Fenrir's Fangs

16. Neighbour-Love

  YE CROWD around your neighbour, and have fine words for it. But I
say unto you: your neighbour-love is your bad love of yourselves.
  Ye flee unto your neighbour from yourselves, and would fain make a
virtue thereof: but I fathom your "unselfishness."
  The Thou is older than the I; the Thou hath been consecrated, but
not yet the I: so man presseth nigh unto his neighbour.
  Do I advise you to neighbour-love? Rather do I advise you to
neighbour-flight and to furthest love!
  Higher than love to your neighbour is love to the furthest and
future ones; higher still than love to men, is love to things and
phantoms.
  The phantom that runneth on before thee, my brother, is fairer
than thou; why dost thou not give unto it thy flesh and thy bones? But
thou fearest, and runnest unto thy neighbour.
  Ye cannot endure it with yourselves, and do not love yourselves
sufficiently: so ye seek to mislead your neighbour into love, and
would fain gild yourselves with his error.
  Would that ye could not endure it with any kind of near ones, or
their neighbours; then would ye have to create your friend and his
overflowing heart out of yourselves.
  Ye call in a witness when ye want to speak well of yourselves; and
when ye have misled him to think well of you, ye also think well of
yourselves.
  Not only doth he lie, who speaketh contrary to his knowledge, but
more so, he who speaketh contrary to his ignorance. And thus speak
ye of yourselves in your intercourse, and belie your neighbour with
yourselves.
  Thus saith the fool: "Association with men spoileth the character,
especially when one hath none."
  The one goeth to his neighbour because he seeketh himself, and the
other because he would fain lose himself. Your bad love to
yourselves maketh solitude a prison to you.
  The furthest ones are they who pay for your love to the near ones;
and when there are but five of you together, a sixth must always die.
  I love not your festivals either: too many actors found I there, and
even the spectators often behaved like actors.
  Not the neighbour do I teach you, but the friend. Let the friend
be the festival of the earth to you, and a foretaste of the Superman.
  I teach you the friend and his overflowing heart. But one must
know how to be a sponge, if one would be loved by over-flowing hearts.
  I teach you the friend in whom the world standeth complete, a
capsule of the good,- the creating friend, who hath always a
complete world to bestow.
  And as the world unrolled itself for him, so rolleth it together
again for him in rings, as the growth of good through evil, as the
growth of purpose out of chance.
  Let the future and the furthest be the motive of thy today; in thy
friend shalt thou love the Superman as thy motive.
  My brethren, I advise you not to neighbour-love- I advise you to
furthest love!-

  Thus spake Zarathustra.