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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Who warm’th me, who lov’th me still?
Give ardent fingers!
Give heartening charcoal-warmers!
Prone, outstretched, trembling,
Like him, half dead and cold, whose feet one warm’th—
And shaken, ah! by unfamiliar fevers,
Shivering with sharpened, icy-cold frost-arrows,
By thee pursued, my fancy!
Ineffable! Recondite! Sore-frightening!
Thou huntsman ’hind the cloud-banks!
Now lightning-struck by thee,
Thou mocking eye that me in darkness watcheth:
—Thus do I lie,
Bend myself, twist myself, convulsed
With all eternal torture,
And smitten
By thee, cruellest huntsman,
Thou unfamiliar—God …
Smite deeper!
Smite yet once more!
Pierce through and rend my heart!
What mean’th this torture
With dull, indented arrows?
Why look’st thou hither,
Of human pain not weary,
With mischief-loving, godly flash-glances?
Not murder wilt thou,
But torture, torture?
For why—me torture,
Thou mischief-loving, unfamiliar God?—
Ha! Ha!
Thou stealest nigh
In midnight’s gloomy hour? …
What wilt thou?
Speak!
Thou crowdst me, pressest—
Ha! now far too closely!
Thou hearst me breathing,
Thou o’erhearst my heart,
Thou ever jealous one!
—Of what, pray, ever jealous?
Off! Off!
For why the ladder?
Wouldst thou get in?
To heart in-clamber?
To mine own secretest
Conceptions in-clamber?
Shameless one! Thou unknown one!—Thief!
What seekst thou by thy stealing?
What seekst thou by thy hearkening?
What seekst thou by thy torturing?
Thou torturer!
Thou—hangman-God!
Or shall I, as the mastiffs do,
Roll me before thee? And cringing, enraptured, frantical,
My tail friendly—waggle!
In vain!
Goad further!
Cruellest goader!
No dog—thy game just am I,
Cruellest huntsman!
Thy proudest of captives,
Thou robber ’hind the cloud-banks …
Speak finally!
Thou lightning-veiled one! Thou unknown one! Speak!
What wilt thou, highway-ambusher, from—me?
What wilt thou, unfamiliar—God?
What?
Ransom-gold?
How much of ransom-gold?
Solicit much—that bid’th my pride!
And be concise—that bid’th mine other pride!
Ha! Ha!
Me—wantst thou? me?
—Entire? …
Ha! Ha!
And torturest me, fool that thou art,
Dead-torturest quite my pride?
Give love to me—who warm’th me still?
Who lov’th me still?—
Give ardent fingers,
Give heartening charcoal-warmers,
Give me, the lonesomest,
The ice (ah! sevenfold frozen ice,
For very enemies,
For foes, doth make one thirst),
Give, yield to me,
Cruellest foe,
—Thyself!⸺
Away!
There fled he surely,
My final, only comrade,
My greatest foe,
Mine unfamiliar—
My hangman-God! …
—Nay!
Come thou back!
With all of thy great tortures!
To me the last of lonesome ones,
Oh, come thou back!
All my hot tears in streamlets trickle
Their course to thee!
And all my final hearty fervour—
Up-glow’th to thee!
Oh, come thou back,
Mine unfamiliar God! my pain!
My final bliss!
—Here, however, Zarathustra could no longer restrain himself; he took his staff and struck the wailer with all his might. “Stop this,” cried he to him with wrathful laughter, “stop this, thou stage-player! Thou false coiner! Thou liar from the very heart! I know thee well!
“I will soon make warm legs to thee, thou evil magician: I know well how—to make it hot for such as thou!”
—“Leave off,” said the old man, and sprang up from the ground, “strike me no more, O Zarathustra! I did it only for amusement!
“That kind of thing belongeth to mine art. Thee thyself, I wanted to put to the proof when I gave this performance. And verily, thou hast well detected me!
“But thou thyself—hast given me no small proof of thyself: thou art hard, thou wise Zarathustra! Hard strikest thou with thy ‘truths,’ thy cudgel forceth from me—this truth!”
—“Flatter not,” answered Zarathustra, still excited and frowning, “thou stage-player from the heart! Thou art false: why speakest thou—of truth!
“Thou peacock of peacocks, thou sea of vanity; what didst thou represent before me, thou evil magician; whom was I meant to believe in when thou wailedst in such wise?”
“The penitent in spirit,” said the old man, “it was him—I represented; thou thyself once devisedst this expression—
“—The poet and magician who at last turneth his spirit against himself, the transformed one who freezeth to death by his bad science and conscience.
“And just acknowledge it: it was long, O Zarathustra, before thou discoveredst my trick and lie! Thou believedst in my distress when thou heldest my head with both thy hands—
“—I heard thee lament ‘we have loved him too little, loved him too little!’ Because I so far deceived thee, my wickedness rejoiced in me.”
“Thou mayest have deceived subtler ones than I,” said Zarathustra sternly. “I am not on my guard against deceivers; I have to be without precaution: so willeth my lot.
“Thou, however—must deceive: so far do I know thee! Thou must ever be equivocal, trivocal, quadrivocal, and quinquivocal! Even what thou hast now confessed, is not nearly true enough nor false enough for me!
“Thou bad false coiner, how couldst thou do otherwise! Thy very malady wouldst thou whitewash if thou showed thyself naked to thy physician.
“Thus didst thou whitewash thy lie before me when thou saidst: ‘I did so only for amusement!’ There was also seriousness therein, thou art something of a penitent-in-spirit!
“I divine thee well: thou hast become the enchanter of all the world; but for thyself thou hast no lie or artifice left—thou art disenchanted to thyself!
“Thou hast reaped disgust as thy one truth. No word in thee is any longer genuine, but thy mouth is so: that is to say, the disgust that cleaveth unto thy mouth.”⸺
—“Who art thou at all!” cried here the old magician with defiant voice, “who dareth to speak thus unto me, the greatest man now living?”—and a green flash shot from his eye at Zarathustra. But immediately after he changed, and said sadly:
“O Zarathustra, I am weary of it, I am disgusted with mine arts, I am not great, why do I dissemble! But thou knowest it well—I sought for greatness!
“A great man I wanted to appear, and persuaded many; but the lie hath been beyond my power. On it do I collapse.
“O Zarathustra, everything is a lie in me; but that I collapse—this my collapsing is genuine!”—
“It honoureth thee,” said Zarathustra gloomily, looking down with sidelong glance, “it honoureth thee that thou soughtest for greatness, but it betrayeth thee also. Thou art not great.
“Thou bad old magician, that is the best and the honestest thing I honour in thee, that thou hast become weary of thyself, and hast expressed it: ‘I am not great.’
“Therein do I honour thee as a penitent-in-spirit, and although only for the twinkling of an eye, in that one moment wast thou—genuine.
“But tell me, what seekest thou here in my forests and rocks? And if thou hast put thyself in my way, what proof of me wouldst thou have?—
“—Wherein didst thou
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