582. Without sympathy.– Which of us can sympathize with the loss of an Alexander, when he learned by that philosopher of the thousand distant worlds he should never be able to conquer? What then is our excuse? That, in this case, there was no feeling of loss? Yet certainly there was, although a man will only be able to sympathize with feelings he is himself capable of, and with misfortunes that his own rank in life, possessions and the like lend to him as a possibility, however remote. Sympathy, then– is it not a kind of dread? A communication of a sort of danger?
583. Novelty and aversion.– Oftentimes, from out of the various pallete of life, something new to us is colored by a suffering we have never yet known– and consequently, a new aversion arises in us too. Yet, because it is never the thing itself which entreats this aversion to take root and to edify itself, as for this a great deal of knowledge is required, I ask: in what then does it do so? In the case of a man’s first experience with woman, and the unavoidable suffering which owes itself to those first diffident approaches, the aversion thence born is forced to take root in that which is most precious to him, namely, his pathos itself, his trust in his own capacity to love. The suffering born out of such inexperience, by fulfilling this transference from the given object to an aversion which must root itself in our very means of apprehending it, and thus also of being harmed by it, has now bestowed upon us the sotted impression that we are no longer withdrawing shamefully from something which has tyrannized over us, but that we ourselves are tyrannizing over what has so pained us. For we are by this time neither withdrawing or tyrannizing, but rather advancing more blindly and apace toward the true object of our distress than ever before.
584. Active and passive destruction.– It is certainly true that solitude lays bear to us the stuff of life, that it permits it to be seen: the little reed of youth, of expectation, and of all our ennobled and cherished humanity, when cast off from the marsh and the sea side of society, history, and culture; thence strewn about the general waste of the yawning tide, is indeed the weakest thing in all of nature. Yet the solitary, no matter to what extent he deserves the name of “sage,” or “philosopher,” must not pay a mere passive witness before the destruction of illusions and the rending of the veil, as it happens that, for the human heart, the power of contrivance and dissimulation is the one thing that knows no pallor, nor hunger; but he must rather actively engage with the destruction of illusions which at every moment threaten him, and at every step of reason approach with fresh liveliness, and must with a certain audacity lend his own hand to the curtain of our theater. And one must add, that this engagement is only provided to the solitary, wherein lies his sole benefit.
585. Wisdom and Gethsemane.– There is daily increase in the garden of wisdom; new experiences everywhere raise their head, with new appraisals of such experiences and dreams upon them, which unfold as surely as the bloom from bud; a whole store of the most unusual orchids and corydali which renews itself in all the confidence of which the earth ‘abideth forever.’ How can it be that those content merely to stop before the doors of husbandmen unto such gardens, and purchase a little handful of their fruit and flower, which will be used up and withered in the span of a few days, truly be content? I mean, the mere reader, as even he accepts such a handful of flowers; or any other man of the like, content merely to borrow from the store of another. There are times, however, after a long day spent at tending my own garden, that I repine of myself and become jealous of them, and even approach an understanding of them: for the tending of such a vast garden is a heavy labor and one that, owing to the degree to which I delight in its beauty, is likely never to provide me a days rest; and all the vigilance which must be paid before weed, insect, and wild animals, even more thoroughly discourages me from the hope of happiness. Alas, every garden of such wisdom must, after all, and in spite of all its beauty, be a garden of Gethsemane and a place of sorrow! Ever shall the wisest, and also the weariest, practice this judgment: Non tibi sacra Venus, non tibi Bacche facit. 1 [Josephus-Gonsalvus a Quunedo]
1. Venus accepts nothing as sacred, which has not come from out of the garden of Bacchus.
586. Art as a means to solitude.– What miraculous talent has this Orpheus? It is precisely with his music, that he makes of every woman he falls in love with a muse. But there shall come for him some sweet and bitter hour upon which he discerns that it is through this gift of his that he will meet with solitude. Now all women around him have become inspirations and beautiful muses which, however thankful they may be to him for this sanctification, cannot dwell with him upon the earth. It happens then that he comes to long for and love only the deaf woman, into whom his songs may never pierce, a woman which he cannot ever turn into a muse and ideal. The question arises, then, to whom now shall he sing?– Dic mihi, parve puer, numquam tula tela quiescant? Non sat erant frondes, non undae nec fera nec sons? Non satyrus, non taurus amans, non ales et imber? Non tristes epulae, post quas petit aera Tereus? 1 [ Aegritudo Perdicae]
1. What am I but the ignorant child, without the love which threatens to silence me even as a spear?
587. Fathers and poets.– Every poet who has attained to some degree of fame cannot avoid a certain weariness with the world and with the walks of society, when he hears another man reciting to the fellow beside him or to himself his own verses, and undergoes in his heart a great deal of sorrow, self-chastisement, and humiliation thereof. This shame is precisely that of the father whose son, on some beautiful day, has asked him if he might come out with him, in admiration of the scene or in the name of sport, and the father had to relate to him that he was much too tired to do so.
588. Where asceticism hides.– Because illusion and fantasy are such things as are availble to every one of us and at any time may be freely indulged in, and because most of us without much trouble resist this piece of folly, (but are no means thereby inculpable or to be necesarrily absolved from this charge) that some men do take enjoyment in illusion can only be explained by the fact that they have striven so ardently for reality and for such a long time that, out of hunger for it, they have been driven to a state in which they have felt compelled to mortify themselves and to teach themselves to find gratification in even the most meagre sustenance– namely, their illusions, to finally escape their irreverent craving and lust. What? But that is a species of asceticism.
589. A revelation in philosophy, and two mysteries.– Hypatia was said to have raised a rag covered in her own menstrual blood as a proof that carnal desire was no beautiful thing. Whoever would guess at what this scene really proves would betray to himself a great deal of feminine nature. On my part, I shall only dress this riddle with another, namely, with one of the Latin mysteries: an amor dolor sit: an dolor amor sit? 1
1. I do not know if love is pain: I do not know if pain is love.
590. The threat of loss.– Sometimes it takes nearly loosing something for us to be able to enjoy it; not, as most men imagine, because in this way we have been reminded of how feeble a thing our fortune is and to what extent we are lucky to have acquired it in the first place, but because the prospect of its loss has washed away all the illusions we have painted over it, has absolved all the insatiate expectation we have troubled it by, and removed those unapproachable ornaments and petty sanctities with which it we have adorned it.
591. The danger of genius.– As in the eye itself there is a little spot that does not see, and in which no image is reflected, so there lies genius in the heart of a man; so long as genius dwells upon him all the peace and the ‘mute creation’ of his solitude, to speak with the poet, is so thoroughly elaborated within him that it almost attains to a quite opposite effect, and he is overcome with that recklessness and temerity by which honor, health, and friend become as the mere shadows of his thoughts and motivations, and not even shadows; with such a vicious cheek to spite his conscience, he preys upon his own heart with all the confidence of a raven, and like the vulture, has even gotten a peculiar taste for all the bloodied carrion of his hopes and expectations, able even find a piece of wisdom in his most shameful folly. But let for one moment this man reflect upon himself, let him in one of those chance spells of indolence become conscious of his genius, that true ‘nil horum humani saeva tyrannis habet,’ [Petri Royzii Maurei Alcagnicensis carmina] 1 which the fury of his heart has for so long hidden from him, and he shall find to what extent the whole store of his knowledge has pursued him as nothing more than a train of images and vacant tracts of shadow, and his decaying body, his lonesomeness, and his ignominy shall, with a renewed horror, put him at odds with himself, make him inconceivable to himself, and make him to know sorrow.
1. There is nothing belonging to man, which is not a subject to the tyranny of the hour.
592. Of exceeding our failures.– It was Goethe’s opinion, that man shall only find freedom in the severest limitation; for it is precisely that which discloses to him the complete range of his powers, sensibilities, and the whole store of the like knowledge. Thus every genius allots to himself precisely that which he cannot achieve, and every supreme work of art or thinking is ever the good conscience of this failure, but also an imputation of all the culpable patience with which man has learned to treat himself. Yet, what is more dreadful is that even the establishment of this great work, which could easily be reckoned the most noble appointment of mankind, becomes therefor in the end for every genius as a mere means to attaining the knowledge of what he is himself capable of– and all of that for nothing. For how could he ever exceed this grand failure! Now, at the end of his life, he must take that verse out of Ausonius to compliment his Goethe: is quippe solus rei gerendae est efficax, meditatur omne qui prius negotium. This is the whole business of philosophy and of all man’s private meditation: to find out to what extent he can bear himself.
593. A preliminary state of glorification.– How often, by mere coincidences and fortuity, do we disentomb the secrets of another man’s heart, and raise a thousand little blasphemies from their peaceful graves and resting places, perhaps those even of our own friend, and nonetheless watch this man continue about in his course of life as if this secret was still indeed a secret! Yet there are far too many men who lack the eye penetrating enough to discern the furtiveness in this soul, and to realize the treacherous character of the knowledge they have obtained. As most of us therefor lack the necessity which such an eye must impose upon us, namely, of keeping our proper distance, so let us at once glorify our friends and fellow men and depict them to ourselves in a deceitful light as far greater than they truly are, and treat of this as a sort of rule and a maxim, for in this way we shall learn of that prudent estrangement and, by habit, no longer look so deeply into them. As Seneca says, “Decet timeri cesarem: at plus diligi– it is a piece of good wisdom to fear Caesar, yes- and also love.”
594. Savages in wisdom.– The most striking intemperance and downright vice of a great thinker, if such a word may be applied here in any degree of good taste, is his munificence; for, just as the savage sacrifices his entire subsistence and crop in the name of hunger, and uproots his entire store at the first harvest; so, urged on in his search for knowledge, the thinker sacrifices himself and his life unshrinkingly to his knowledge, and uproots the entire crop of his thoughts, hopes, and anticipations at the first pang of unsated wisdom, so that there is absolutely nothing left for those thinkers that would have marked his succession to live upon.
595. The illusion of progress.– Josephus said that a child should be instructed beginning from the age he first blushes- for if he is capable of shame, he is capable of knowledge. And yet, although the historian should blush, how patient have we been in his instruction! The illusion of progress in the history of man arises simply out of the divisions and separations of homogenous spheres of nature, whose severance is born in the very recesses of his nature. Thus the tragic muse was separated from oratory, the former owing itself to the praise of all the virtues of man, the latter to the remediation of his vices– as Tacitus tells us. The possibility of the latter was contained in the former, although the political corruption of man had not brought about the division of these two homogenous spheres of nature necessary to indicate any use for it.
596. The commerce of poets.– In the commerce of pleasure, a poet’s desires far too often debase his coinage in gold or silver and unwittingly introduce a bit of bronze into it, eventually confusing the value of things.
597. The highest vanity.– How lofty, how sublime! How often beauty raises her voice, with what confidence, with what noble shamelessness! And merely because her voice can creep into only the most somnolent and dreamy of souls.
598. Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae.– There are melancholy natures which possess something which they cherish to such an extent that they cannot dispossess it before the eye of conscience, nor to that of reason– a strange and, at times, frightening elation in the veteris vestigia flammae of the image of a woman they no longer love, in a distant isle, or in the recollections of all their youthful curiosities, such as no heart knows how to appreciate but that which has been so often consumed with the ardent flame of the passions, and tormented with them to such a degree that it cannot help itself from always entertaining a sublime doubt as to rather or not one of these little embers might strike upon new life, and once again fill it with raptures.
599. The noble scene of the heart.– As the driftwood which litters these beautiful sands, so the loss of friend, or spoiled love, is suddenly born upon us one morning from we know not where, and there it befouls what seemed only a few moments ago to be a perfect tableau. How sad the heart which, instead of being the sea and rolling tide from which its beauties, its dreams, and its graces issue forth, is only the sands and noble scene which receives them.
600. The preservation of youth through enmity.– How often the youthful thinker besets himself to a solitary existence and a life of books out of a spirit of enmity against this youth and all of its frightening, indeterminate expression– because he fears the eye which age might cast upon him, and he is afraid to find out all the depth of his foolishness and knows that out of this struggle it may be afforded him to preserve his youthfulness all his life long.
601. The history of morality.– When we are disgusted by the image we have cast in water, we endeavor to strike this image and in the final case discover that we can strike nothing but the water, and in doing so we tire and eventually perish, no matter if what has disturbed us is quite egregious or something very innocent. But that is the basic conclusion of any history of morality.
602. The unexpected calm.– As the sun falls most slowly just before it sets, and even seems to lull plaintively there to spite for one moment all the vehemence and labor of the earth, so the great poet wiill act with a calmness quite unbecoming of his otherwise impetuous, lustful, and hasty nature before every deed, be it good or ill, and with a graciousness which one would have never expected from him, gracefully welcomes the cup of pleasure to his lips when it finally falls upon his impatient hands as if to speak with Theodorus Gracian, “vain beauty pleads with every softening charm.”
603. The ambition of poets.– How often the poet loses hold of that thread of his heart, and forgets his own passions! But never the desires and the ambitions with which these passions had enkindled him.
604. The secret of moral genius.– If the heart too easily grows shame-faced, and with an incorrigible desire to hide itself from all eyes is over and over again permitted to do so, then even the slightest of vice and pettiest of indulgences gradually exaggerates itself into an almost unfathomable mortification, an almost divine saintliness, and an impossible chastity.
605. Metabolism and genius.– When nature drives an animal to despair and starvation it will only then search for new aliment, and I know of no more perfect a metaphor for the creation of the genius. The genius, who must necessarily come to view mankind as well as culture as an eternally fruitless stalk, is compelled out of his desperation to search for new foods in the domain of knowledge as well as experience; although he is very often led to his death by the unwitting consumption of some poison, sometimes it happens that he does indeed discover a means of sustenance, and sometimes he even discovers that he is able to assimilate some experience or piece of knowledge quite inimical to his nature, and seemingly poisonous, owing either to the strength or the ingenuity of his digestive powers. The former create a school of art and establish a new tradition to compliment the scenery in which they have hereby come to live and in which they discovered their new relish– the latter are hailed as original spirits and free thinkers, only because the substances out of which they distill the meathe of their experience is quite destructive to their fellow men, and cannot be used by them.
606. Vehement natures oppressed with an immensity of passion, unlike those of a more modest character, do not burn of themselves as incense, but are rather as the coals which must be revived by such an incense of beauty, experience, and wisdom; and when such a nature as this lacks the inclination for creating it unwittingly strives after destruction; to carry on the metaphor, it continually exhausts the whole store of incense born over it which is necessary to keep it alive, only without bestowing on us any pleasant fragrances.
