Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/187

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 * Deep is its woe—
 * But joy's more deep than misery;
 * Woe saith: "O, go!"
 * But all joy seeks eternity—
 * Seeks the deep, deep eternity.'" undefined

That in this human life of ours there may be joy and that it may transcend woe, is Nietzsche's faith. But it is a joy which he conceives after his own fashion. The root of his misery lay in a sense of the lack of the great, the Divine in the world. It was the commonplaceness, the smallness, the meaninglessness of life that preyed on him. In the decay of ancient religion, heaven and hell are no longer felt as supreme issues among us; and aims of comfort, pleasure, and success, such as most men lose themselves in, could not satisfy him. But the question arose, granting that the great and Divine do not exist, whether now or by any necessity in the future, might they not exist—might they not be created? Might not life then get a meaning even if of itself it had none—with a sublime possibility like this before it? Even to turn one's thought that way, even only to expect the outcome, though the consummation itself was far away, could give joy. Such at least was his experience, and with this thought and joy he could confront a recurrence of his life, dreaded as it might otherwise be. The day and hour when all this stood luminously before him became memorable—even the particular spot he was in, near a boulder in the woods of the Upper Engadine, "6000 ft. above the sea, and far higher above all human things"; it was an "immortal" moment, as he afterward noted down. undefined

In other words, the thought of recurrence gives rise to a practical ethical problem. The task being to "endure our immortality," the problem is, how to live so that we shall "wish to live again." "When thou incorporatest the thought of thoughts within thee, it will transform thee. The question in connection with all thou doest, 'is it something that I wish to