The Portable Nietzsche (43 page)

With these words Zarathustra turned to leave. Then the soothsayer said, “O Zarathustra, you are a rogue! I know it: you want to get rid of me. You would sooner run into the woods and look for evil beasts. But what will it avail you? In the evening you will have me back anyway; in your own cave I shall be sitting, patient and heavy as a block—waiting for you.”

“So be it!” Zarathustra shouted back as he was walking away. “And whatever is mine in my cave belongs to you too, my guest. And if you should find honey in there—well, then, lick it up, you growling bear, and sweeten your soul. For in the evening we should both be cheerful—cheerful and gay that this day has come to an end. And you yourself shall dance to my songs as my dancing bear. You do not believe it? You shake your head? Well then, old bear! But I too am a soothsayer.”

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Zarathustra had not yet walked an hour in his mountains and woods when he suddenly saw a strange procession. On the very path he wanted to follow down, two kings were approaching, adorned with crowns and crimson belts and colorful as flamingos; and they were driving a laden ass before them. “What do these kings want in my realm?” Zarathustra said in his heart, surprised, and quickly he hid behind a bush. But when the kings came close he said half aloud, as if talking to himself, “Strange! Strange! How does this fit together? Two kings I see—and only one ass!”

The two kings stopped, smiled, looked in the direction from which the voice had come, and then looked at each other. “Something of the sort may have occurred to one of us too,” said the king at the right; “but one does not say it.” The king at the left, however, shrugged his shoulders and replied, “It may well be a goatherd. Or a hermit who has lived too long among rocks and trees. For no society at all also spoils good manners.”

“Good manners?” the other king retorted angrily and bitterly; “then what is it that we are trying to get away from? Is it not ‘good manners'? Our ‘good society'? It is indeed better to live among hermits and goatherds than among our gilded, false, painted mob—even if they call themselves ‘good society,' even if they call themselves ‘nobility.' They are false and foul through and through, beginning with the blood, thanks to bad old diseases and worse quacks. Best and dearest to me today is a healthy peasant, coarse, cunning, stubborn, enduring: that is the noblest species today. The peasant is the best type today, and the peasant type should be master. But it is the realm of the mob; I shall not be deceived any more. Mob, however, means hodgepodge. Mob-hodgepodge: there everything is mixed up in every way, saint and scamp and Junker and Jew and every kind of beast out of Noah's ark. Good manners! Everything among us is false and foul. Nobody knows how to revere any longer: we are trying to get away from precisely that. They are saccharine, obtrusive curs; they gild palm leaves.

“This nausea suffocates me: we kings ourselves have become false, overhung and disguised with ancient yellowed grandfathers' pomp, showpieces for the most stupid and clever and anyone who haggles for power today. We are not the first and yet must represent them: it is this deception that has come to disgust and nauseate us. We have tried to get away from the rabble, all these scream-throats and scribbling bluebottles, the shopkeepers' stench, the ambitious wriggling, the foul breath—phew for living among the rabble! Phew for representing the first among the rabble! Nausea! Nausea! Nausea! What do we kings matter now?”

“Your old illness is upon you,” the king at the left said at this point; “nausea is seizing you, my poor brother. But you know that somebody is listening to us.”

Immediately Zarathustra, who had opened his ears and eyes wide at this talk, rose from his hiding-place, walked toward the kings, and began, “He who is listening to you, he who likes to listen to you, O kings, is called Zarathustra. I am Zarathustra, who once said, ‘What do kings matter now?' Forgive me, I was delighted when you said to each other, ‘What do we kings matter now?' Here, however, is
my
realm and my dominion: what might you be seeking in my realm? But perhaps you found on your way what I am looking for: the higher man.”

When the kings heard this, they beat their breasts and said as with one voice, “We have been found out. With the sword of this word you cut through our hearts' thickest darkness. You have discovered our distress, for behold, we are on our way to find the higher man—the man who is higher than we, though we are kings. To him we are leading this ass. For the highest man shall also be the highest lord on earth. Man's fate knows no harsher misfortune than when those who have power on earth are not also the first men. That makes everything false and crooked and monstrous. And when they are even the last, and more beast than man, then the price of the mob rises and rises, and eventually the virtue of the mob even says, ‘Behold, I alone am virtue!' ”

“What did I just hear?” replied Zarathustra. “What wisdom in kings! I am delighted and, verily, even feel the desire to make a rhyme on this—even if it should be a rhyme which is not fit for everybody's ears. I have long become unaccustomed to any consideration for long ears. Well then!” (But at this point it happened that the ass too got in a word; but he said clearly and with evil intent, Yea-Yuh. )

These rhymes of Zarathustra delighted the kings; but the king at the right said, “O Zarathustra, how well we did to go forth to see you! For your enemies showed us your image in their mirror: there you had the mocking grimace of a devil, so that we were afraid of you. But what could we do? Again and again you pierced our ears and hearts with your maxims. So we said at last: what difference does it make how he looks? We must hear him who teaches: ‘You shall love peace as a means to new wars, and the short peace more than the long!' Nobody ever spoke such warlike words: ‘What is good? To be brave is good. It is the good war that hallows any cause.' Zarathustra, the blood of our fathers stirred in our bodies at such words: it was like the speech of spring to old wine barrels. When the swords ran wild like snakes with red spots, our fathers grew fond of life; the sun of all peace struck them as languid and lukewarm, and any long peace caused shame. How our fathers sighed when they saw flashing dried-up swords on the wall! Like them, they thirsted for war. For a sword wants to drink blood and glistens with desire.”

When the kings talked thus and chatted eagerly of the happiness of their fathers, Zarathustra was overcome with no small temptation to mock their eagerness: for obviously they were very peaceful kings with old and fine faces. But he restrained himself. “Well!” he said, “that is where the path leads; there lies Zarathustra's cave; and this day shall yet have a long evening. Now, however, a cry of distress calls me away from you urgently. My cave is honored if kings want to sit in it and wait: only, you will have to wait long. But what does it matter? Where does one now learn better how to wait than at court? And all the virtue left to kings today—is it not called: being able to wait?”

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

And thoughtfully Zarathustra went farther and deeper, through woods and past swampy valleys; but as happens to everybody who reflects on grave matters, he stepped on a man unwittingly. And behold, all at once a cry of pain and two curses and twenty bad insults splashed into his face and startled him so that he raised his stick and beat the man on whom he had stepped. A moment later, however, he recovered his senses, and his heart laughed at the folly he had just committed.

“Forgive me,” he said to the man he had stepped on, who had angrily risen and sat down; “forgive me and, above all, listen to a parable first. As a wanderer who dreams of distant matters will unwittingly stumble over a sleeping dog on a lonely road—a dog lying in the sun—and both start and let fly at each other like mortal enemies, because both are mortally frightened: thus it happened to us. And yet—and yet, how little was lacking, and they might have caressed each other, this dog and this lonely man. For after all they were both lonely.”

“Whoever you may be,” said the man he had stepped on, still angry, “your parable too offends me, and not only your foot. After all, am I a dog?” And at that the seated man got up and pulled his bare arm out of the swamp. For at first he had been lying stretched out on the ground, concealed and unrecognizable, as one lying in wait for some swamp animal.

“But what are you doing?” cried Zarathustra, startled, for he saw that much blood was flowing down the bare arm. “What has happened to you? Did a bad animal bite you, you poor wretch?”

The bleeding man laughed, still angry. “What is that to you?” he said and wanted to go on. “Here I am at home and in my realm. Let whoever wants to, ask me; but I certainly won't answer a bumpkin.”

“You are wrong,” said Zarathustra, full of pity, and he held him back. “You are wrong. This is not your realm but mine, and here nobody shall come to grief. Call me whatever you like; I am who I must be. I call myself Zarathustra. Well! Up there runs the path to Zarathustra's cave, which is not far. Do you not want to look after your wounds in my place? Things have gone badly for you in this life, you poor wretch; first the beast bit you and then man stepped on you.”

When the man who had been stepped on heard Zarathustra's name he changed completely. “What is happening to me?” he cried out.
“Who
else matters to me any more in this life but this one man, Zarathustra, and that one beast which lives on blood, the leech? For the leech's sake I lay here beside this swamp like a fisherman, and my arm, which I had cast, had already been bitten ten times when a still more beautiful leech bit, seeking my blood, Zarathustra himself. O happiness! O miracle! Praised be this day that lured me into this swamp! Praised be the best, the most alive cupper living today, praised be the great leech of the conscience, Zarathustra!”

Thus spoke the man who had been stepped on; and Zarathustra enjoyed his words and their fine, respectful manner. “Who are you?” he asked and offered him his hand. “There is much between us that remains to be cleared up and cheered up; but even now, it seems to me, the day dawns pure and bright.”

“I am the
conscientious in spirit,
” replied the man; “and in matters of the spirit there may well be none stricter, narrower, and harder than I, except he from whom I have learned it, Zarathustra himself.

“Rather know nothing than half-know much! Rather be a fool on one's own than a sage according to the opinion of others! I go to the ground—what does it matter whether it be great or small? whether it be called swamp or sky? A hand's breadth of ground suffices me, provided it is really ground and foundation. A hand's breadth of ground—on that one can stand. In the conscience of science there is nothing great and nothing small.”

“Then perhaps you are the man who knows the leech?” Zarathustra asked. “And do you pursue the leech to its ultimate grounds, my conscientious friend?”

“O Zarathustra,” replied the man who had been stepped on, “that would be an inmensity; how could I presume so much! That of which I am the master and expert is the
brain
of the leech: that is
my
world. And it really is a world too. Forgive me that here my pride speaks up, for I have no equal here. That is why I said, ‘Here is my home.' How long have I been pursuing this one thing, the brain of the leech, lest the slippery truth slip away from me here again! Here is
my
realm. For its sake I have thrown away everything else; for its sake everything else has become indifferent to me; and close to my knowledge lies my black ignorance.

“The conscience of my spirit demands of me that I know one thing and nothing else: I loathe all the half in spirit, all the vaporous that hover and rave.

“Where my honesty ceases, I am blind and I also want to be blind. But where I want to know, I also want to be honest—that is, hard, strict, narrow, cruel, and inexorable.

“That
you,
O Zarathustra, once said, ‘Spirit is the life that itself cuts into life,' that introduced and seduced me to your doctrine. And verily, with my own blood I increased my own knowledge.”

“As is quite apparent,” Zarathustra interrupted, for the blood still flowed down the bare arm of the conscientious man, ten leeches having bitten deep into it. “O you strange fellow, how much I learn from what is apparent here, namely from you. And perhaps I had better not pour all of it into your strict ears. Well! Here we part. But I should like to find you again. Up there goes the path to my cave: tonight you shall be my dear guest there. To your body too, I should like to make up for Zarathustra's having stepped on you with his feet: I shall reflect on that. Now, however, a cry of distress urgently calls me away from you.”

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

But when Zarathustra came around a rock he beheld, not far below on the same path, a man who threw his limbs around like a maniac and finally flopped down on his belly. “Wait!” Zarathustra said to his heart; “that must indeed be the higher man; from him came that terrible cry of distress; let me see if he can still be helped.” But when he ran to the spot where the man lay on the ground he found a trembling old man with vacant eyes; and however Zarathustra exerted himself to help the man to get up on his feet again, it was all in vain. Nor did the unfortunate man seem to notice that anybody was with him; rather he kept looking around with piteous gestures, like one abandoned and forsaken by all the world. At last, however, after many shudders, convulsions, and contortions, he began to moan thus: