Our narrow minds make us believe that we live in strange days. And we are, but not particularly stranger than ever before. With every step we take, we forget the third or praise the ground it had just stepped on. Our world might be destroyed by climate change or nuclear war, but people have lived for thousands of years in worlds no larger than the six houses around them or the small city they inhabited in fear of instant destruction. The theatre we live in now might be as large as the whole world and the angst real, but don’t pretend it’s new.
I don’t have many good reasons for my aversion to this kind of doom-and-gloom. We will always live among nay-sayers and deniers, and the idea of progress is a challenge for many, but don’t forget that these people are also happy to have clean water to drink and to visit a dentist when they have a toothache. Progress does not care what we think; it will move forward, and no one is innocent in this game of who is to blame.
Don’t forget that behind all the nonsense we believe in and are willing to die for are people who bleed when they get cut, mourn their loved ones, and even fall in love for the first time, just like we do, even when these feelings are hidden behind shame and fear. You know for yourself what is hidden inside, we are all afraid to look in the mirror, to look deep in the reflections of our own eyes.
I name you three metamorphoses of the spirit: how the spirit shall become a camel, and the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child. There are many heavy things for the spirit, for the strong, weight-bearing spirit in which dwell respect and awe: its strength longs for the heavy, for the heaviest. What is heavy? thus asks the weight-bearing spirit, thus it kneels down like the camel and wants to be well laden. What is the heaviest thing, you heroes? so asks the weight – bearing spirit, that I may take it upon me and rejoice in my strength. Is it not this: to debase yourself in order to injure your pride? To let your folly shine out in order to mock your wisdom? Or is it this: to desert our cause when it is celebrating its victory? To climb high mountains in order to tempt the tempter? Or is it this: to feed upon the acorns and grass of knowledge and for the sake of truth to suffer hunger of the soul? Or is it this: to be sick and to send away comforters and make friends with the deaf, who never hear what you ask? Or is it this: to wade into dirty water when it is the water of truth, and not to disdain cold frogs and hot toads? Or is it this: to love those who despise us and to offer our hand to the ghost when it wants to frighten us? The weight-bearing spirit takes upon itself all these heaviest things: like a camel hurrying laden into the desert, thus it hurries into its desert. But in the loneliest desert the second metamorphosis occurs: the spirit here becomes a lion; it wants to capture freedom and be lord in its own desert. It seeks here its ultimate lord: it will be an enemy to him and to its ultimate God, it will struggle for victory with the great dragon. What is the great dragon which the spirit no longer wants to call lord and God? The great dragon is called ‘Thou shalt’. But the spirit of the lion says ‘I will!’ ‘Thou shalt’ lies in its path, sparkling with gold, a scale-covered beast, and on every scale glitters golden ‘Thou shalt’. Values of a thousand years glitter on the scales, and thus speaks the mightiest of all dragons: ‘All the values of things – glitter on me. ‘All values have already been created, and all created values – are in me. Truly, there shall be no more “I will”!’ Thus speaks the dragon. My brothers, why is the lion needed in the spirit? Why does the beast of burden, that renounces and is reverent, not suffice? To create new values – even the lion is incapable of that: but to create itself freedom for new creation – that the might of the lion can do. To create freedom for itself and a sacred No even to duty: the lion is needed for that, my brothers. To seize the right to new values – that is the most terrible proceeding for a weight-bearing and reverential spirit Truly, to this spirit it is a theft and a work for an animal of prey. Once it loved this ‘Thou shalt’ as its holiest thing: now it has to find illusion and caprice even in the holiest, that it may steal freedom from its love: the lion is needed for this theft. But tell me, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion cannot? Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes. Yes, a sacred Yes is needed, my brothers, for the sport of creation: the spirit now wills its own will, the spirit sundered from the world now wins its own world. I have named you three metamorphoses of the spirit: how the spirit became a camel, and the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child. Thus spoke Zarathustra. And at that time he was living in the town called The Pied Cow.
Nochrisis 