Page:Thus Spake Zarathustra - Alexander Tille - 1896.djvu/320

 286 THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA, III

This sleeping I disturbed when teaching that no one knoweth yet what is good and evil, unless he be a creator !

But a creator is he who createth man's goal and giveth earth its significance and its future. It is he alone who createth the fact that things are good and evil.

And I bid them overthrow their old chairs, and all seats on which that old conceit had sat. I bid them laugh at their great masters of virtue and saints and poets and world-redeemers.

I bid them laugh at their gloomy wise men, and whoever had before sat warning, a black scare-crow on the tree of life.

By their great street of graves I sat down, yea, nigh unto carrion and vultures ; and I laughed at all their past and its mellow, decaying splendour.

Verily, like preachers of penitence and fools I pro- claimed wrath and slaughter against their great and small things. ' Oh, that their best things are so very small ! Oh, that their evilest things are so very small ! ' Thus I laughed.

Thus out of me cried and laughed my wise longing, which is born on mountains, a wild wisdom, verily ! my great longing with its roaring wings.

And often it tore me off and upward and away, and that in the midst of laughing. Then meseemed I flew shuddering, an arrow through a rapture drunk with sunlight

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