparkling stars and glowworms up there, and be overjoyed with your gifts of light.
But I live in my own light; I drink back into myself the flames that break out of me. I do not know the happiness of those who receive; and I have often dreamed that even stealing must be more blessed than receiving. This is my poverty, that my hand never rests from giving; this is my envy, that I see waiting eyes and the lit-up nights of longing. Oh, wretchedness of all givers! Oh, darkening of my sun! Oh, craving to crave! Oh, ravenous hunger in satiation!
They receive from me, but do I touch their souls? There is a cleft between giving and receiving; and the narrowest cleft is the last to be bridged. A hunger grows out of my beauty: I should like to hurt those for whom I shine; I should like to rob those to whom I give; thus do I hunger for malice. To withdraw my hand when the other hand already reaches out to it; to linger like the waterfall, which lingers even while it plunges: thus do I hunger for malice. Such revenge my fullness plots: such spite wells up out of my loneliness. My happiness in giving died in giving; my virtue tired of itself in its overflow.
The danger of those who always give is that they lose their sense of shame; and the heart and hand of those who always mete out become callous from always meting out. My eye no longer wells over at the shame of those who beg; my hand has grown too hard for the trembling of filled hands. Where have the tears of my eyes gone and the down of my heart? Oh, the loneliness of all givers! Oh, the taciturnity of all who shine!
Many suns revolve in the void: to all that is dark they speak with their light—to me they are silent. Oh, this is the enmity of the light against what shines: merciless it moves in its orbit. Unjust in its heart against all that shines, cold against suns—thus moves every sun.
The suns fly like a storm in their orbits: that is their motion. They follow their inexorable will: that is their coldness.
Oh, it is only you, you dark ones, you nocturnal ones, who create warmth out of that which shines. It is only you who drink milk and refreshment out of the udders of light.
Alas, ice is all around me, my hand is burned by the ice. Alas, thirst is within me that languishes after your thirst.
Night has come: alas, that I must be light! And thirst for the nocturnal! And loneliness!
Night has come: now my craving breaks out of me like a well; to speak I crave.
Night has come; now all fountains speak more loudly. And my soul, too, is a fountain.
Night has come; now all the songs of lovers awaken. And my soul, too, is the song of a lover.
8
Nothing like this has ever been written, felt, or suffered: thus suffers a god, a Dionysus. The answer to such a dithyramb of solar solitude in the light would be Ariadne.—Who besides me knows what Ariadne is!—For all such riddles nobody so far had any solution; I doubt that anybody even saw any riddles here.
Zarathustra once defines, quite strictly, his task—it is mine, too—and there is no mistaking his meaning: he says Yes to the point of justifying, of redeeming even all of the past.
“I walk among men as among the fragments of the future—that future which I envisage. And this is all my creating and striving, that I create and carry together into One what is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident. And how could I bear to be a man if man were not also a creator and guesser of riddles and redeemer of accidents? To redeem those who lived in the past and to turn every ‘it was’ into a ‘thus I willed it’—that alone should I call redemption.”1
In another passage he defines as strictly as possible what alone “man” can be for him—not an object of love or, worse, pity—Zarathustra has mastered the great nausea over man, too: man is for him an un-form, a material, an ugly stone that needs a sculptor.
‘Willing no more and esteeming no more and creating no more—oh, that this great weariness might always remain far from me! In knowledge, too, I feel only my will’s joy in begetting and becoming; and if there is innocence in my knowledge, it is because the will to beget is in it. Away from God and gods this will has lured me; what could one create if gods—were there?
“But my fervent will to create impels me ever again toward man; thus is the hammer impelled toward the stone. O men, in the stone an image is sleeping, the image of images! Alas, that it has to sleep in the hardest, ugliest stone! Now my hammer rages cruelly against its prison. Pieces of rock rain from the stone: what is that to me? I want to perfect it; for a shadow came to me—the stillest and lightest of all things once came to me. The beauty of the over-man came to me as a shadow. O my brothers, what are gods to me now?”2
I stress a final point: the verse in italics furnishes the occasion. Among the conditions for a Dionysian task are, in a decisive way, the hardness of the hammer, the joy even in destroying. The imperative, “become hard!” the most fundamental certainty that all creators are hard,3 is the distinctive mark of a Dionysian nature.
1Clearly, the rock is not the one on the Chaste, a peninsula in the Silser See, on which a tablet with the text of the “Drunken Song” from Zarathustra IV (section 12) has been fastened. A photograph of the right rock illustrates a small booklet of 44 pages put out by and entitled Nietzsche-Haus in Sils-Maria.
2Section 341 (Portable Nietzsche.). The idea meant is that of the eternal recurrence.
3The manuscript sent to the printer (Druckmanuskript) was preserved in the Nietzsche Archive and characterized as follows by Hans Joachim Mette: “Autograph composition for a solo voice with piano accompaniment,” written in August/September 1882, based on a stanza of the, poem Prayer to Life by Lou Salomé: this very Lied was reworked by Peter Gast, who also took into account the second stanza, which Nietzsche presumably communicated to him—and was turned, in the summer of 1887, into a Hymn to Life: Composition for Mixed Choir and Orchestra and published by him under this title over Nietzsche’s name, in the form of a first edition, E 39 (cf. Friedrich Nietzsches Gesammelte Briefe, III.2, 2nd ed., 1919, pp. 366-68); music sheet written upon on both sides.” Mette’s footnote reads: “*The melody had been found already in 1873/74 for the Hymn to Friendship” (Der Literarische Nachlass Friedrich Nietzsches, Hadl, Leipzig 1932, pp. 12f.; the same report was included a year later in the first volume of Nietzsche’s Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe; Werke, vol. I, Munich, Beck, 1933).
Cf. Podach, Fin Blick in Notizbücher Nietzsches (a glance into Nietzsche’s notebooks; Heidelberg, Wolfgang Rothe, 1963), p. 132: “… Gast had reworked the score so often that it … really was his. Nietzsche knew this very well and suggested that the composer’s name should appear on the title page. A correspondence on this point ensued, not only with Gast who protested modestly but also with the publisher …”
See also Frederick R. Love, Young Nietzsche and the Wagnerian Experience (Chapel Hill, N.C., University of North Carolina Press, 1963).
4In the MS, Nietzsche’s sister crossed out the last eleven words of this sentence, but they were printed nevertheless in 1908, and in all subsequent editions (cf. Podach, Friedrich Nietzsches Werke).
5Hotel.
6Nietzsche originally wrote, “the unforgettable German Emperor” but then crossed out three words (Podach). When the first Emperor of the Second Reich, Wilhelm I, had died at ninety-one on March 9, 1888, his much more liberal son, Friedrich III, had succeeded him; but Friedrich died of cancer after a hundred days; June 15, and was succeeded by his son, the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. It has often been surmised that European history might have taken a different turn if Friedrich III had lived longer.
On June 20 Nietzsche had written Gast: “The death of Kaiser Fried-rich has moved me: in the end he was a small glimmering light of free thought, the last hope for Germany. Now the rule of Stocker begins: I project the consequence and already know that now my Will to Power will be confiscated in Germany first of all.”
Hofprediger (Court Chaplain) Stocker was the leading German anti-Semite of that period. The Will to Power was then no more than a project for which Niezsche had accumulated a great deal of material, and the work now known under this striking title is merely a posthumously published collection of many of Nietzsche’s most interesting notes. Still, this letter shows—along with a lot of other evidence—how the title was not meant, and how thoroughly Nietzsche’s intentions and spirit differed from those of the last Kaiser.
7Fiel mir … ein.
8überfiel mich.
1The last section but one, number 382.
2At this point, the original text of 1887 still had “a soothsayer” in addition to the others enumerated above.
3In Wissen und Gewissen.
4Wohlseins und Wohlwollens.
5The last aphorism of Book IV, which concluded the first edition of The Gay Science, had been entitled Incipit tragoedia (the tragedy begins) and was reused as the first section of the Prologue of Zarathustra.
The reference to “parody” in the sentence above is a reminder that Nietzsche’s occasional pathos in Zarathustra and Ecce Homo is not devoid of irony: cf. the opening paragraph of section 4 of “Why I Am So Clever.”
1“One’s skin creeping”: überrieselungen conjures up a slightly different image—as if water trickled over us.
2“Arches over” and “wide arches” are in the original überspannt and weitgespannt, and the word for tension at the end of the sentence and also a little earlier is Spannung.
3Zarathustra III, “The Return Home.” The German editions do not have the three dots inserted above to mark Nietzsche’s omission of almost one page; and instead of “you” (twice) after the three dots, Zarathustra has “me.”
4This conclusion is criticized by Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (New York, Harper, 1958; Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday Anchor Books, 1961), section 75.
1A town 50 miles northeast of Rome, 2360 feet above sea level, founded as a bulwark against the power of the papacy by Conrad, son of Emperor Frederick II, about 1250, the year Frederick II died.
2Reading zur (in) where the German editions have die (the). The German reading makes no sense and presumably represents an error due to haste.
3As he should be.
4Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, section 200.
5Here the following words in the MS were deleted, I do not know by whom—but Nietzsche himself might well have struck them out on rereading them: “In Rome I had the experience that Parsifal was praised to my face: twice I had attacks of laughter at that” (Podach).
6Before 1870 this had been a papal residence; since 1870 it was the residence of the king of Italy. One of Nietzsche’s last letters (December 31, 1888, to Gast) ends: “My address I do not know any more: let us suppose that at first it may be the Palazzo del Quirinale. N.”
7The ninth chapter of Zarathustra II.
8Nietzsche had published only Parts I, II, and III, at first separately and then, in 1887, also in one volume. Part IV, written in Nizza and Mentone the next winter (early in 1885) was printed privately in 1885 (only forty copies), and only seven copies were distributed among close friends.
9The twelfth chapter of Zarathustra III.
1Rancor.
2Cf. the “pathos of distance,” Beyond Good and Evil, section 257; also above, “The Untimely Ones,” section 3, the last paragraph.
3In a discarded draft we find the following passage: “The psychologist still adds that there are no conditions in which one’s defenselessness and lack of protection are greater. If there are any means at all for destroying [umzubringen] men who are destinies, the instinct of poisonous flies discerns these means. For one who has greatness there is no fight with the small: hence the small become masters” (Podach). Cf. also “The Flies of the Market Place” in Zarathustra I and, of course, Sartre’s The Flies.
1Zarathustra HI, “On Old and New Tablets,” section 19.
2Cf. Aristotle’s conception of megalopsychia, cited in the Editor’s Introduction, section 2.
3Genesis 28:12.
4Nach seinem Gleichnis zu suchen. This makes little sense; Nietzsche probably meant: nach seinesgleichen zu suchen, i.e.: seeking his equal.
5“On Old and New Tablets,” section 19. The first dash, after “deepest,” is not found in the original but has been inserted above to mark Nietzsche’s omission of the words: “how should the most parasites not sit on that?” And where Nietzsche has a double dash, Zarathustra concludes: “oh, how should the highest soul not have the worst parasites?”
6Cf. Zarathustra III, the last chapter, which is entitled “The Seven Seals (Or: The Yes and Amen Song).”
1Zarathustra II, “On Redemption.” The lines after the phrase in italics should be compared with “Human, All-Too-Human,” section 4, above: Ecce Homo voices Nietzsche’s own amor fati.
2Zarathustra II, “Upon the Blessed Isles.”
3Zarathustra III, “On Old and New Tablets,” 29, as quoted at the end of Twilight (Portable Nietzsche, pp. 326 and 563). Zarathustra: “For creators are hard.” Twilight: “For all creators are hard.” And “Become hard!” is emphasized in Zarathustra but not in Twilight.