Page:Thus Spake Zarathustra - Thomas Common - 1917.djvu/273

 The little man, especially the poet- how passionately does he accuse life in words! Hearken to him, but do not fail to hear the delight which is in all accusation!

Such accusers of life- them life overcomes with a glance of the eye. "You love me?" says the insolent one; "wait a little, as yet have I no time for you."

Towards himself man is the cruel animal; and in all who call themselves "sinners" and "bearers of the cross" and "penitents," do not overlook the voluptuousness in their plaints and accusations!

And I myself- do, I thereby want to be man's accuser? Ah, my animals, this only have I learned hitherto, that for man his evil is necessary for his best,-

-That all that is evil is the best power, and the hardest stone for the highest creator; and that man must become better and more evil:-

Not to this torture-stake was I tied, that I know man is bad,- but I cried, as no one has yet cried:

"Ah, that his evil is so very small! Ah, that his best is so very small!"

The great disgust at man- it strangled me and had crept into my throat: and what the soothsayer had presaged: "All is alike, nothing is worth while, knowledge strangles."

A long twilight limped on before me, a fatally weary, fatally intoxicated sadness, which spoke with yawning mouth.

"Eternally he returns, the man of whom you are weary, the small man"- so yawned my sadness, and dragged its foot and could not go to sleep.

A cavern, became the human earth to me; its breast caved in; everything living became to me human dust and bones and mouldering past.

My sighing sat on all human graves, and could no longer