500Against the grain– A thinker can for years on end force himself to think against the grain: that is to say, to pursue not the thoughts which offer themselves from within him but those to which an office, a prescribed schedule, an arbitrary kind of industriousness seem to oblige him. In the end, however, he will fall sick: for this apparently moral overcoming of himself will ruin his nervous energy just as thoroughly as any regularly indulged in excess could do.
495 Our teachers.- In our youth we take our teachers and guides from the time in which we happen to live and the circle in which we happen to move: we are thoughtlessly confident that the times we live in are bound to have teachers better suited to us than to anyone else and that we are bound to find them without much trouble. For this childishness we have in later years to pay a heavy price: we have to expiate our teachers in ourself We then perhaps go in search of our true guides throughout the whole world, the world of the past included, but perhaps it is too late. And in the worst case we discover that they were living when we were young – and that we missed them.
492 Among south winds. -A: I no longer understand myself! Only yesterday I felt so wild and stormy and at the same time so warm, so sunny and bright in the extreme. And today! All is now motionless, flat, dejected, gloomy, like the lagoon of Venice: – I want nothing and draw a deep breath of relief at that, and yet I am secretly vexed at this wanting nothing. Thus do the waves splash back and forth in the lake of my melancholy.- 8: You have described a pleasant little illness. The next north-east wind will blow it away! – A: Why should it!
491 Another reason for solitude!– A: So you intend to return to your desert?- B: I am not quick moving, I have to wait for myself- it is always late before the water comes to light out of the well of my self, and I often have to endure thirst for longer than I have patience. That is why I go into solitude- so as not to drink out ofeverybody’s cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think as I really think; after a time it always seems as though they want to banish me from myself and rob me of my soul – and I grow angry with everybody and fear everybody. I then require the desert, so as to grow good again.
At one time Zarathustra too cast his delusion beyond man, like all the afterworldly. The work of a suffering and tortured god, the world then seemed to me. A dream the world then seemed to me, and the fiction of a god: colored smoke before the eyes of a dissatisfied deity. Good and evil and joy and pain and I and you-colored smoke this seemed to me before creative eyes. The creator wanted to look away from himself; so he created the world. Drunken joy it is for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to lose himself. Drunken joy and loss of self the world once seemed to me. This world, eternally imperfect, the image of an eternal contradiction, an imperfect image-a drunken joy for its imperfect creator: thus the world once appeared to me. Thus I too once cast my delusion beyond man, like all the afterworldly. Beyond man indeed? Alas, my brothers, this god whom I created was man-made and madness, like all gods! Man he was, and only a poor specimen of man and ego: out of my own ashes and fire this ghost came to me, and, verily, it did not come to me from beyond. What happened, my brothers? I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself. And behold, then this ghost fled from me. Now it would be suffering for me and agony for the recovered to believe in such ghosts: now it would be suffering for me and humiliation. Thus I speak to the afterworldly. It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds, this and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer most deeply. Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor, ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.
There are many people in our time and region who think about the end of their life, and especially about the circumstances in which they want a doctor to end it. They talk about suffering, dignity, and fear of losing control.
You say you want to die with dignity. Why should dignity disappear when strength disappears? Why should dependence be undignified? Why should confusion, illness, or old age stand outside life?
It is the illusion that if you lose any of your faculties, you lose your dignity. We don’t even know what dignity entails. Is it a fixed state that slowly disappears?
These arguments seem to imply that some forms of life are beneath dignity, whereas I see dignity as belonging to life itself, not to a particular level of health, independence, or control.
I have less of a problem with people who reason their way to suicide because of unrelievable pain or unavoidable depression, but planning your own suicide by crossing off some boxes because you believe that what comes after these boxes is not life sounds…
We live in a time and place where we have the illusion of controlling our own lives. It starts young, when you choose a career, decide what color hair your boyfriend should have, and decide where you are going to live. Superficially, our lives seem to be a constant string of decisions of our own design, but unbeknownst to most, life is a constant stream of coincidences. You are just lucky that the car had an accident a few seconds later when you crossed the street; otherwise, your life would have gone a totally different way than you thought you had planned it.
You live to prepare yourself for the circumstances you encounter, and if you are lucky enough, or brave enough, you will learn to embrace fate, even if it means years spent staring at a ceiling on your deathbed.
