Page:Thus Spake Zarathustra - Thomas Common - 1917.djvu/390



8.
God's woe is deeper, you strange world! Grasp at God's woe, not at me! What am I! A drunken sweet lyre,-

-A midnight-lyre, a bell-frog, which no one understands, but which must speak before deaf ones, you higher men! For you do not understand me!

Gone! Gone! O youth! O noontide! O afternoon! Now have come evening and night and midnight,- the dog howls, the wind:

-Is the wind not a dog? It whines, it barks, it howls. Ah! Ah! how she sighs! how she laughs, how she wheezes and pants, the midnight!

How she just now speaks soberly, this drunken poetess! has she perhaps overdrunk her drunkenness? has she become overawake? does she ruminate?

-Her woe does she ruminate over, in a dream, the old, deep midnight- and still more her joy. For joy, although woe be deep, joy is deeper still than grief can be.

9.
You grape-vine! Why do you praise me? Have I not cut you! I am cruel, you bleedest-: what means your praise of my drunken cruelty?

"Whatever has become perfect, everything mature- wants to die!" so say you. Blessed, blessed be the vintner's knife! But everything immature wants to live: alas!

Woe says: "Hence! Go! Away, you woe!" But everything that suffers wants to live, that it may become mature and lively and longing,