Message #32986

[VoraX]

24. In the Happy Isles

  THE figs fall from the trees, they are good and sweet; and in
falling the red skins of them break. A north wind am I to ripe figs.
  Thus, like figs, do these doctrines fall for you, my friends: imbibe
now their juice and their sweet substance! It is autumn all around,
and clear sky, and afternoon.
  Lo, what fullness is around us! And out of the midst of
superabundance, it is delightful to look out upon distant seas.
  Once did people say God, when they looked out upon distant seas;
now, however, have I taught you to say, Superman.
  God is a conjecture: but I do not wish your conjecturing to reach
beyond your creating will.
  Could ye create a God?- Then, I pray you, be silent about all
gods! But ye could well create the Superman.
  Not perhaps ye yourselves, my brethren! But into fathers and
forefathers of the Superman could ye transform yourselves: and let
that be your best creating!-
  God is a conjecture: but I should like your conjecturing
restricted to the conceivable.
  Could ye conceive a God?- But let this mean Will to Truth unto
you, that everything be transformed into the humanly conceivable,
the humanly visible, the humanly sensible! Your own discernment
shall ye follow out to the end!
  And what ye have called the world shall but be created by you:
your reason, your likeness, your will, your love, shall it itself
become! And verily, for your bliss, ye discerning ones!
  And how would ye endure life without that hope, ye discerning
ones? Neither in the inconceivable could ye have been born, nor in the
irrational.
  But that I may reveal my heart entirely unto you, my friends: if
there were gods, how could I endure it to be no God! Therefore there
are no gods.
  Yea, I have drawn the conclusion; now, however, doth it draw me.-
  God is a conjecture: but who could drink all the bitterness of
this conjecture without dying? Shall his faith be taken from the
creating one, and from the eagle his flights into eagle-heights?
  God is a thought- it maketh all the straight crooked, and all that
standeth reel. What? Time would be gone, and all the perishable
would be but a lie?
  To think this is giddiness and vertigo to human limbs, and even
vomiting to the stomach: verily, the reeling sickness do I call it, to
conjecture such a thing.
  Evil do I call it and misanthropic: all that teaching about the one,
and the plenum, and the unmoved, and the sufficient, and the
imperishable!
  All the imperishable- that's but a simile, and the poets lie too
much.-
  But of time and of becoming shall the best similes speak: a praise
shall they be, and a justification of all perishableness!
  Creating- that is the great salvation from suffering, and life's
alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is
needed, and much transformation.
  Yea, much bitter dying must there be in your life, ye creators! Thus
are ye advocates and justifiers of all perishableness.
  For the creator himself to be the new-born child, he must also be
willing to be the child-bearer, and endure the pangs of the
child-bearer.
  Verily, through a hundred souls went I my way, and through a hundred
cradles and birth-throes. Many a farewell have I taken; I know the
heart-breaking last hours.
  But so willeth it my creating Will, my fate. Or, to tell you it more
candidly: just such a fate- willeth my Will.
  All feeling suffereth in me, and is in prison: but my willing ever
cometh to me as mine emancipator and comforter.
  Willing emancipateth: that is the true doctrine of will and
emancipation- so teacheth you Zarathustra.
  No longer willing, and no longer valuing, and no longer creating!
Ah, that that great debility may ever be far from me!
  And also in discerning do I feel only my will's procreating and
evolving delight; and if there be innocence in my knowledge, it is
because there is will to procreation in it.
  Away from God and gods did this will allure me; what would there
be to create if there were- gods!
  But to man doth it ever impel me anew, my fervent creative will;
thus impelleth it the hammer to the stone.
  Ah, ye men, within the stone slumbereth an image for me, the image
of my visions! Ah, that it should slumber in the hardest, ugliest
stone!
  Now rageth my hammer ruthlessly against its prison. From the stone
fly the fragments: what's that to me?
  I will complete it: for a shadow came unto me- the stillest and
lightest of all things once came unto me!
  The beauty of the superman came unto me as a shadow. Ah, my
brethren! Of what account now are- the gods to me!-

  Thus spake Zarathustra.