Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (ebook reader color screen .TXT) 📕
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Thus Spake Zarathustra was Friedrich Nietzsche’s favorite of the books he wrote, and has been his most popular amongst general readers. Yet some scholars dislike it because of its unphilosophical nature: it eschews jargon and the scaffolding of arguments, which engage only the intellect, in favor of an artistic approach that engages the whole mind.
After ten years of solitude in a cave high in the mountains, Zarathustra wishes to share with humanity the wisdom he has accumulated during this time. He reaches the nearest town and addresses the crowd on the marketplace. He tells them of the Overman: the next step in human evolution, a being who creates their own values, freed from the weight of tradition and morality, and who takes responsibility for their own successes and failures. But the crowd doesn’t understand him; his discourse is met only with rude ignorance. Zarathustra then decides to gather a small group of disciples and share his wisdom with them.
The bulk of the book is Zarathustra’s speeches on topics such as morality, society, individualism, religion, and how suffering and its overcoming are what give meaning to our existence. While already wiser than most, Zarathustra still learns from those he talks to, re-evaluating his thoughts as he deals with disappointment (such as when his disciples prove to be mere followers), and confronting his own doubts. His greatest challenge, though, comes when he faces the existential test of the eternal recurrence of the same: the thought that our lives could repeat indefinitely without the minutest of change.
The inspiration for Zarathustra came to Nietzsche during one of the long hikes he often indulged in despite his failing health. It was a decade of solitude: his physical condition had worsened to the point of forcing him to retire from his position at the University of Basel, and each change of season prompted him to relocate to kinder climes in Switzerland, France, or Italy. The book took two years to write. Each of its four parts was written in a ten-day period of creative effervescence followed by months of gloom, plagued by terrible, debilitating migraines.
Zarathustra was initially received with indifference at best and frustration at worst. It’s a work of philosophy as much as aesthetics: the language is modeled after the Luther Bible and contains numerous references to Homer, Heraclitus, Plato, Goethe, Emerson, and Wagner, to name a few. Later Nietzsche attempted to address the book’s lack of popularity by framing the same concepts in a more traditional, approachable manner in his following book, Beyond Good and Evil, but that book also struggled to find an audience.
With his health steadily deteriorating, Nietzsche’s mind broke down in 1889 and never recovered. His body would live on for 11 more years, and he ended up in the care of his sister, Elisabeth. A stalwart nationalist and anti-Semite, she saw in her brother’s illness the opportunity to turn him into a German hero. Despite her brother’s firm opposition to nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics, she perverted his work by promoting it for her own ends. Scores of commentators partook in her lie and enthusiastically used Nietzsche’s work to buttress their own contrary views. Doing so requires one to selectively ignore half the content of the book: Zarathustra’s discourses regularly touch on a priori dark and violent themes, but they also clearly state that these are to be directed towards oneself. Reaching the Overman requires us to know ourselves, and such introspection, given the darker side of human nature, leads to contempt. This contempt for ourselves, says Nietzsche, should be embraced as the first step towards awareness of what we could be. Cruelty, likewise, stems from that knowledge as a necessity to hammer ourselves into the proper shape. Such commentators also conveniently ignored Zarathustra’s many remarks about love: love for ourselves, he says, is what can prevent us from spreading resentment around us during this difficult process of change.
The first English translation of Zarathustra was by Alexander Tille, a German scholar who had emigrated to Scotland. English wasn’t his first language and his work suffered from it. Thomas Common, a Scottish scholar, used Tille’s work as the base for his own translation. Bringing Zarathustra to the English-speaking world was no easy task given Nietzsche’s stylistic idiosyncrasies. Just like Nietzsche, Common took risks: because the book is written in the style of the Luther Bible, Common decided to emulate the style of the King James Bible; he also tried to reproduce the musicality of the language and the new words coined by Nietzsche, some of which have been updated over time—e.g. Common’s “Superman” is nowadays known as “Overman.” While his choices have been controversial, he produced a landmark translation that faithfully tried to convert the unique flavor of Zarathustra into English. Published in 1909, it would take four decades until the next translation by Walter Kaufman in 1954.
But Zarathustra didn’t find its scholarly fame limited to Europe: soon after its publication, it reached Asia, where it was received with enthusiasm, particularly in China and Japan where it influenced the famous Kyoto School. Zarathustra has also received special attention from the music world. Nietzsche loved music and poetry, and it was his wish that this book be taken as music. No fewer than 87 pieces have been inspired by the book, in part or as a whole. The best known are Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, the fourth movement of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, and Frederick Delius’ A Mass of Life.
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- Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
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All too small, even the greatest man!—that was my disgust at man! And the eternal return also of the smallest man!—that was my disgust at all existence!
Ah, Disgust! Disgust! Disgust!⸺Thus spake Zarathustra, and sighed and shuddered; for he remembered his sickness. Then did his animals prevent him from speaking further.
“Do not speak further, thou convalescent!”—so answered his animals, “but go out where the world waiteth for thee like a garden.
“Go out unto the roses, the bees, and the flocks of doves! Especially, however, unto the singing-birds, to learn singing from them!
“For singing is for the convalescent; the sound ones may talk. And when the sound also want songs, then want they other songs than the convalescent.”
—“O ye wags and barrel-organs, do be silent!” answered Zarathustra, and smiled at his animals. “How well ye know what consolation I devised for myself in seven days!
“That I have to sing once more—that consolation did I devise for myself, and this convalescence: would ye also make another lyre-lay thereof?”
—“Do not talk further,” answered his animals once more; “rather, thou convalescent, prepare for thyself first a lyre, a new lyre!
“For behold, O Zarathustra! For thy new lays there are needed new lyres.
“Sing and bubble over, O Zarathustra, heal thy soul with new lays: that thou mayest bear thy great fate, which hath not yet been anyone’s fate!
“For thine animals know it well, O Zarathustra, who thou art and must become: behold, thou art the teacher of the eternal return—that is now thy fate!
“That thou must be the first to teach this teaching—how could this great fate not be thy greatest danger and infirmity!
“Behold, we know what thou teachest: that all things eternally return, and ourselves with them, and that we have already existed times without number, and all things with us.
“Thou teachest that there is a great year of Becoming, a prodigy of a great year; it must, like a sandglass, ever turn up anew, that it may anew run down and run out:—
“—So that all those years are like one another in the greatest and also in the smallest, so that we ourselves, in every great year, are like ourselves in the greatest and also in the smallest.
“And if thou wouldst now die, O Zarathustra, behold, we know also how thou wouldst then speak to thyself:—but thine animals beseech thee not to die yet!
“Thou wouldst speak, and without trembling, buoyant rather with bliss, for a great weight and worry would be taken from thee, thou patientest one!—
“ ‘Now do I die and disappear,’ wouldst thou say, ‘and in a moment I am nothing. Souls are as mortal as bodies.
“ ‘But the plexus of causes returneth in which I am intertwined—it will again create me! I myself pertain to the causes of the eternal return.
“ ‘I come again with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent—not to a new life, or a better life, or a similar life:
“ ‘—I come again eternally to this identical and selfsame life, in its greatest and its smallest, to teach again the eternal return of all things—
“ ‘—To speak again the word of the great noontide of earth and man, to announce again to man the Superman.
“ ‘I have spoken my word. I break down by my word: so willeth mine eternal fate—as announcer do I succumb!
“ ‘The hour hath now come for the down-goer to bless himself. Thus—endeth Zarathustra’s down-going.’ ”⸺
When the animals had spoken these words they were silent and waited, so that Zarathustra might say something to them: but Zarathustra did not hear that they were silent. On the contrary, he lay quietly with closed eyes like a person sleeping, although he did not sleep; for he communed just then with his soul. The serpent, however, and the eagle, when they found him silent in such wise, respected the great stillness around him, and prudently retired.
LVIII The Great LongingO my soul, I have taught thee to say “today” as “once on a time” and “formerly,” and to dance thy measure over every Here and There and Yonder.
O my soul, I delivered thee from all by-places, I brushed down from thee dust and spiders and twilight.
O my soul, I washed the petty shame and the by-place virtue from thee, and persuaded thee to stand naked before the eyes of the sun.
With the storm that is called “spirit” did I blow over thy surging sea; all clouds did I blow away from it; I strangled even the strangler called “sin.”
O my soul, I gave thee the right to say Nay like the storm, and to say Yea as the open heaven saith Yea: calm as the light remainest thou, and now walkest through denying storms.
O my soul, I restored to thee liberty over the created and the uncreated; and who knoweth, as thou knowest, the voluptuousness of the future?
O my soul, I taught thee the contempt which doth not come like worm-eating, the great, the loving contempt, which loveth most where it contemneth most.
O my soul, I taught thee so to persuade that thou persuadest even the grounds themselves to thee: like the sun, which persuadeth even the sea to its height.
O my soul, I have taken from thee all obeying and knee-bending and homage-paying; I have myself given thee the names, “Change of need” and “Fate.”
O my soul, I have given thee new names and gay-coloured playthings, I have called thee “Fate” and “the Circuit of circuits” and “the Navel-string of time” and “the Azure bell.”
O my soul, to thy domain gave I all wisdom to drink, all new wines, and also all immemorially old strong wines of wisdom.
O my soul, every sun shed I upon thee, and every night and every silence and every longing:—then grewest thou up for me as a vine.
O my soul, exuberant and heavy dost thou now stand forth, a vine with swelling udders and full clusters of brown golden grapes:—
—Filled and
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