O Zarathustra, here is the great city: here hast thou nothing to seek and everything to lose.
Why wouldst thou wade through this mire? Have pity upon thy foot! Spit rather on the gate of the city, and—turn back!
Here is the hell for anchorites’ thoughts: here are great thoughts seethed alive and boiled small.
Here do all great sentiments decay: here may only rattle-boned sensations rattle!
Smellest thou not already the shambles and cookshops of the spirit? Steameth not this city with the fumes of slaughtered spirit?
Seest thou not the souls hanging like limp dirty rags?—And they make newspapers also out of these rags!
Hearest thou not how spirit hath here become a verbal game? Loathsome verbal swill doth it vomit forth!—And they make newspapers also out of this verbal swill.
They hound one another, and know not whither! They inflame one another, and know not why! They tinkle with their pinchbeck, they jingle with their gold.
They are cold, and seek warmth from distilled waters: they are inflamed, and seek coolness from frozen spirits; they are all sick and sore through public opinion.
All lusts and vices are here at home; but here there are also the virtuous; there is much appointable appointed virtue:—
Much appointable virtue with scribe-fingers, and hardy sitting-flesh and waiting-flesh, blessed with small breast-stars, and padded, haunchless daughters.
There is here also much piety, and much faithful spittle-licking and spittle-backing, before the God of Hosts.
“From on high,” drippeth the star, and the gracious spittle; for the high, longeth every starless bosom.
The moon hath its court, and the court hath its moon-calves: unto all, however, that cometh from the court do the mendicant people pray, and all appointable mendicant virtues.
“I serve, thou servest, we serve”—so prayeth all appointable virtue to the prince: that the merited star may at last stick on the slender breast!
But the moon still revolveth around all that is earthly: so revolveth also the prince around what is earthliest of all—that, however, is the gold of the shopman.
The God of the Hosts of war is not the God of the golden bar; the prince proposeth, but the shopman—disposeth!
By all that is luminous and strong and good in thee, O Zarathustra! Spit on this city of shopmen and return back!
Here floweth all blood putridly and tepidly and frothily through all veins: spit on the great city, which is the great slum where all the scum frotheth together!
Spit on the city of compressed souls and slender breasts, of pointed eyes and sticky fingers—
—On the city of the obtrusive, the brazen-faced, the pen-demagogues and tongue-demagogues, the overheated ambitious:—
Where everything maimed, ill-famed, lustful, untrustful, over-mellow, sickly-yellow and seditious, festereth pernicious:—
—Spit on the great city and turn back!—
Here, however, did Zarathustra interrupt the foaming fool, and shut his mouth.—
Stop this at once! called out Zarathustra, long have thy speech and thy species disgusted me!
Why didst thou live so long by the swamp, that thou thyself hadst to become a frog and a toad?
Floweth there not a tainted, frothy, swamp-blood in thine own veins, when thou hast thus learned to croak and revile?
Why wentest thou not into the forest? Or why didst thou not till the ground? Is the sea not full of green islands?
I despise thy contempt; and when thou warnedst me—why didst thou not warn thyself?
Out of love alone shall my contempt and my warning bird take wing; but not out of the swamp!—
They call thee mine ape, thou foaming fool: but I call thee my grunting-pig,—by thy grunting, thou spoilest even my praise of folly.
What was it that first made thee grunt? Because no one sufficiently FLATTERED thee:—therefore didst thou seat thyself beside this filth, that thou mightest have cause for much grunting,—
—That thou mightest have cause for much VENGEANCE! For vengeance, thou vain fool, is all thy foaming; I have divined thee well!
But thy fools’-word injureth ME, even when thou art right! And even if Zarathustra’s word WERE a hundred times justified, thou wouldst ever—DO wrong with my word!
Thus spake Zarathustra. Then did he look on the great city and sighed, and was long silent. At last he spake thus:
I loathe also this great city, and not only this fool. Here and there— there is nothing to better, nothing to worsen.
Woe to this great city!—And I would that I already saw the pillar of fire in which it will be consumed!
For such pillars of fire must precede the great noontide. But this hath its time and its own fate.—
This precept, however, give I unto thee, in parting, thou fool: Where one can no longer love, there should one—PASS BY!—
Thus spake Zarathustra, and passed by the fool and the great city.
LII. The Apostates.
Ah, lieth everything already withered and grey which but lately stood green and many-hued on this meadow! And how much honey of hope did I carry hence into my beehives!
Those young hearts have already all become old—and not old even! only weary, ordinary, comfortable:—they declare it: “We have again become pious.”
Of late did I see them run forth at early morn with valorous steps: but the feet of their knowledge became weary, and now do they malign even their morning valour!
Verily, many of them once lifted their legs like the dancer; to them winked the laughter of my wisdom:—then did they bethink themselves. Just now have I seen them bent down—to creep to the cross.
Around light and liberty did they once flutter like gnats and young poets. A little older, a little colder: and already are they mystifiers, and mumblers and mollycoddles.
Did perhaps their hearts despond, because lonesomeness had swallowed me like a whale? Did their ear perhaps hearken yearningly-long for me IN VAIN, and for my trumpet-notes and herald-calls?
—Ah! Ever are there but few of those whose hearts have persistent courage and exuberance; and in such remaineth also the spirit patient. The rest, however, are COWARDLY.
The rest: these are always the great majority, the common-place, the superfluous, the far too many—those all are cowardly!—
Him who is of my type, will also the experiences of my type meet on the way: so that his first companions must be corpses and buffoons.
His second companions, however—they will call themselves his BELIEVERS,—will be a living host, with much love, much folly, much unbearded veneration.
To those believers shall he who is of my type among men not bind his heart; in those spring-times and many-hued meadows shall he not believe, who knoweth the fickly faint-hearted human species!
COULD they do otherwise, then would they also WILL otherwise. The half-and-half spoil every whole. That leaves become withered,—what is there to lament about that!
Let them go and fall away, O Zarathustra, and do not lament! Better even to blow amongst them with rustling winds,—
—Blow amongst those leaves, O Zarathustra, that everything WITHERED may run away from thee the faster!—
“We have again become pious”—so do those apostates confess; and some of them are still too pusillanimous thus to confess.
Unto them I look into the eye,—before them I say it unto their face and unto the blush on their cheeks: Ye are those who again PRAY!
It is however a shame to pray! Not for all, but for thee, and me, and whoever hath his conscience in his head. For THEE it is a shame to pray!
Thou knowest it well: the faint-hearted devil in thee, which would fain fold its arms, and place its hands in its bosom, and take it easier:—this faint-hearted devil persuadeth thee that “there IS a God!”
THEREBY, however, dost thou belong to the light-dreading type, to whom light never permitteth repose: now must thou daily thrust thy head deeper into obscurity and vapour!
And verily, thou choosest the hour well: for just now do the nocturnal birds again fly abroad. The hour hath come for all light-dreading people, the vesper hour and leisure hour, when they do not—“take leisure.”
I hear it and smell it: it hath come—their hour for hunt and procession, not indeed for a wild hunt, but for a tame, lame, snuffling, soft-treaders’, soft-prayers’ hunt,—
—For a hunt after susceptible simpletons: all mouse-traps for the heart have again been set! And whenever I lift a curtain, a night-moth rusheth out of it.
Did it perhaps squat there along with another night-moth? For everywhere do I smell small concealed communities; and wherever there are closets there are new devotees therein, and the atmosphere of devotees.
They sit for long evenings beside one another, and say: “Let us again become like little children and say, ‘good God!’”—ruined in mouths and stomachs by the pious confectioners.
Or they look for long evenings at a crafty, lurking cross-spider, that preacheth prudence to the spiders themselves, and teacheth that “under crosses it is good for cobweb-spinning!”
Or they sit all day at swamps with angle-rods, and on that account think themselves PROFOUND; but whoever fisheth where there are no fish, I do not even call him superficial!
Or they learn in godly-gay style to play the harp with a hymn-poet, who would fain harp himself into the heart of young girls:—for he hath tired of old girls and their praises.
Or they learn to shudder with a learned semi-madcap, who waiteth in darkened rooms for spirits to come to him—and the spirit runneth away entirely!
Or they listen to an old roving howl- and growl-piper, who hath learnt from the sad winds the sadness of sounds; now pipeth he as the wind, and preacheth sadness in sad strains.
And some of them have even become night-watchmen: they know now how to blow horns, and go about at night and awaken old things which have long fallen asleep.
Five words about old things did I hear yester-night at the garden-wall: they came from such old, sorrowful, arid night-watchmen.
“For
