Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/164

Prophets of Dissent by any means as a banal devotion to the pleasurable side of life alone. The true disciple finds in every event, be it happy or adverse, exalting or crushing, the factors of supreme" spiritual satisfaction: joy and pain are equally implied in experience, the Will to Live encompasses jointly the capacity to enjoy and to suffer. It may even be paradoxically said that since man owes some of his greatest and most beautiful achievements to sorrow, it must be a joy and a blessing to suffer. The unmistakable sign of heroism is amor fati, a fierce delight in one's destiny, hold what it may.

Consequently, the precursor of the superman will be possessed, along with his great sensibility to pleasure, of a capacious aptitude for suffering.

"Ye would perchance abolish suffering," exclaims Nietzsche, "and we,—it seems that we would rather have it even greater and worse than it has ever been. The discipline of suffering,—tragical suffering,—know ye not that only this discipline has heretofore brought about every elevation of man?" "Spirit is that life which cutteth into life. By one's own pain one's own knowledge increaseth;—knew ye that before? And the happiness of the spirit is this: to be anointed and