Part 50 (1/2)

Here do I sit and wait, old broken tables around me and also new half-written tables. When cometh mine hour?

--The hour of my descent, of my down-going: for once more will I go unto men.

For that hour do I now wait: for first must the signs come unto me that it is MINE hour--namely, the laughing lion with the flock of doves.

Meanwhile do I talk to myself as one who hath time. No one telleth me anything new, so I tell myself mine own story.

2.

When I came unto men, then found I them resting on an old infatuation: all of them thought they had long known what was good and bad for men.

An old wearisome business seemed to them all discourse about virtue; and he who wished to sleep well spake of ”good” and ”bad” ere retiring to rest.

This somnolence did I disturb when I taught that NO ONE YET KNOWETH what is good and bad:--unless it be the creating one!

--It is he, however, who createth man's goal, and giveth to the earth its meaning and its future: he only EFFECTETH it THAT aught is good or bad.

And I bade them upset their old academic chairs, and wherever that old infatuation had sat; I bade them laugh at their great moralists, their saints, their poets, and their Saviours.

At their gloomy sages did I bid them laugh, and whoever had sat admonis.h.i.+ng as a black scarecrow on the tree of life.

On their great grave-highway did I seat myself, and even beside the carrion and vultures--and I laughed at all their bygone and its mellow decaying glory.

Verily, like penitential preachers and fools did I cry wrath and shame on all their greatness and smallness. Oh, that their best is so very small! Oh, that their worst is so very small! Thus did I laugh.

Thus did my wise longing, born in the mountains, cry and laugh in me; a wild wisdom, verily!--my great pinion-rustling longing.

And oft did it carry me off and up and away and in the midst of laughter; then flew I quivering like an arrow with sun-intoxicated rapture:

--Out into distant futures, which no dream hath yet seen, into warmer souths than ever sculptor conceived,--where G.o.ds in their dancing are ashamed of all clothes:

(That I may speak in parables and halt and stammer like the poets: and verily I am ashamed that I have still to be a poet!)

Where all becoming seemed to me dancing of G.o.ds, and wantoning of G.o.ds, and the world unloosed and unbridled and fleeing back to itself:--

--As an eternal self-fleeing and re-seeking of one another of many G.o.ds, as the blessed self-contradicting, recommuning, and refraternising with one another of many G.o.ds:--

Where all time seemed to me a blessed mockery of moments, where necessity was freedom itself, which played happily with the goad of freedom:--

Where I also found again mine old devil and arch-enemy, the spirit of gravity, and all that it created: constraint, law, necessity and consequence and purpose and will and good and evil:--

For must there not be that which is danced OVER, danced beyond? Must there not, for the sake of the nimble, the nimblest,--be moles and clumsy dwarfs?--

3.

There was it also where I picked up from the path the word ”Superman,”

and that man is something that must be surpa.s.sed.

--That man is a bridge and not a goal--rejoicing over his noontides and evenings, as advances to new rosy dawns: